Latin American Politics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Politics of Latin America is intended to be a multi-disciplinary introduction to critical issues within contemporary Latin American culture, society, politics, and economy. An assumption behind the organization of this course is that many of the traditional boundaries between different disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities are drawn somewhat arbitrarily, and that a more comprehensive understanding of Latin America can, and even should, be approached from a number of different analytic and disciplinary lenses. Thus, we will trespass traditional disciplinary boundaries from time to time over the course of the semester. The course is divided into two major parts. The first part is organized around a number of key analytic lenses, which we will employ sequentially with an aim to gaining a deeper appreciation of important aspects of contemporary Latin America. We will begin with a discussion of the utility of "culture" as a tool for understanding Latin America. Is there such a thing as "Latin America" understood as a discrete category of countries, and if so, what do they share in common? We will follow this discussion with an exploration of what is certainly a chief cultural expression among any people, an exploration of levels of religiosity and their relationship to social and political behavior. Other key features of culture will be woven into the analyses of the case studies we will undertake for the remainder of the course. We will explore the wide variation in the quality of democratic governance in different Latin American countries. And we will we look to some of the sources of that variation, including democratic institution building, economic and social policy making, and the persistence of populist politics, and forces in the international arena, such as U.S Foreign Policy, among other factors. In the remainder of the course, we will look specifically at country-cases in comparative perspective, in particular Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela. In selecting these cases, I have made a conscious decision to sacrifice breadth for greater depth. An effort will be made throughout the discussion of the cases to make broader comparisons with a wider range of Latin American cases.