State-building in Latin America: Analyzing its historical foundations

Latin America is a region inhabited by states with intermediate levels of state capacity, but with remarkable variation between stronger states, such as the Chilean, and weaker such as the Peruvian. What factors account for this diversity in state capacity? Drawing on an historical institutionalist approach, the three books reviewed here (Kurtz, 2013; Saylor, 2014; Soifer, 2015) aim to answer that question by highlighting different types of historical causes. The main lesson is that structural factors, such as economic, social, political, and geographical conditions, strongly influenced the decisions and actions of governing elites that led to the emergence, success or failure of state building enterprises. However, the focus on structural conditions and elites overlooks other factors that deserve to be assessed, namely the influence of state autonomy, political regime, mass publics' pressures, the reproduction mechanisms of state strength or weakness, and the possibilities of change that have taken place beyond the nineteenth century Latin America.