CLAS Lecture Series: Revolution From Below: The Rise of Local Politics and the Fall of Bolivia's Party Systems

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Center for Latin American Studies
Location
Bolivar House, 582 Alvarado Row

For 50 years Bolivia’s political party system was a surprisingly robust component of an otherwise fragile democracy. How did a gas pipeline dispute spark a revolution that overturned the political system, destroyed existing political parties, and re-cast the relationship between state and society? IProfessor Faguet will examine how the arrival of local government shifted the nation’s politics from a typical 20th century, left-right axis of competition deeply unsuited to a society like Bolivia, to an ethnic and cultural axis more closely aligned with its major social cleavage. This shift made elite parties redundant, and transformed the country’s politics by facilitating the rise of structurally distinct political organizations, and a new indigenous political class. Decentralization was the trigger – not the cause – that made Bolivia’s latent cleavage political, sparking revolution from below. He suggests a folk theorem of identitarian cleavage, and outline a mechanism linking deep social cleavage to sudden political change.

Dr. Jean-Paul Faguet is Professor of the Political Economy of Development at the London School of Economics. He is also Chair of the Decentralization Task Force of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. His research blends quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. He has published extensively in the economics, political science, and development literatures, including Is Decentralization Good for Development? Perspectives from Academics and Policymakers (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Governance from Below: Decentralization and Popular Democracy in Bolivia (U of Michigan Press), which won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best political science book of 2012. He is ranked in the top 5% of global social science authors by SSRN, and the global top 5% of economists by RePEc. His teaching and research focus on comparative political economy, new institutional economics, economic development and economic history. Before coming to the LSE he worked for the World Bank in La Paz, Bolivia on health, education, early childhood development and the environment. He trained in both political science and economics at Princeton, Harvard and the LSE, where his dissertation won the William Robson Memorial Prize. http://governancefrombelow.net/

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