With the publication in 1973 of Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics, Guillermo O'Donnell initiated a new phase in the debate over the relationship between social change and politics in Latin America. In contrast to most of the political development literature of the 1950s and 1960s, O'Donnell argued that social and economic modernization in the context of delayed development is more likely to lead to authoritarianism than democracy. His analysis focused on the emergence of military regimes in Argentina and Brazil in the middle 1960s—regimes that he labeled “bureaucratic-authoritarian” to distinguish them from oligarchical and populist forms of authoritarian rule found in less modernized countries. O'Donnell's suggestion that an “elective affinity” exists between higher levels of modernization and the rise of bureaucratic-authoritarianism in South America anticipated the military takeovers of the 1970s in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. The timeliness of his argument, together with its broad theoretical implications, stimulated considerable discussion, which culminated in the recent publication of a volume devoted to the exploration of themes raised by O'Donnell.
