Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America
Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America

Author: Scott Mainwaring

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-01-31

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1107433630

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This book presents a new theory for why political regimes emerge, and why they subsequently survive or break down. It then analyzes the emergence, survival and fall of democracies and dictatorships in Latin America since 1900. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán argue for a theoretical approach situated between long-term structural and cultural explanations and short-term explanations that look at the decisions of specific leaders. They focus on the political preferences of powerful actors - the degree to which they embrace democracy as an intrinsically desirable end and their policy radicalism - to explain regime outcomes. They also demonstrate that transnational forces and influences are crucial to understand regional waves of democratization. Based on extensive research into the political histories of all twenty Latin American countries, this book offers the first extended analysis of regime emergence, survival and failure for all of Latin America over a long period of time.

Covert Regime Change
Covert Regime Change

Author: Lindsey A. O'Rourke

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1501730681

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O'Rourke's book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreignimposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.― Political Science Quarterly States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d'état, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign dissident groups. In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O'Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on overt cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O'Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Offensive operations aim to overthrow a current military rival or break up a rival alliance. Preventive operations seek to stop a state from taking certain actions, such as joining a rival alliance, that may make them a future security threat. Hegemonic operations try to maintain a hierarchical relationship between the intervening state and the target government. Despite the prevalence of covert attempts at regime change, most operations fail to remain covert and spark blowback in unanticipated ways. Covert Regime Change assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was ten times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War. Her dataset allows O'Rourke to address three foundational questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime change? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly rather than overtly? How successful are such missions in achieving their foreign policy goals?

Toppling Foreign Governments
Toppling Foreign Governments

Author: Melissa Willard-Foster

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-01-11

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0812251040

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In 2011, the United States launched its third regime-change attempt in a decade. Like earlier targets, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi had little hope of defeating the forces stacked against him. He seemed to recognize this when calling for a cease-fire just after the intervention began. But by then, the United States had determined it was better to oust him than negotiate and thus backed his opposition. The history of foreign-imposed regime change is replete with leaders like Qaddafi, overthrown after wars they seemed unlikely to win. From the British ouster of Afghanistan's Sher Ali in 1878 to the Soviet overthrow of Hungary's Imre Nagy in 1956, regime change has been imposed on the weak and the friendless. In Toppling Foreign Governments, Melissa Willard-Foster explores the question of why stronger nations overthrow governments when they could attain their aims at the bargaining table. She identifies a central cause—the targeted leader's domestic political vulnerability—that not only gives the leader motive to resist a stronger nation's demands, making a bargain more difficult to attain, but also gives the stronger nation reason to believe that regime change will be comparatively cheap. As long as the targeted leader's domestic opposition is willing to collaborate with the foreign power, the latter is likely to conclude that ousting the leader is more cost effective than negotiating. Willard-Foster analyzes 133 instances of regime change, ranging from covert operations to major military invasions, and spanning over two hundred years. She also conducts three in-depth case studies that support her contention that domestically and militarily weak leaders appear more costly to coerce than overthrow and, as long as they remain ubiquitous, foreign-imposed regime change is likely to endure.

Regime Change In Afghanistan
Regime Change In Afghanistan

Author: Amin Saikal

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-28

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 100030941X

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This book is a study of regime change in an underdeveloped country with a weak state and strong autonomous social organizations. Regime change is in many countries a traumatic and disruptive experience, but few countries have paid as high a cost to retain traditionally accepted relationships of authority as has Afghanistan since the communist coup

Overthrow
Overthrow

Author: Stephen Kinzer

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2007-02-06

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0805082409

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An award-winning author tells the stories of the audacious American politicians, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of other countries with disastrous long-term consequences.

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics
The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics

Author: Keith E. Whittington

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-06-11

Total Pages: 828

ISBN-13: 0191616281

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The study of law and politics is one of the foundation stones of the discipline of political science, and it has been one of the most productive areas of cross-fertilization between the various subfields of political science and between political science and other cognate disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the field of law and politics in all its diversity, ranging from such traditional subjects as theories of jurisprudence, constitutionalism, judicial politics and law-and-society to such re-emerging subjects as comparative judicial politics, international law, and democratization. The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics gathers together leading scholars in the field to assess key literatures shaping the discipline today and to help set the direction of research in the decade ahead.

The Power Triangle
The Power Triangle

Author: Hazem Kandil

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-18

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0190239220

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Revolution, reform, and resilience comprise the respective fortunes of modern Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. Although the countries all experienced coups with remarkably similar ambitions, each followed a very different trajectory. Iran became an absolutist monarchy that was overthrown from below, Turkey evolved into a limited democracy, and Egypt turned into a police state. In The Power Triangle, Hazem Kandil attributes the different outcomes to the power struggle between the political, military, and security institutions. Coups establish a division of labor, with one group of officers running government, another overseeing the military, and a third handling security. But their interests begin to vary as each group identifies with its own institution. Politicians wish to rule indefinitely; military officers prefer to return to barracks after implementing the needed reforms; and security men scramble to maintain the privileges they acquired in the post-coup emergency. Driven by conflicting agendas, these partners in domination struggle over regime control. Using comparative historical sociology, Kandil demonstrates how regimes are constantly shaped and reshaped through the recurrent clashes and shifting alliances between the team of rivals in this "power triangle." The Power Triangle's realist approach to regime change shows that a clear explanation of pivotal events in Iran, Turkey, and Egypt is impossible without a firm grasp of the power relations within each country's ruling bloc.

Authoritarian Russia
Authoritarian Russia

Author: Vladimir Gel'man

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0822980932

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Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of "electoral authoritarianism" which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country's essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions. Vladimir Gel'man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable "rules of the game" for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.