Chapter 1 sets the scene for this book, providing the requisite background for the chapters that follow. It begins with a short overview of the military regime, focusing on repression and the gradual restoration of democratic freedoms, highlighting the role the latter played in facilitating the country’s burgeoning environmental movement. It then turns to the dictatorship’s plans for industrial growth and energy production. The chapter closes with an overview of the symbolism that surrounds big dams and an introduction to the influential generals and engineers responsible for orchestrating the dictatorship’s dam-building campaign. This chapter also lays the groundwork for the book’s first argument, that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build big dams quickly and with little regard for their social and environmental impacts.

Amid imperial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white settlers were a tiny minority in most newer colonies, and in some cases, a non-white middle class arose that was educated in the colonizer's language and political system. This produced three main outcomes. (1) White settlers became a sizable minority in certain parts of Africa, which yielded electoral representation. Settler-minority regimes strongly opposed political rights for non-whites. (2) Settlers reversed their support for electoral institutions when their dominance was threatened. In the British West Indies in the mid-nineteenth century, white planters responded to the prospect of political control by Black politicians by disbanding their elected legislatures and accepting direct British Crown rule. (3) In some colonies with few settlers, a non-white middle class educated in the colonizer's language emerged. These elites were especially strong in the major port cities in South Asia and West Africa, and in colonies with emancipated slaves. Non-white elites in these areas gained representation by the 1920s, although with limited autonomy and a narrow franchise.

This chapter develops a theoretical framework centered on three actors: metropolitan officials, white settlers, and non-Europeans. Colonists could pressure the colonial state through lobbying/agitation, nonparticipation, and revolt; and metropolitan officials could respond by offering electoral concessions. What mattered? (1) Metropoles with pluralistic institutions should be more responsive to demands for electoral representation. (2) Sizable white settlements should trigger early electoral institutions (prodemocratic effect), but resistance by smaller settler minorities to franchise expansion could undermine the democratic foundations created by early elections (antidemocratic effect). (3) Where local elites were weak, non-Europeans should not gain early elections. Instead, they would move rapidly to mass-franchise elections with high autonomy after World War II, when the threat of revolt spiked. In cases with a large non-white middle class, we expect early elections with small franchises and low autonomy, which should broaden peacefully over time. Finally, cases with a national monarch should correspond with high autonomy but without meaningful electoral bodies.

Colonial electoral institutions influenced postindependence democracy levels. (1) Lengthy democratic exposure under colonialism usually produced stable postcolonial democracies. Often, a non-white middle class pushed for and participated in elections for multiple decades prior to independence. Early colonial elections involved a tiny segment of the population, but electoral reforms deepened over time and yielded institutionalized parties. After independence, institutionalized parties and democratically socialized elites acted as a buffer against military coups and executive power grabs. Some settler colonies followed this path as well. (2) Many colonies inherited democratic-looking institutions at independence, but these institutions reflected relatively shallow, post-WWII concessions. Few colonies with short colonial pluralism were democratic within a decade of independence, although some experienced post-Cold War democratization episodes. (3) Other colonies gained no meaningful electoral experience. Regimes established by successful anticolonial rebels and monarchies monopolized military power and constructed durable authoritarian regimes after independence.

This chapter summarizes the main findings thematically, including the theory (actors, goals, and strategic options), the pluralism of metropolitan institutions, the dual effects of white settlers, pressure from non-Europeans, and postcolonial persistence. We also develop broader implications for numerous segments of the democratization literature, including top-down democratic transitions, social classes and democratization, democratic sequencing, dominant-party democracies, non-Western institutions and democracy, and international democracy promotion.

Prospects for successful mass revolts increased dramatically after 1945, but the pace of reform and approaches to decolonization varied. Some colonizers moved to mass-franchise elections and high autonomy, ending with formal independence – whereas others sought to cling to power. This yielded three main outcomes. (1) Franchise size and legislative autonomy expanded rapidly in most colonies ruled by democratic powers. These processes tended to occur earlier when left-wing governments were in power, who were less tied to the colonial project. (2) White settler elites and the governing class in authoritarian metropoles opposed empowerment for non-whites, who they perceived as an existential threat to their social status and economic rents. This prompted anticolonial revolts by disenfranchised Africans and Arabs. (3) Colonial officials sometimes granted autonomy to nonelectoral institutions if doing so would avoid revolt and be acceptable to metropolitan opinion. This desire led to a distinct type of authoritarian decolonization, prevalent among British colonies, in which the colonizer handed off power to a national monarch.

Why are some countries more democratic than others? For most non-European countries, elections began under Western colonial rule. However, existing research largely overlooks these democratic origins. This book analyzes a global sample of colonies across four centuries to explain the emergence of colonial electoral institutions and their lasting impact. The degree of democracy in the metropole, the size of the white settler population, and pressure from non-Europeans shaped the timing and form of colonial elections. White settlers and non-white middle classes educated in the colonizer’s language usually gained early elections, but settler minorities resisted subsequent franchise expansion. Authoritarian metropoles blocked elections entirely. Countries with lengthy exposure to competitive colonial institutions tended to consolidate democracies after independence. By contrast, countries with shorter electoral episodes usually shed democratic institutions, and countries that were denied colonial elections consolidated stable dictatorships. Regime trajectories shaped by colonial rule persist to the present day.

