Territory and Ideology in Latin America

Kent Eaton is a Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining the faculty at UCSC, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School (2005-2006) and at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University (1998-2005). He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1998. Professor Eaton's research on Latin American politics has been published in a wide array of journals, including Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, and Security Studies. His publications include The Democratic Decentralization Programming Handbook (with Tyler Dickovick and Paul Smoke, USAID, 2009), and The Political Economy of Decentralization Reforms (with Kai-Alexander Kaiser and Paul J. Smoke, World Bank, 2010).

Around the world, familiar ideological conflicts over the market are becoming increasingly territorialized in the form of policy conflicts between national and subnational governments. Thanks to a series of trends like globalization, democratization, and especially decentralization, subnational governments are now in a position to more effectively challenge the ideological orientation of the national government.

The book conceptualizes these challenges as operating in two related but distinct modes. The first stems from elected subnational officials who use their authority, resources, and legitimacy to design, implement, and defend subnational policy regimes that deviate ideologically from national policy regimes. The second occurs when these same officials use their authority, resources, and legitimacy to question, oppose, and alter the ideological content of national policy regimes. The book focuses on three similarly-situated countries in Latin America where these two types of policy challenges met different fates; neither challenge succeeded in Peru, both succeeded in Bolivia, and Ecuador experienced an intermediate outcome marked by the success of the first type of challenge (i.e. the defence of a deviant, neoliberal subnational policy regime) and the failure of the second (i.e. the inability to alter a statist national policy regime). Derived from the in-depth study of these countries, the book's theoretical argument emphasizes three critical variables: 1) the structural significance of the territory over which subnational elected officials preside, 2) the level of institutional capacity they can harness, and 3) the strength of the societal coalitions they can build both within and across subnational jurisdictions.

Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars.

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This book examines the connection between territorial politics and ideological conflict in the global economic sphere, particularly in Latin America, based on in-depth field research in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru.