The Challenges of Creating Democracies in The Americas: The United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Guatemala Alex Roberto Hybel

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Alex Roberto Hybel
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The Challenges of Creating
Democracies in the
Americas
The United States, Mexico,
Colombia, Venezuela,
Costa Rica, and Guatemala
Alex Roberto Hybel
with
Zander Weisman Mintz and Elise Hope Dunn
The Challenges of Creating Democracies in the
Americas
Alex Roberto Hybel
The Challenges of
Creating Democracies
in the Americas
The United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela,
Costa Rica, and Guatemala
With Zander Weisman Mintz and Elise Hope Dunn

Alex Roberto Hybel
Marina del Rey, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-21232-2 ISBN 978-3-030-21233-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21233-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Marina Lohrbach / shutterstock.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For my wife Jan
and
my mother-in-law Barbara
Preface
This book may be my last one. The approach of my 74th birthday, accompa-
nied by the invasion of an unexpected and often destructive disease, engen-
dered a new awareness about my mortality. Regardless of whether I will have
the energy and drive to initiate and complete a book that I have been planning
for several years, I consider myself a very fortunate individual.
My move to the United States in 1965 opened doors to a future I could
never have imagined. After spending 19 turbulent years in Argentina, a
long stint in Vietnam in the late 1960s as an Army reporter and photog-
rapher, and the attainment of US citizenship, I finally found my passion.
My mother said it best in 1983 when she stated, “Who would have
dreamed that you, who barely made it through high school, cared about
little but swimming in the Rio de la Plata, and skipped classes regularly to
go to the movies, would eventually get a Ph.D. from Stanford University.”
I don’t have a clue as to what made that transformation possible, but I am
very grateful that it happened.
This project would have never been completed without the hard work
and tremendous patience of two of my Connecticut College students.
Zander Weisman Mintz spent months collecting data and writing about
Venezuela’s and Colombia’s distinct political experiences. Elise Hope
Dunn carried out the same task in her analysis of Mexico. Zander also
contributed to the analysis of the Mexican case at a later stage.
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful criti-
cisms and suggestions. I am also thankful to Connecticut College for
granting me multiple sabbaticals and providing the necessary financial
support via my endowed chair.
vii
viii PREFACE
As in the past, I am indebted to my mother-in-law, Barbara Peurifoy,

for her willingness to edit countless drafts and in the process teach me how
to write in English. Her kindness, thoughtfulness, and intelligence con-
tinue to motivate me. But when all is said and done, nothing that I have
written for the past 30-plus years would have been published had I not
had Jan’s constant support and love.
Final responsibility for the structure and content of every chapter in
this book and for whatever errors may remain is mine alone.
Marina del Rey, California Alex Roberto Hybel

2019
Contents
1 Introduction: The Nature of the Problem 1

Alex Roberto Hybel
2 Theories of State Creation and Democratization 17

Alex Roberto Hybel
3 The Challenges of State Creation and Democratization in

the United States 55
Alex Roberto Hybel

Mexico 91
Alex Roberto Hybel, Elise Hope Dunn and Zander Weisman
Mintz

Colombia and Venezuela137
Zander Weisman Mintz and Alex Roberto Hybel
ix
x Contents
6 State Creation and Democratization in Costa Rica and

