Abstract
This book is guided by three goals. The first objective is to identify the challenges encountered by the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, as each struggled to create its own state and form its own political regime. The analysis begins with the colonial period and then discusses the challenges each state encountered from the moment it sought to attain independence to the present. The second goal is to postulate a set of time-related hypotheses that capture each state’s evolutionary processes of state creation and political-regime formation. The third goal is to explain why some of those states have been more effective than others at forming a democratic regime.
Chapter 2 discusses alternative theories of state creation and democratization, and their applicability to this study. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 analyze the processes of state creation and regime formation of the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. The final chapter postulates hypotheses that explain why some states in the Americas were faster and more effective than others in creating the state and democratizing its political system. This chapter also discusses the future of democracy in the six aforementioned American states.
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Notes
- 1.
Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, Number 2, April 1996: 14–33.
- 2.
See Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January 2017): 5–16.
- 3.
See Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2014, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2014.
- 4.
Foa and Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation.” See also, “Democracy Index 2016: Revenge of the ‘deplorables’,” The Economist Intelligence Unit, January 25, 2017.
- 5.
Winston Churchill, Churchill by Himself, edited by Richard Langworth (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 574. Churchill did not originate the comment, according to Langworth, he was quoting someone else.
- 6.
See Alex Roberto Hybel, The Making of Flawed Democracies in the Americas: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Argentina, Chile and Peru. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- 7.
David Collier, “Understanding Process Tracing,” in Political Science and Politics, 44 (No. 4), 2011: 823–830.
- 8.
Ibid, 823–830.
- 9.
See Alex Roberto Hybel, The Logic of Surprise in International Conflict (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1986), 18. See also Hybel’s endnote 57, 23.
- 10.
See Hybel, The Making of Flawed Democracies in the Americas.
- 11.
In late 1903, Panama proclaimed its independence from Colombia and granted rights to the United States “as if it were sovereign” to a zone where the United States built a canal, administered it, fortified it, and defended it until the late 1970s. Other states did lose territory, but the United States was not the actor that provoked their loss. Puerto Rico was appropriate by the United States during the Spanish American war in the late nineteenth century, but prior to that time Puerto Rico had not existed as an independent state.
- 12.
Charles Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–11.
- 13.
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Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Yascha Mounk. 2017. The Signs of Deconsolidation. Journal of Democracy 28 (1): 5–15. Print.
Freedom House. 2017. Freedom in the World, 2014. Web. January 24.
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———. 2019. The Making of Flawed Democracies in the Americas – the United States. Chile, Argentina; Peru, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
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Hybel, A.R. (2020). Introduction: The Nature of the Problem. In: The Challenges of Creating Democracies in the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21233-9_1
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