Jean-Paul Faguet
About
Political economist at LSE specializing in Latin American development
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Claims by Jean-Paul Faguet (20 of 25)
Neighbor-Pair and Instrumental Variable Methodology
To rule out that better development reflects pre-existing 'locational fundamentals' (good soil, water, trade routes) rather than the encomienda, the researchers use neighbor-pair fixed effects (comparing adjacent municipalities where one had encomienda and one did not, so unmeasured local characteristics cancel out) plus an instrumental variable—the least-cost path of the conquistadores reconstructed from a 1560 imperial agent's records and NASA geographic data—which correlates with encomienda presence but not directly with modern outcomes.
Governance Is Not Yet Understood
Despite decades of research, social scientists do not really know when, why, or how good governance arises; we have only highly contingent hypotheses with scattered evidence for particular cases, and what works in one place and time (modern Germany) failed in the same place at another time (Germany 1890s-1940s) and offers little guidance for the rest of the world.
Institutions Express Economic Power Cycling Into Politics
Following a classical political economy tradition (which Faguet characterizes as a revived, non-Leninist Marxism), institutions are at some level the expression of economic power applied to politics, which then feeds back into economic power in a continuous cycle; treating economic and political spheres as distinct, as much North American political economy does, risks missing the key dynamic of how the world works.
Party Systems Must Match the Real Cleavage
Per Lipset and Rokkan's cleavage theory, a viable party system must map onto the main political cleavage that actually defines a society; Bolivia's pre-2003 left-versus-right system was built on a false cleavage because Bolivia never had an industrial revolution and thus had no self-identified working class and few capitalists, so the system collapsed and was replaced by parties organized around the real cleavage—ethnic, identitarian, and geographic identity.
Same Constitutions Produce Different Outcomes
Institutions written in identical black-and-white rules (e.g., constitutions copied from the US by Latin American republics, or shared French/British administrative structures left to African colonies) produce radically different outcomes when transferred across cultural contexts, demonstrating that formal rules alone do not determine institutional behavior.
US Parties Sorted From Overlapping to Polarized
Through most of the 20th century, US parties overlapped ideologically—many Southern Democrats were right-wing and many Northeastern Republicans were left-wing, belonging to a party for tribal or historical rather than ideological reasons—but over time, as visualized through roll-call votes, they separated completely so there is now no overlap, producing en-masse party-line voting and removing the cross-party common ground that once enabled cooperation.
Bolivia's Party System Survived Then Collapsed
Bolivia's political party system was remarkably stable from 1952 to 2002—the same parties and individuals returned after coups, 50,000% inflation, and roughly 15 coups d'etat—yet it suddenly collapsed around 2003, an event popularly but implausibly attributed to a few demonstrations in Cochabamba and La Paz that could not realistically topple a system that survived far larger shocks.
US Presidentialism Only Works in the US
Per Adam Przeworski's comparative research, the American-style system of presidentialism and separation of powers has only really worked in the United States; the many countries that copied it (all of Latin America) failed, because parliamentary systems have an escape valve—a vote of no confidence triggering an election—that presidential systems lack, allowing a hobbled party to stagger on while resentment builds, and the historic ideological overlap between US parties was part of what made the exceptional American system work.
Colonialism Was a Complex Treatment
The cutting edge of the field treats colonialism as a 'complex treatment' that produced many effects, many bad and some horrific, but also some good incremental effects (such as infrastructure like railroads that lowered transport costs and enabled economic integration); recognizing the marginal benefit of an outcome is distinct from endorsing the immoral process that produced it.
Venezuela Declined Under 21st Century Socialism
Venezuela went from being arguably the richest, most sophisticated, and most politically stable country in Latin America—with ~90% voter registration and turnout—into a declining autocracy after Hugo Chávez's '21st century socialism' gutted its industrial sector, leaving an oil-dependent economy where the government pays off the military, elites tied to the government prosper, everyone else works informally, and about a third of the population has fled.
Electoral Systems Trade Decisiveness for Representation
First-past-the-post voting turns relatively small electoral majorities into large legislative majorities, producing strong but brittle governments that can enact sweeping change (a 35% vote can yield a vast parliamentary majority—an 'electoral dictatorship'), whereas proportional representation gives parties seats proportional to votes, better representing sincere preferences and enabling coalitions but producing only minor reshuffles; PR is better when things go well, but first-past-the-post's capacity for a clean sweep is valuable when things go badly.
Western Left Declining as Working Class Identity Fades
The traditional European left is umbilically tied to unions and a self-identified working class, but that identity is dissolving: people work hard but no longer see themselves as working class (the gig-economy Uber driver thinks of himself as an entrepreneur rather than a factory worker among thousands), so left-right politics is in steep decline across the West for reasons strikingly similar to Bolivia's.
Slavery's Negative Legacy Persists Today
Recent empirical work (Nunn, Wantchekon, and others) shows the harmful effects of slavery persist into the present: in West African regions with severe slave trafficking, people today trust each other less—linked to historical slave-raiding that pitted ethnic groups against one another—and education and health outcomes remain worse in places that suffered heavy slavery.
Encomienda Indirectly Improved Modern Development
The encomienda, a brutal colonial forced-labor institution, is statistically tied to better development outcomes today across about 20 measures (GDP per capita, wages, health, education, infant mortality, literacy, and institutional capacity) in Colombia—not because forced labor itself helped, but because the presence of encomienda gave Spanish lords strong incentives to build durable local institutions to protect their property rights, and those local institutions persisted and grew in capacity within a chronically weak imperial state.
Identity Politics Turns Positive-Sum Into Zero-Sum
Left-right politics is fundamentally economic and positive-sum: a growing pie lets capitalists and workers both gain, so compromise solutions are always possible; but if politics shifts to identitarian lines (ethnicity, religion, language), it becomes zero-sum—one group is on top or the other is—making agreeable solutions very difficult and threatening political stability. This dynamic, first visible in institutionally weak Bolivia, is now appearing across the West.
Disaggregate Institutions Below National Level
The dominant 'extractive versus inclusive' framing of national institutions is too high a level of aggregation; institutions vary substantially below the national level (Mississippi differs from Massachusetts) and across dimensions (legal system, policing, electoral norms, party systems), so studying specific institutions across space yields different and more accurate answers.
Conquistadores Were Minor Nobility's Younger Sons
Contrary to the flattering story Latin Americans tell themselves, the conquistadores were not great lords but the second, third, and fourth sons of minor nobility who had little to inherit; educated and with some means to finance the voyage, they sought to set themselves up as lords in the New World rather than remain marginal in Spain.
Colombian State Still Absent in Parts Today
Although Colombia became independent in 1821 and has been independent over 200 years, the Colombian state still has not fully occupied its territory: in places in 2024 there is no police station, mayor's office, school, or hospital, even though people live there and self-organize, reaching only about 350 of roughly 1,120 municipalities historically.
Non-Encomienda Areas Lost Institutions to Depopulation
In areas without encomienda there was no incentive to build a colonial state, and pre-existing indigenous institutions collapsed because indigenous populations declined by over 95%, leaving scattered people without governing institutions; thus the advantage of encomienda areas was partly that the alternative areas had their institutions run into the ground.
Decentralization Enabled New Indigenous Parties
Bolivia's decentralization created local governments that previously did not exist, generating a new class of politicians competing for local positions; with about a ten-year lag these politicians realized they need not join elite parties led by wealthy white La Paz residents and could form their own parties based on the society's real ethnic-geographic cleavage, enabling the rise of Evo Morales.
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