Description
CAMBRIDGE State Building in Latin America 2015 Edition by Hillel David Soifer
State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Table of contents :- Introduction: the origins of state capacity in Latin America; 1. The emergence of state-building projects; 2. A theory of state-building success and failure; 3. Alternative historical explanations and initial conditions; 4. State projects, institutions, and educational development; 5. Political costs, infrastructural obstacles, and tax state development; 6. Local administration, varieties of conscription, and the development of coercive capacity; 7. Conclusion.