Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America, The

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2003 by Hartlyn, Jonathan

Mahoney, James. The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Maps, figures, tables, bibliography, index, 416 pp.; cloth $49.95, paperback $18.95.

This is an impressive and valuable book at several levels. Employing the critical juncture framework advanced by Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier (in Shaping the Political Arena) and others, its central argument is that the different experience of the liberal period of the nineteenth century in five Central American countries is a key critical juncture in their history, one that later played a central role in determining the nature of their political regimes during a heritage period well into the twentieth century. Employing systematic historical comparison, the book argues that radical liberalism in Guatemala and El Salvador ultimately led to corporate military authoritarianism; reform liberalism in Costa Rica led to political democracy; and aborted liberalism because of foreign intervention in Honduras and Nicaragua led to traditional dictatorship.

In developing its argument, this book is methodologically self-conscious. It provides carefully crafted definitions of key concepts; and it presents pithy historical syntheses and keen comparative analyses while also examining, sometimes partly borrowing from, and other times rejecting an array of alternative arguments. In particular, Mahoney asserts his general agreement with arguments about the importance of the nature and degree of polarization of agrarian class structures, but argues that these need to be supplemented with analyses that focus on political leaders and states as actors and organizational structures. Similarly, though he incorporates issues of external dependence and U.S. intervention directly into his analysis, he argues for understanding how domestic political struggles affected the likelihood of foreign intervention and for distinguishing political and economic forms of intervention.

Thus Mahoney finds that "liberal states were indispensable to the development of export agriculture in the region" (p. 19) and that liberal dictators were not simply an expression of oligarchic interests but were "fundamentally state-building political actors interested in maintaining and expanding their own personal power" (p. 19). We therefore should not "translate the effects of political processes" begun during the liberal period (such as those that dramatically strengthened the power of elite coffee planters in some countries) "into the causes of such processes" (p. 112). He asserts that unequal, polarized class relations in the countryside only closed off democracy as a historical possibility "when combined with and closely linked to extensively militarized state structures" (p. 20). He argues that continuity in state institutions (particularly with regard to the strength of the military) played a more important role in explaining the endurance of the political regimes during the heritage period than continuity in agrarian relations, noting especially a continuing comparatively demilitarized state in Costa Rica, in contrast to growing land concentration in that country by the mid-1900s. He also contends that the structural patterns induced by the liberal reform period persisted largely because of power mechanisms that underpinned them, rather than because of some functional logic or legitimation mechanisms (with the partial exception of Costa Rica).

Path-dependent critical juncture arguments must attempt to address several analytical challenges. First, they must explain why a particular period is indeed a "critical juncture," a choice point at which "enduring institutions and structures are created, and the range of possible outcomes is narrowed considerably" (p. 7). Second, they must justify why the choice point they select is actually the key one, as opposed to others, and why the range of outcomes is narrowed more by decisions made during that period than by ongoing ("constant") causes. Third, they have a number of difficult comparative-historical decisions to make, categorizing periods and determining which cases are similar enough to be lumped together in contrast to others. This book systematically addresses each of these key issues; although it probably has not done so in a way that will satisfy all readers, its clear presentation facilitates further debate and discussion of its arguments.

Path-dependent analyses differ in how much they argue that a critical juncture period "locks in" future evolution. In this work, Mahoney argues that after a critical juncture, countries' ensuing paths of development "cannot be easily broken or reversed" (p. 7). One might also logically expect the impact of a critical juncture to vary across country cases because of antecedent conditions, differences in "world historical time" when they occur, differential external shocks then or later, or their ongoing consequences. The book periodically notes these issues in the context of individual country cases, but they could have benefited from more sustained consideration.