Guatemala209
Alex Roberto Hybel
7 An Exploratory Theory of State Creation and

Democratization: The United States, Mexico, Venezuela,
Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala247
Alex Roberto Hybel
Index261
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Nature of the Problem
Introduction
This book’s principal objectives are threefold. The initial goal is to identify
the key challenges encountered by six political entities in the Americas as
each one tried to create its own state and form its own political regime.
The second objective is to postulate a set of time-related hypotheses that
capture the evolutionary processes of state creation and political-regime
formation. The third objective, which is closely related to the first two, is
to explain why some states in the Americas have been more effective than
others at creating a democratic regime. Since the arguments presented
here are built on the contention that past developments can affect the
state-creation and political-regime-formation processes, the analysis begins
with the identification of the main conditions each newly freed entity
inherited from the colonial period. An examination of the challenges each
group encountered as it sought to create a state and form a political regime
is followed by an evaluation of its effectiveness in addressing those tasks.
The six cases investigated in this book are the United States, Mexico,
Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.
Rationale
Democracy is in peril. Just a few decades ago, most Western political sci-
entists would not have voiced such a concern. They would have agreed
with the contention that democracy was the “only game in town.”1 They
© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. R. Hybel, The Challenges of Creating Democracies in the
Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21233-9_1
2 A. R. HYBEL
would have added that in places where democracy had been consolidated,
the return to authoritarianism had become an unacceptable alternative.2
Today, such a bold assertion would be questioned, and with very
good reasons.
In the 1920s, only a very small number of sovereign states had political
regimes that would have qualified as democratic. By 1990, that number
had increased to 69, and by 2012 to 117. Between the years 2005 and
2013, however, more countries experienced a decline in political rights
and civil liberties than an increase.3 Equally disturbing are the figures rep-
resenting the percentage of millennials in developed democracies who
actually support democracy. In the United States, the number of millenni-
als who believe it is “essential to live in a democracy” is only 30 percent.
In Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand the per-
centage is at 40 percent or lower. Ironically, the last four states are among
the 16 most developed democracies in the world. The numbers remain
troubling as the analysis focuses on those who believe that it is preferable
to have a “strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and
elections.” As could be expected, the percentage in places such as Russia,
Romania, Ukraine, and Turkey oscillates between the high 50s and the
high 70s. But sadly, though the percentages are much lower, they have
increased in the United States and Germany, as well as in Mexico,
Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay, four South American countries that seemed
to have finally embraced democracy some two to three decades ago.4
Is the world beginning to witness the steady downfall of democracy?
Will a modified form of authoritarianism arise, one in which autocratic
leaders limit the access to multiple sources of information in order to mold
the preferences of the public? The two questions beg another question:
Should democracy be desired?
Any serious attempt to answer the questions forces analysts to recog-
nize that despite democracy’s present allure among many people in vari-
ous corners of the world, for much of history political leaders and
philosophers did not view it favorably. Plato posited that oligarchies turned
into democracies when elites overindulged, became idle and wasteful, and
developed interests separate from those they ruled. Democracies did not
fare much better. Democracies became tyrannies when mob passion over-
took political reason and autocrats became the darling of the masses.
Machiavelli was no less critical. He argued that democracies catered to the
whims of the people, who too often accepted false ideas, misused their
resources, and failed to take into consideration potential threats until it
1 INTRODUCTION: THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 3
was too late. The founders of the United States also feared democracy.
John Adams warned that democracies never lasted long. Every democracy
throughout history self-destructed. James Madison was equally troubled.
But then Winston Churchill told us to keep in mind that no one “pretends
that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democ-
racy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that
have been tried from time to time.”5
Churchill’s implicit warning should not be taken lightly. Democracies
have not always enabled the wisest to lead, and too often, they have
become victims of the whims of uninformed populists. But it should not
be forgotten that though open and competitive political systems have not
always shielded democracies from grave errors, they have enhanced the
chances to correct those mistakes before they became unbearably costly.
Other political systems lack such safety measures. Moreover, no other sin-
gle type of political system has empowered the voices of those who, forced
to remain quiet throughout history, can finally be heard and counted.
The study of the conditions that either facilitate or obstruct the forma-
tion of democratic regimes is an old enterprise. Some investigators have
focused on single cases; others have conducted comparative studies in dif-
ferent regions. Based on their works, analysts have derived multiple argu-
ments, often in the form of theories. Because democracies have emerged
in every region of the world, and at different times in history, it would be
futile to attempt to develop a theoretical argument applicable to states
worldwide without first acquiring a clear understanding of the struggles
that states in particular regions endured at different point in time as they
strove to consolidate and legitimize their power and establish democratic
regimes. Hence the rationale for focusing solely on a few states in the
Americas.6
Methodology
Process-tracing procedure is an analytical tool utilized to draw “descrip-
tive and causal pieces from diagnostic pieces of evidence—often under-
stood as part of a temporal sequence of events or phenomena.”7 As David
Collier explains, process-tracing helps to: (a) identify and describe political
and social phenomena, (b) evaluate prior explanatory hypotheses, discover
new ones, and assess the new causal claims, (c) gain insights into causal
mechanisms, and (d) provide alternative ways of addressing challenging
problems such as reciprocal causation, spuriousness, and selection bias.8
4 A. R. HYBEL
Stated differently, the investigator tries to identify the intervening steps or

cause-and-effect links that might exist between the dependent, interven-
ing, and independent variables within a particular case, conduct the same
analyses in other related cases, and then compare the cause-and-effect
links across cases.9 In cases where a similar sequence does not emerge, the
investigator attempts to find out what might have caused the discrepancy.
Case Selection
The decision to study the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica,
Colombia, and Venezuela demands answers to two questions: Why com-
pare the state-creation and political-regime-formation processes of the
United States with those of Spanish American states when their histories
and cultures are so different? Why include in the analyses the experiences
of Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Colombia and not of
other Spanish American states?
The analysis presented here rejects the contention that the inclusion of
the United States in the comparison would elicit arguments of limited
theoretical value. The United States’ pathway to democracy was neither
predetermined nor intentional. Much of its evolution was defined by a
combination of domestic and external factors that compelled the US lead-
ers to steadily transform the nature of the state and of their political sys-
tem. As demonstrated in this study, though differences existed between
the ways the United States and the Spanish American colonies evolved
into states and formed their respective political regimes, many similarities
were also present. The identification of the differences and similarities
helps develop a better understanding of the types of obstacles and oppor-
tunities newly independent entities in the Americas encountered as they
created their respective states and political regimes and, as a result, helps
determine what enabled or prevented the development of democratic
regimes. In short, despite the fact that the founders of the United States
feared democracy, unintentionally they helped set up its foundation, which
in turn served in a number of cases as a model for the Spanish American
leaders who were determined to create their own sovereign states and
distinct political regimes after they gained independence from Spain.
With regard to the second question, it is evident that the comparison of
cases other than Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Colombia
would help elicit valuable explanatory hypotheses.10 In a separate book,
the state-creation and political-regime-formation experiences of the
United States are compared with those of Argentina, Chile, and Peru.
Needless to say, there are many other Spanish American cases that could
also be studied, and this analyst hopes that other investigators will assume
such responsibility and compare their conclusions with those arrived at in
this volume and its companion.
There are several distinct rationales for selecting Mexico, Venezuela,
Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. Mexico is one of Spanish America’s
most idiosyncratic states. Because of its richness and vastness, and its sig-
nificance to Spain for much of its colonial period, Mexico stood singularly
apart from the other Spanish American colonies. For much of the nine-
teenth century, the same type of domestic political turmoil that afflicted
other Latin American entities plagued Mexico. However, despite this simi-
larity, none of the other Spanish American states was forced to surrender
large parcels of its territory to the United States, had its own capital threat-
ened by the US military forces, or was governed for a brief period by a
European political figure who assumed the title of emperor.11 In addition,
Mexico, from the late 1920s until 2000, was the only Spanish American
state that did not experience a military coup; was ruled by a single political
party despite having relatively open elections; and ultimately managed to
partially overcome its past and give rise to a regime that, notwithstanding
its multiple deficiencies, is democratic. To explain these differences, it is
important to examine what made Mexico’s political history so unique.
What was it about Mexico that led it to undergo such a distinctive trans-
formation? Why did a state that experienced many of the same conditions
generated by colonialism in other colonies throughout Spanish America,
and that suffered many of the same problems the other newly freed states
encountered during the nineteenth century, ultimately moved along a dif-
ferent political path in the twentieth century?
The comparative analysis of Colombia and Venezuela builds on the con-
clusions arrived at in the Mexican study. The investigation is guided by this
question: Why would Colombia ultimately be markedly more successful
than Venezuela at creating the state and forming a quasi-democratic
regime, when the two shared common borders, achieved independence at
almost the same time, and were members of the same confederation during
their immediate years after independence? The question becomes substan-
tially more intriguing when one considers that for some three decades after
1959, Venezuela was viewed by many researchers as one of the few Spanish
American states that had succeeded at creating a stable democracy, while
during the same period Colombia’s political regime was being challenged
6 A. R. HYBEL
by the rise of four major drug-trafficking cartels and several revolutionary

