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Abstract
This dissertation seeks to account for the relatively high levels of liberal democracy exhibited by Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay compared to other countries with formally democratic regimes in post-Third Wave Latin America. The analysis focuses in particular on the territorial dimension of liberal democracy, seeking to explain why these three countries are largely free of the territorially-based spheres of private power that exist in the peripheral regions of many other Latin American countries. The argument, which focuses on the institutional legacies created by different modes of nineteenth-century state consolidation, is assessed through a comparison of Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay with the contrasting cases of Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia.
The starting point for the analysis is the identification of two different modes of state consolidation in nineteenth-century Latin America: (1) direct military domination of outlying regions by the center and (2) political exchange between the center and regional oligarchs in which the latter retain their traditional hegemony within their regions. Countries that experienced state consolidation through military domination have, since approximately the turn of the twentieth century, experienced trajectories of regime development in which, during nonauthoritarian periods, liberal democracy has been present on a territory-wide basis. Countries experiencing state consolidation via political exchange have, in contrast, seen the persistence of subnational domains of private power throughout their national territories.
The argument consists of three main parts. First, I argue that which mode of state consolidation occurred in each case was a function of the geographic balance of power between traditional regional elites and state-building elites in the capital at the outset of independence. Second, the different regime trajectories in the two sets of cases first emerged around the turn of the twentieth century as a result of the different reactions they produced on the part of the traditional oligarchy. Third, the over-time reproduction of these different regime trajectories has been due to particular features of party development that can also be traced to the manner of nineteenth-century state consolidation.