Before the nineteenth century, most European colonies were located in the New World. British colonies experienced more electoral competition because of parliamentary institutions at home. British-settled colonies in North America, the West Indies, and Oceania routinely gained fully elected assemblies shortly after settlement. However, the early British empire was far from democratic: voting rights were confined to white property-owning men, London occasionally pushed back on settlers’ policymaking autonomy (prompting the American Revolution), and colonies with Catholic or convict populations experienced long delays before gaining electoral representation. Prior to the French Revolution, colonists in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires lacked electoral representation beyond the municipal level. Afterward, political transformations in authoritarian metropoles triggered reforms to colonial institutions. France fluctuated between democratic and authoritarian institutions after the French Revolution, and colonial institutions closely tracked metropolitan patterns. Spain and Portugal engaged in abortive electoral reforms in their colonies, which preceded the dissolution of their American empires.

In the mid-twentieth century a flow of books written by women writers was published. These works reformulated the emancipatory imaginaries of the political and artistic avant-gardes of the 1920s with original explorations of gender and affective relationships. In these books can be seen the emergence of a new sensibility along with a new poetics that nourishes the demands of the market and the expectations of a wider and more diversified audience prone to reading new experiences, innovative aesthetics, and novel affects. This chapter heeds the articulation of the sensitive and the political in different writers. Salvadora Medina Onrubia, Norah Lange, and Sara Gallardo are the writers of different decades who through their work, the literary-discursive figures they created, and their biographical stories displayed passionate and conflictive interactions with their time. They pursued emancipation specially through language. Literary texts, public speech, and print columns help them to mobilize more than just a political idea or a literary project, by activating perceptions, emotions, sensibilities, and public imaginations. This chapter will analyze the host of feelings that emerged in this process, mainly women’s genuine interest to get close to other women.

This chapter maps out two decades of novelistic production starting with Respiración artificial by Ricardo Piglia in the midst of the dictatorship. An archival pursuit of a history of violence constitutive of national foundations, the narrative insinuates the possibility of a national project where silenced voices might have a hearing. Whereas in Piglia, modernist fragmentation signals an enigma that needs to be solved, in Reina Roffe’s La rompiente a shattered and disrupted memory both names the horror and promises a break away from archival sites of authority. Los Pichiciegos by Rodolfo Fogwill offers a vision of the Malvinas/Falklands War that is both hallucinatory and hyperreal, facing simultaneously the darkness of the present and a visionary glance revealing novel forms of destitution in the making. In novels published in the 1990s such as Matilde Sanchez’s El dock, Rodolfo Fogwill’s Vivir afuera, Sergio Chefjec’s El aire and Los planetas, the characters’ aimless wanderings might be said to explore the failure of memory as historical direction, as national reckoning, as a form of political representation, as harnessing community, yet memories of the horror persist beyond any general project of political reconstitution and the capacity of literature to repair or bestow meaning.

This chapter lays out a novel theory of elite cohesion, coercive capacity, and authoritarian social order. Enabling and controlling coercive agents is a fundamental challenge confronting all dictators. Actors like secret police chiefs pose a grave threat to incumbent authoritarian elites because they hold the means of violence and could use them to overthrow their masters. Elites’ task of monitoring and controlling their coercive agents is a collective action problem. All members of an authoritarian ruling coalition are better off if they cooperate to control coercive agents. However, individual authoritarian elites have incentives to defect from cooperation. When authoritarian elites cannot cooperate to prevent insubordination by coercive agents, they reduce coercive capacity. Institutions promote authoritarian elite cohesion. They provide structures of shared expectations or focal points that allow authoritarian elites to pool their resources, cooperate, and control coercive agents. In Cold War communist Central and Eastern Europe, Stalinism was the institutional structure that promoted elite cohesion and led to the construction of large, capable coercive institutions across the region.

This chapter introduces the research design and comparative case studies in Part II of the book. In this part of the book, I present historical case studies of Poland and East Germany. This is the qualitative component of the integrated, multimethod difference-in-difference research design with which I test the theoretical propositions laid out in Chapter 2. The first case experienced a post-Stalinist transition, while the second did not. By carefully tracing developments in elite cohesion and coercive capacity across the two otherwise very similar cases, I demonstrate that post-Stalinist transitions caused reductions in coercive capacity. I do so by showing that trends in capacity were similar across the Polish and East German regimes before 1953; that post-Stalinist transitions occurred randomly and were not themselves a function of coercive capacity; and by tracing the causal mechanisms that linked transitions to declines in capacity.

In this conclusion, I draw broader lessons for the study of authoritarian regimes from the analyses of this book. I call for greater attention to coercive institutions by scholars of authoritarian politics, and for authoritarian regimes to be theorized as groups rather than unitary actors. I briefly discuss the applicability of my theoretical argument to the Chinese case. Under Mao Zedong, breakdown of elite cohesion during the Cultural Revolution was associated with a decline in the capacity of the Ministry of Public Security. This mirrors reductions in coercive capacity after post-Stalinist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe.

This introduction lays out the problem of enabling and controlling coercive agents under authoritarian regimes. It describes puzzling variation in the size and activities of coercive institutions across six regimes in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The theoretical approach of the book is briefly discussed, emphasizing elite cohesion over political threats. The research design, plan, and empirical findings of the book are discussed.