movements. And yet, as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first,
a dramatic turnaround took place. Venezuela’s democracy was assailed by a
set of leaders determined to transform its economic system and to gain and
retain full political control, while Colombia moved steadily to eliminate the
conditions that had given rise to the drug cartels and revolutionary move-
ments during the previous decades. Though Colombia is still afflicted by
many of its earlier problems and remains a flawed democracy, its political
system is substantially more open and more competitive than Venezuela’s.
The argument repeats itself when their respective levels of corruption are
assessed. Venezuela today is one of the most corrupt states in the world,
while Colombia, though not a model of integrity, is markedly less corrupt
than its regional counterpart. Moreover, Venezuela was recently ranked as
one of the world’s most violent countries, while Colombia has of late man-
aged to reduce the violence that plagued it in decades past. In sum, step-
by-step historical analyses of the emergence of both states and of their
political regimes reveal the causal conditions that engendered critical
changes at different points in time, and help explain why Colombia, despite
its troubled past in the later part of the twentieth century, today has a more
open and competitive political regime than Venezuela.
At first light, the inclusion of Guatemala and Costa Rica may seem
unjustified. The territorial and population sizes of each country are measur-
ably smaller than those already mentioned. There are at least three reasons
why both states should be included in the analysis. First, it is important to
ascertain whether the challenges of creating states and political regimes
encountered by Central American states differed substantially from those
encountered by the other states. Second, though Guatemala and Costa
Rica do not share common borders, geographically they are not far from
one another, and from 1823 until 1840, both were part of the Federal
Republic of Central America. And third, today Costa Rica is considered to be
the second most developed democracy in Spanish America—after Uruguay,
while Guatemala is ranked markedly lower than the other political regimes
investigated here, but ahead of Venezuela. Hence, the questions: Why did
two states that were colonized by the Spaniards, attained independence at
nearly the same time and were part of the same confederation after inde-
pendence, evolve so differently? Or more to the point, why did Costa Rica’s
inhabitants (Ticos) manage to create one of Spanish America’s most devel-
oped democracies, while Guatemalans e stablished one of Spanish America’s
most undemocratic and corrupt political regimes?
A few final points about the selection of cases: Brazil is Latin America’s
biggest country, has the largest population, economy, and military force,
and houses one of the most populated democracies in the world. Those
characteristics alone would justify its inclusion in the analysis. Two reasons
dictate its exclusion. First, this analyst does not possess the knowledge about
Brazil needed to conduct a meaningful study. Second, the intent through-
out the book is to conduct a comparative analysis of the United States and
Spanish American states, not of the United States and Latin American states.
This analyst recognizes that the comparison of Brazil’s state-creation and
political-regime-formation experiences with a number of Spanish American
states, and possibly the United States, would bring to light some valuable
arguments, but such an analysis is beyond the scope of this study.
To sum up, the six cases investigated throughout this book share both
similarities and differences in the creation of their respective states and
political regimes. The analysis of how each state and its political regime
evolved through time helps reveal possible causal relationships between
the conditions that either facilitated or obstructed the construction of
stable states and democratic political regimes. It is imperative to keep in
mind that the relationships between state creation and regime formation,
though distinct, are generally dependent on one another. As the study
shows, many states that initially were assumed to have attained stability, in
fact, had not; and political regimes that early on were deemed to be demo-
cratic often became nondemocratic. To understand what brought such
changes, it is essential to study the interconnections between the creation
of the state and the formation of its political regime. Stated differently,
because setbacks in attaining state stability and achieving democracy were
not uncommon, investigators are compelled to expose the conditions that
brought about changes in one or the other process, or in both, at specific
points in time, and determine how those conditions differed when some
of those same entities were finally able to create stable states and form last-
ing democratic regimes.
Structure of the Book

Chapter 2 is both conceptual and theoretical. An investigation of democ-
ratization and the conditions that facilitate, delay, or obstruct the process
of liberalization has to be built on a set of well-defined concepts. Since
part of the argument presented here is constructed on the contention that
today’s democracies cannot emerge in failed states, the first task is to
8 A. R. HYBEL
determine what constitutes a state, and then to discuss alternative theories

of state creation and their possible applicability to the state-building pro-
cess in the Americas.
Disagreements regarding the definition of democracy persist. Charles
Tilly notes that analysts choose among four types of definitions: constitu-
tional, substantive, procedural, and process-oriented.12 Tilly’s analysis
presents a rationale for combining the procedural and process-oriented
methods in the definition. Because there are multiple theories of democ-
ratization, the first chapter ends with a summary and analysis of the most
important ones.
The empirical cases are built on axioms generally accepted by students
of democracy. They are:
Axiom 1: Democracies do not emerge in stateless territories or in states

that have failed to consolidate and legitimize their power.
Axiom 2: States that have existed for extended periods, and whose power
and legitimacy may seem to have been consolidated, may lose some or
all of both conditions.
Axiom 3: Though the consolidation and legitimization of a state’s power
is a necessary condition for the creation of a stable democracy, it is not
a sufficient one; other factors can derail the democratization process.
Axiom 4: None of today’s well-established Western democracies that
began to create representative governments in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries did so with the intent of forming democratic regimes.
Axiom 5: Conditions in the international arena can either weaken or
strengthen the drive to create democratic regimes.
The study of each country’s processes of state creation and political-

