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Sebastián L. Mazzuca

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Sebastián L. Mazzuca
BornBuenos Aires, Argentina[1]
🎓 Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
💼 Occupation
Known forComparative politics
state formation

Sebastián L. Mazzuca is a professor of political science specializing in comparative politics at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his research on state formation.

Career[edit]

Mazzuca earned his MA in Economics and his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.[1] He studied with David Collier and James A. Robinson.

After teaching at Harvard University, and the National University of General San Martín in Buenos Aires, he returned to the United States and began teaching at Johns Hopkins University.

Academic research[edit]

Mazzuca works in the field of comparative politics specializing in state formation, state building, and democracy.[2]

Mazzuca is known for introducing the distinction between the access to power and the exercise of power. He argues that the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy concerns the access to power dimension. In contrast, the distinction between patrimonialism and bureaucracy concerns the exercise of power dimension.[3]

Mazzuca's work on state formation,[4] and on economic development,[5] has been seen as a contribution to critical juncture theory.

The state and democracy[edit]

Mazzuca, in his work with Gerardo L. Munck, has advanced the argument that the process of state formation, and the resulting level of state capacity, affects the process of democratization as well as the quality of democracy. In A Middle-quality Institutional Trap (2020), Mazzuca and Munck maintain that "States can make democracy and democracy can make States," but that they do so "only under certain macroconditions, which trigger the causal mechanisms that make the State–democracy interaction a virtuous cycle." They compare advanced democracies to Latin America and show that "in Latin America, the State–democracy interaction has not generated a virtuous cycle." They explain the poor quality of Latin American democracies in terms of various factors, including the legacy of state formation in the nineteenth century.[6]

Latecomer State Formation[edit]

Mazzuca's book Latecomer State Formation. Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America (2021) has been praised as a "dazzling and conceptually innovative book" that offers "an empirically convincing positive theory of state formation," and as "a pathbreaking account of ... state formation in Latin America."[7]

Latecomer State Formation is a cross-regional study of state formation, that contrasts the pattern of state formation in Latin America and Europe. One of its key arguments is that state formation in Latin America was trade-led rather than war-led and that this difference explains why Latin American states have low state capacity relative to their European counterparts. In early modern western Europe, Mazzuca argues, "state formation had multiple linkages to state building. Violence monopolization required great efforts at fiscal extraction, which in turn caused the abolition of the intermediary power of local potentates and incited social demands for new public goods." In contrast, in Latin America, "the obstacles to the development of state capacities were the result of mutually convenient bargains struck by central state-makers and peripheral potentates, who, far from being eliminated during state formation, obtained institutional power to reinforce local bastions."[8]

Latecomer State Formation also holds that three pathways were followed in forming Latin American states. These three paths are distinguished by the key agent in the process of state formation. (1) In the "port-driven pathway" - followed by Argentina and Brazil - territorial consolidation and violence monopolization is simultaneously achieved. The result are "territorial colossuses." (2) In the "party-driven pathway" - followed by Mexico and Colombia - there is "a temporal gap between territory consolidation and violence monopolization." However, this pathways created "states with large territories combining multiple economic regions." (3) Finally, the "lord-driven pathway" tends towards fragmentation and sampled states. In some cases, lords break up large-scale territorial projects - the cases of "Antonio Páez in relation to Bolívar’s Gran Colombia (Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Venezuela), Rafael Carrera in relation to the Central American Federation, and Ramón Castilla in relation to the Peru-Bolivian Confederation." In other cases, lords form smaller states — the case of Venezuela, Guatemala, and Peru.[9]

Selected publications[edit]

Books[edit]

Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America (Yale University Press, 2021).

A Middle-Quality Institutional Trap: Democracy and State Capacity in Latin America (with Gerardo L. Munck; Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Articles[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 "Sebastián Mazzuca". Political Science.
  2. Sebastián L. Mazzuca, "Access to power versus exercise of power: Reconceptualizing the quality of democracy in Latin America," Studies in Comparative International Development 45,3 (2010), 334-357; Sebastián L. Mazzuca, "Macrofoundations of regime change: democracy, state formation, and capitalist development," Comparative Politics 43, 1 (2010), 1-19; Gerardo L. Munck and Sebastián L. Mazzuca, “State or Democracy First? Alternative Perspectives on the State-Democracy Nexus,” Democratization 21, 7 (2014): 1221-43; Sebastián L. Mazzuca, “Critical Juncture and Legacies: State Formation and Economic Performance in Latin America“ Qualitative & Multi-Method Research Vol. 15, No. 1 (2017): 29-35; Gerardo L. Munck and Sebastián L. Mazzuca, A Middle-Quality Institutional Trap: Democracy and State Capacity in Latin America, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020; Sebastián L. Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.
  3. Sebastián L. Mazzuca, "Access to power versus exercise of power: Reconceptualizing the quality of democracy in Latin America," Studies in Comparative International Development 45,3 (2010), 334-357.[1]
  4. Sebastián Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021, p. 14.
  5. Sebastián L. Mazzuca, “Critical Juncture and Legacies: State Formation and Economic Performance in Latin America“ Qualitative & Multi-Method Research Vol. 15, No. 1 (2017): 29-35.
  6. Sebastián L. Mazzuca and Gerardo L. Munck, A Middle-quality Institutional Trap: Democracy and State Capacity in Latin America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 63.
  7. Statements by Maya Tudor, James A Robinson, and Steven Levitsky on back cover of Sebastián L. Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.
  8. Sebastián Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021, p. 2.
  9. Sebastián Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021, p. 14.

External links[edit]



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