Professor Aníbal Pérez-Liñán wins APSA book award

Congratulations to Professor Aníbal Pérez-Liñán. His book Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (co-authored with Scott Mainwaring) co-won the Best Book Award granted by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association to the best book offering a comparative analysis of the origins, processes, and outcomes of democratization published in 2014.

The book offers a novel perspective on the emergence and survival of political regimes, claiming that regime outcomes are best explained by the degree to which powerful actors embrace democracy as an intrinsically desirable goal, and by the radicalization of their policy preferences. It also demonstrates that transnational mechanisms are crucial to understand regional waves of democratization. The study relies on this theory to explain the emergence and fall of democracies and dictatorships in Latin America since 1900.