This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."

In the conclusion, we review the book’s chapters and argue that Latin America has experienced a resurgence of conservative forces in recent years. We analyze the supply and demand of a broad set of conservative alternatives, paying special attention to the processes of party-building, adaptation, and rebranding. We find that new right-wing forces often have weak organizations, but have been able to mobilize voters along noneconomic cleavages, including security, gender politics, and reproductive rights. The adoption of a highly conservative profile has allowed parties to access lower-class constituencies and mobilize mass support among them. The politicization of cultural issues, such as LGBT rights and religious identities, has contributed to polarization and the rise of populist radical right parties. These parties have flourished within the context of political and economic shocks and benefited from cultural backlashes and the crises of traditional right-wing parties. In these situations, politics becomes a zero-sum game and the stakes get higher. Democratic stability in the region is arguably at its most tenuous state since the age of military dictatorships. Interrupted presidencies have become realities in many countries over the past fifteen years, raising concerns about democratic stability and potential threats to democratic institutions.

In recent decades, Latin America has experienced a resurgence of the political right after the “left turn” of the 2000s. The introduction argues that right-wing parties have adapted to social and political changes by emphasizing cultural issues, mobilizing voters along salient political cleavages, and crafting distinctive party platforms and political identities. It also introduces a typology of right-wing parties and movements that captures the diversity of the post-2000 Latin American right in both ideological and organizational terms. Looking at the demand side, the introduction sets the stage for our analysis of the changes and continuities in the attitudes of Latin American electorates. On the supply side, the introduction sets the groundwork for mapping the programmatic features that distinguish the post-2000 political right from right-wing parties created in previous eras. Finally, the introduction presents an outline of the book and summarizes its main findings.

This chapter delves into evolving policy and regulatory dimensions shaping the emergence of hydrogen in the Latin American energy landscape. With a focus on three regional leaders – Chile, Colombia and Brazil – it explores the distinct strategic paths these countries are charting as they seek to position themselves in the burgeoning hydrogen economy. Chile, Colombia and Brazil, aiming to capitalize on their abundant (renewable) resources, have moved swiftly to outline ambitious hydrogen strategies and legislation. Despite this progress, as the chapter reveals, important regulatory challenges still limit their ability to fully tap the hydrogen well. Even as these obstacles persist, interest in hydrogen projects continues to soar, as exemplified by the numerous developed or in-development pilot projects pragmatically leveraging the existing frameworks. Ultimately, while clean hydrogen promises to usher in an era of sustainable development for Latin America, regulatory efforts matching policy ambitions will continue to be needed to successfully transition from promise to actual production.

In this chapter I return to the classics of bellicist theory to formalize their insights and derive concrete observational expectations for nineteenth-century Latin America. I first look at the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, who suggest a more holistic approach to the effects of war on the process of state formation which combines both pre-war and post-war phases in a single overarching theory. I then use the more modern concepts and logics of historical institutionalism to generate clearer predictions from their theories. I propose that, in a pre-war phase and when hostilities are taking place, mobilization will trigger taxation and repression—i.e., the extraction-coercion cycle. Yet, war outcomes will determine whether those contingent policies will become institutionalized after the critical juncture of war. While victory will consolidate a trajectory of state formation, defeat will render state institutions illegitimate and set losers into a path-dependent process of state weakening. Finally, I discuss actors and mechanisms specific to nineteenth-century Latin America and lay out the observational implications of my argument.

This introductory chapter presents the puzzle of the variation in agrarian elites’ capacity to organize electoral representation across Latin America after the third wave of democratization and discusses the consequences of this variation for redistributive politics. It summarizes the book’s central argument that agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence are explained by two factors: the perception of an existential threat and the level of intragroup fragmentation. Then, it discusses the relevance of that argument for the comparative politics literature, in particular regarding the relationship among economic elites’ representation, democratic consolidation, and redistribution. The chapter also offers background about a series of structural and political transformations that have changed agrarian elites’ sources of power in Latin America over the last six decades and describes my research methods, case selection strategy, and data sources.

Examines the dispersion of the Mediterranean community into Latin America and other areas and the reconfiguration of the consular service away from the former Mediterranean focus and toward a more professional organization.

The conclusions close the manuscript and make four points. First, they review the macro-level observational expectations tested in Part II, and how my findings, obtained through a triangulation of different techniques, allow for a comprehensive picture of how war affected state formation throughout the entire region. Second, they bring together all case studies in Part III, noting how the historical evidence collected fits the expectations of the theory at a micro-level—e.g., considering the behavior of individual actors and the effects of narrow events like battles within wars—and does so with out-and-out consistency—i.e., case by case, almost without exception. Third, they reflect upon the scope of the theory, discussing many other cases that could be explained by the long-term effects of war outcomes. This discussion covers many regions and time periods, showing that classical bellicist theory not only can travel, but can also solves logical problems and empirical puzzles highlighted by previous scholarship. Finally, the conclusions suggest many lines of enquiry for future research that the book leaves open.

In this chapter I lay the foundations of the book and give an overview of the argument. After introducing the importance of studying state capacity and the main puzzle of why certain states are set in divergent state building trajectories, I discuss the state of bellicist theory and criticisms related to its alleged functionalist approach to history, and lack of fit with a world where inter-state war has become less frequent. I then turn to Latin America, a poster child of anti-bellicist scholars. There I review the aforementioned books by Centeno, Kurtz, Mahoney, Mazzuca, Saylor, and Soifer, amongst others. My book is set against this new consensus which dismisses war as an explanation for intra-regional variation in state capacity. In a final section, I propose the need to rethink the theory with a focus on the long-term consequences of war outcomes rather than pre-war conditions. The introduction closes with a discussion of my case selection strategy and chapter layout.

Was war intense and frequent enough in Latin America to cause state formation? How should we evaluate the capability of these states in the nineteenth century? This chapter presents a background of how war formed the colonial state in Latin America and features some cross-regional comparisons between Europe and Latin America which give context to the rest of the book. After showing how warfare in Europe and in the Americas led to the institutionalization of the colonial state, I focus on entire century between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI to show that Latin America faced comparatively frequent and severe warfare during this period. I then show that the territorial effects of warfare were similar in both regions and that the modes of financing war were also comparable and similarly conducive to state building. Put together, these pieces of evidence demonstrate through simple descriptive comparisons that the idea of a relatively peaceful Latin America populated by weak states, although a valid overall characterization of the region in the twentieth century, collapses when our focus is the nineteenth century.