Youssef Cohen

The Paradoxical Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order

The central argument of this paper is developed as a criticism of a widely accepted interpretation of collective violence in new states. It is shown that instead of indicating political decay, violence in these states is an integral part of the process of accumulation of power by the national state. To the degree that this power accumulation is necessary for the imposition or maintenance of order, collective violence also indicates movement towards political order on a new scale. Admittedly, our evidence is far from definitive. Nevertheless, it consistently contradicts the interpretation of violence as political decay and supports our interpretation of violence as a usual feature of the process of primitive accumulation of power.

Democracy from Above: The Political Origins of Military Dictatorship in Brazil

The argument of this paper is that the emergence of military dictatorships, such as the Brazilian regime of 1964, is not caused by an economic crisis of dependent capitalist development. Rather, it results from a polarization and radicalization of the democratic regime by which it is preceded. Democracies handed down from above, like that in Brazil and other South American democracies, lend themselves to polarization and radicalization. They therefore favor the emergence of modern forms of autocracy.

The Impact of Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Rule on Economic Growth:

The question posed in this article is whether the record of economic growth of Third World countries so far supports the claim that at a certain stage late industrialization is best served by bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes. A multiple interrupted time-series design is used to assess and compare the impact of bureaucratic-authoritarian and democratic regimes on economic growth in South America.

“The Benevolent Leviathan”: Political Consciousness among Urban Workers under State Corporatism

From the onset of industrial capitalism in Latin America, urban workers have been dependent on the state. This is particularly true in Brazil, where urban workers are still in a situation of extreme dependence on the state. Thus, the Brazilian setting provides an ideal opportunity for the study of the consciousness of dependent workers as well as an important point of referencefor comparative study of working-class consciousness. This paper outlines the general characteristics of the situation of state-dependent workers in Latin America, with special attention to the Brazilian worker, in order to show how their dependence is reflected in their consciousness. The evidence for our interpretation is based on the attitudes of 617 urban workers who are part of a larger probability sample of the popula

How Much Do Interest Groups Influence State Economic Growth

In the March 1988 issue of this Review, Virginia Gray and David Lowery presented a respecification of Mancur Olsons model of economic growth and tested the revised model with U.S. state data. A special feature of the Gray-Lowery analysis is its more thorough measurement of interest group effects. These investigators found interest group influences quite different from those anticipated by Olsons model. Paul Brace and Youssef Cohen argue that the Gray-Lowery model misspecifies the determinants of state economic growth, overstating the role of interest group size and failing to incorporate crucial exogenous variables. Gray and Lowery join the issue and defend their specification.

Political Determinants of Population Dynamics

The article suggests that the massive transformation of the political system often referred to as “political development” is responsible for the movement from high to low birth-and death rates in national populations. The effect of the changing political system is independent of (and in addition to) the effects of socioeconomic changes previously presented in the theory of demographic demographic transition. The article reports first the nature of the systematic connection between change in the political system on the one hand and change in vital rates on the other. Second, it presents a new empirical measure of the capacity and effectiveness of whole political systems.

The Heresthetics of Coup Making

Heresthetics is a term coined by Riker to refer to the stratagems used by politicians to manipulate the structure of a decision-making situation. The object of such manipulation is to force ones opponents into a choice of alternatives such that, whichever alternative is chosen, the opponents will lose. The main argument of this article is that military coups and regimes are largely the outcomes of successful heresthetical maneuvers. In this article my argument is applied to the emergence of the Brazilian military regime of 1964. But the argument should apply more widely. At the very least, this preliminary exercise should stimulate more research on the strategic maneuvers that engender military regimes and other forms of political change. By investigating the relationship between heresthetics and regime change this article also shows how social choice theory and game theory can be used to complement and enrich current explanations of political change.

Higher Taxes, Lower Birthrates?@@@Births, Deaths and Taxes: The Demographic and Political Transitions

This book is concerned with the relationship between political change and demographic change. In particular the authors attempt to identify how political changes affect patterns of fertility and mortality and they maintain that the growth in government power as measured by increases in taxation has a direct influence on the number of children born and the number of people dying in a given population. According to this hypothesis the larger the scale of government the lower the rate of childbearing and the lower the rate of mortality. Consideration is also given to the relative capacity of different political systems to effect demographic change. The concept of the demographic transition is first outlined. Next the authors describe their theory concerning how expansion of the political system affects vital rates. The hypothesis is then tested using data for 90 underdeveloped developing and developed countries over the period 1950-1975. Consideration is given to whether countries can accelerate existing trends in fertility and whether they can raise fertility when it has fallen to undesirable levels.