UC Berkeley

Over the course of the last decades of the twentieth century, Latin America has experienced massive institutional change. Democracy has become the dominant political regime. Change, however, has been restricted at the level of access to power. Patrimonial and hegemonic forms of exercise of power persist. Patrimonialism and hegemonic rule are birthmarks of most Latin American countries, but they have adapted to the new democratic context and gained strength from recent economic processes. This dissertation traces, from different angles, the sources of patrimonial persistence and hegemonic consolidation. State structures and coalitional dynamics, not culture or formal rules, have played a crucial role.

The distinction between access to power and exercise of power is central to the analysis. It is used to reconceptualize the discussion of regimes and states in Latin America, with the goal of overcoming important analytic problems in the field. To explain the transformations of regimes and states, this study advances a model of "institutional refraction," which in turn is a synthesis of two major strands of macro-comparative analysis, neo-Marxism and neo-Weberianism. These concepts and distinctions are explored in two case studies. An analysis of Colombia in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries examines the interaction between regime and state in a context where a fundamental change in the electoral regime serves to stabilize the state's control of violence within the national territory. The second case study focuses on South American politics since the year 2000. Here the refraction model, along with the distinction between access and exercise, shed new light on how an unprecedented export boom has facilitated a move to the left throughout the region, and has also reinforced hegemonic forms of rule in some--but not all--countries.