This book lays down some general themes and principles in the study of land reform and traces the historical evolution of the concept of land reform. It constitutes a continent-based country-by-country survey of the significant recent reforms in the less developed countries.

This book argues that - in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens - democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. The study provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Albertus and Menaldo also conduct detailed case studies of Chile and Sweden. In doing so, they explain why some democracies successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions for more egalitarian social contracts.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Chile Since Independence brings together four chapters from Volumes III, V and VIII of The Cambridge History of Latin America to provide in a single volume an economic, social, and political history of Chile since independence. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay.

Partners in Conflict examines the importance of sexuality and gender to rural labor and agrarian politics during the last days of Chile’s latifundia system of traditional landed estates and throughout the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. Heidi Tinsman analyzes differences between men’s and women’s participation in Chile’s Agrarian Reform movement and considers how conflicts over gender and sexuality shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics. Tinsman restores women to a scholarly narrative that has been almost exclusively about men, recounting the centrality of women’s labor to the pre-Agrarian Reform world of the hacienda during the 1950s and recovering women’s critical roles in union struggles and land occupations during the Agrarian Reform itself. Providing a theoretical framework for understanding why the Agrarian Reform ultimately empowered men more than women, Tinsman argues that women were marginalized not because the Agrarian Reform ignored women but because, under both the Frei and Allende governments, it promoted the male-headed household as the cornerstone of a new society. Although this emphasis on gender cooperation stressed that men should have more respect for their wives and funneled unprecedented amounts of resources into women’s hands, the reform defined men as its protagonists and affirmed their authority over women. This is the first monographic social history of Chile’s Agrarian Reform in either English or Spanish, and the first historical work to make sexuality and gender central to the analysis of the reforms.

Few dispute that a major turning point in the history of present-day Chile commenced with the election in 1970 of a Marxist physician, Salvador Allende. What followed were three years that shook South America, if not the world. Land reform, factory expropriation, the politicization of a sector of the armed forces, curriculum reform in education, each in their turn led to a hardening of political fault lines, and created the basis for the overthrow of the Allende regime. This work, by one of the foremost analysts of modern Chile, features an interview with an earlier president of that beleaguered country, Eduardo Frei. In what is likely to be viewed as the most authoritative statement to date on U.S.Chile relationships during this stormy period, Falcoff debunks the myth of a CIA-inspired overthrow of the democratic forces, placing responsibility on Allende's failure to obtain or even seek a decisive electoral mandate, on a governing coalition internally inconsistent and frequently at war with its constituent elements, on an economic policy that polarized supporters and enemies, and ultimately on the need to turn to the military for the stability that its policy failures could not achieve. The final chapter, on the assumption to power and political changes rendered by the present ruler, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, indicates that the problems of Chile are not attributable to any single ruler or party. Falcoff indicates that core problems in Chile, from capital formation to the search for diversification, were exemplified in cultural, moral, and spiritual values between the Frei and Allende epochs. The prolonged Pinochet regime, for Falcoff, has postponed settlement of the major issues raised by the democratic era: equality and growth, legality and legitimacy. The costs of democratic order remain for Chileans to confront and resolve.