Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America
Date and Time
Location
While the historical role of landed elites as obstacles to democratic consolidation in Latin America has been widely studied, how these elites have adapted to the new democratic context remains underexplored even four decades after the start of the Third Wave of democratization. Dr. Fernández Milmanda's work addresses this gap in our knowledge by studying the strategies agrarian elites employ to protect their interests in democracy, showing they have been more successful in influencing policymaking where they have organized in the electoral arena than where they have relied on non-electoral means such as lobbying or protests.
Speaker: Belén Fernández Milmanda, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Trinity College.
Moderated by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
About the Speaker
Belén Fernández Milmanda is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford. Her research explores how economic elites influence policy making in Latin America with a focus on distributive and environmental politics. She is the author of Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in World Development, Politics and Society, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Latin American Politics.
About the Moderator
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, political parties, weak and informal institutions, and most recently, the crisis of democracy in the United States. He and Daniel Ziblatt are authors of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times best-seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently writing a book on the sources of global democratic resilience in the 21st Century.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.