Varieties of Political Regimes: Latin America in Comparative Perspective

Objectives: The huge variety of regime types both past and present turns Latin America into a laboratory for the study of political regimes. The course aims to use fundamental theoretical and conceptual understandings of various democratic and non-democratic regime types to discuss and analyse the range of empirical variety in political regime development in Latin America.

Content: The course is divided into four sections. The first section provides theoretical and conceptual as well as analytical tools for the empirical study of different political regime types. The second section provides an overview of political regime development in 19th century Latin America. The third section is devoted to varieties of non-democratic regimes in Latin America, whereas the fourth section concerns varieties of democratic regimes in Latin America. The course emphasizes temporal variations as well as intraregional differences and similarities between countries.

Upon completion of the course the student should be able to:

Knowledge

• Describe the main temporal and intraregional variations in Latin American political regime development since independence

Skills

• Analyze empirical regime developments by using the theoretical conceptualizations of different political regime types
• Compare and discuss differences and similarities between empirical cases of the various Latin American regime types

General competence

• Critically relate concepts, models and theories to empirical examples and facts