Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America since the Revolutions of 1848 - Hardcover

Weyland, Kurt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 110704474X ISBN 13: 9781107044746

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2014

Synopsis

This study investigates the three main waves of political regime contention in Europe and Latin America. Surprisingly, protest against authoritarian rule spread across countries more quickly in the nineteenth century, yet achieved greater success in bringing democracy in the twentieth. To explain these divergent trends, the book draws on cognitive-psychological insights about the inferential heuristics that people commonly apply; these shortcuts shape learning from foreign precedents such as an autocrat's overthrow elsewhere. But these shortcuts had different force, depending on the political-organizational context. In the inchoate societies of the nineteenth century, common people were easily swayed by these heuristics: Jumping to the conclusion that they could replicate such a foreign precedent in their own countries, they precipitously challenged powerful rulers, yet often at inopportune moments - and with low success. By the twentieth century, however, political organizations had formed. Their leaders had better capacities for information processing, were less strongly affected by cognitive shortcuts, and therefore waited for propitious opportunities before initiating contention. As organizational ties loosened the bounds of rationality, contentious waves came to spread less rapidly, but with greater success.

About this title

Book Description

Based on a wealth of historical sources and field research in Brazil, Chile, and Peru, this wide-ranging study examines the three main waves of contention against autocratic rulers in Europe and Latin America: the revolutions of 1848, the protests stimulated by the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the efforts to unseat Latin America's military dictators in the 1970s and 1980s. This study draws on cognitive-psychological insights and political-organizational theory to explain why conflict spread more quickly from country to country in the nineteenth century, yet achieved more progress toward democracy in the twentieth century.

About the Author

Kurt Weyland is the Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics and professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin. He received his PhD in political science at Stanford University in 1991. Based on intensive field research in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru and Venezuela, he has written three books and numerous journal articles on democracy, economic and social policy, populism, and diffusion processes in Latin America. Many of his articles and books have drawn on cognitive-psychological insights about bounded rationality to shed new light on puzzling political phenomena, such as the adoption of risky reforms in fragile democracies and the rash, ill-considered emulation of foreign precedents and models in a wide range of countries.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 110704474X
• ISBN 13: 9781107044746
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 326