Authoritarianism and the Growth of the State in Latin America

Abstract

The discussion focuses on the effects that changing forms of authoritarian rule and the growth of a bureaucratic state had on A gentine public policies during the 1930-1970 interval. Hitherto quite separate literatures are brought together in the examination of two different arguments. The first, drawn from the emerging literature on authoritarianism and corporatism in Latin America, suggests that the trends in Argentine public policies should have been interrupted whenever different types of authoritarian coalitions sequentially replaced each other in power. The second thesis, drawn primarily from research on Latin American bureaucracies and North American policy analyses, suggests that there is a need to disaggregate the coalition/policy linkage. It hypothesizes that four factors which developed at about the midpoint of the 1930-1970 period in Argentina—the growth of a large and well-entrenched public sector, limitations on the ability of political elites to press their policy demands, limitations on previously uncommitted resources, and the existence of a crisis of hegemony—should have increasingly constrained the policy-making importance of the coalitions and the leaders who represented them in the highest levels of government. Coalitions and elites should have been increasingly unable to direct and indirect policies in the ways which they preferred. Interrupted time-series analyses of seven policy series provided support for the constraints thesis. Coalitions and those who governed at the top were once important in Argentina as the authoritarian literature suggests. Coalition changes did not occur in a vacuum, however. Once the four state-related constraints developed, such shifts came to have only marginal impacts on the examined policy indicators.