Description:

In contemporary scholarship on democratic regimes the U.S. tends to be held up as a model of institutionalized democracy and Latin America as a repository of models of unstable or problematic political regimes. In my work the past few years I have swum against this tide, examining authoritarian institutions historically shared by the U.S. and Latin America. My recent book, Boundary Control, compared the endurance of provincial/state authoritarianism in both regions, and my new work starts out by studying how the federal system in the U.S. shapes the expansion and contraction of political rights. At the LACS seminar I hope to exchange ideas on these issues as well as on problems and opportunities in the comparative study of the U.S. and Latin America.