regime formation is conducted from the same vantage point. Initially, the
focus is on each colony’s pre-colonial conditions. Each colony’s topogra-
phy and natural resources are described, along with the political, eco-
nomic, and social systems in which its native inhabitants lived. Consideration
is given to the size of the native population, how extensively various native
groups interacted, and whether any of the existing societies had a hierar-
chical structure. In addition, attention is paid to the region’s abundance
or lack of minerals such as gold and silver, and the kinds of crops grown or
that could be grown. Also discussed are the colonizers’ general values,
beliefs, and ideas; the way they tried to transform the human and natural
conditions they encountered in the colonies; and the level of opposition
they faced. This portion of the analysis is completed with a description of

each colony’s political, economic, and social structure, and with an evalu-
ation of the types of tensions that afflicted each colony as the drive for
independence was about to begin.
Independence arrived differently in the various colonies. The third sec-
tion identifies the core conditions that prompted the drive for indepen-
dence and the obstacles each colony encountered. Since commitment to
independence within each colony was not universal, the reasons for such
divisions are discussed, along with the types of tensions the internal strug-
gles generated.
The hardships each colony confronted as it became independent
affected the early stages of its state-creation process. Because the newly
independent entities inherited different sets of problems from their colo-
nial past, some were more effective than others at setting up the founda-
tion of a new state. During this portion of the analysis, an attempt is made
to identify the most cumbersome obstacles each prospective state encoun-
tered, explain how effective its leaders were at addressing those obstacles,
and examine why some states consolidated their power and gained legiti-
macy sooner than others.
The processes of state creation and regime formation did not evolve
separately. As the political elites in each newly freed state sought to con-
solidate and legitimize the power of the state, they also tried to create a
political regime. The problems they faced varied. This part of the empirical
analysis identifies and discusses the main factors that affected the state-
creation and regime-formation processes, and examines the types of posi-
tive and negative effects that developments in one process had on the
other. Specifically, the intent of this section is to:
1. Describe the processes of state creation and of regime formation for

each state after it had attained independence.
2. Identify the elements that generated either positive or negative
changes in the processes of state creation and regime formation
within each state.
3. Discuss the tensions such changes engendered.
4. Isolate the conditions that facilitated the initial development of
quasi-democratic regimes and, in certain instances, the circum-
stances that provoked their downfall.
5. Explain why some of today’s states have been more effective at cre-
ating stable democracies than others.
10 A. R. HYBEL
Each empirical case closes with a two-part examination. In the first part,
the factors that either served democratization well or impeded its develop-
ment are identified. The contents of the analyses can vary substantially
from case to case. Because this study uses cases as building blocks and as a
way of assessing the explanatory value of earlier conclusions, some analyses
are more detailed and more complex than others. The second part exam-
ines the obstacles to further democratization and compares those conclu-
sions with the ones derived in the previous cases.
The empirical cases are arrayed in a specific order. Chapter 3 explains
the creation of the United States as a state actor and the development of
its political regime. Mexico is a unique case, and thus also merits its own
separate chapter. Its analysis is conducted in Chap. 4. Chapter 5 focuses on
Colombia and Venezuela’s distinct experiences and presents several
hypotheses. Chapter 6 focuses on the state-creation and political-regime-
formation processes of Guatemala and Costa Rica, and also posits a small
set of hypotheses designed to explain their distinct experiences. Chapter 7
brings the various arguments together in the form of revised hypotheses.
To fulfill the objectives identified at the start of the Introduction, it is
necessary to address a set of questions:
1. What compelled the colonizers to colonize?

2. What led the new inhabitants of the colonies to seek independence?
3. Why were the leaders of some colonies more inclined to seek inde-
pendence than those of the other colonies?
4. What conditions helped or mired the consolidation and legitimiza-
tion of the power of the state?
5. What conditions helped or mired the formation of stable demo-
cratic regimes?
This is not the place to bring to the fore the multiple hypotheses pos-
tulated in the conclusion, but the presentation of a summary version of
the arguments derived from them is justified.
First, the empirical examinations establish that the values, beliefs, and
ideas the British and Spanish colonizers brought to the Americas influ-
enced greatly their approaches to colonization—approaches that after
independence affected significantly their processes of state creation and
political regime formation.
Second, the analyses demonstrate that a region’s topography, natural
resources, and characteristics of the indigenous population also played a
critical role in shaping the colonization processes of the Americas by the

Spaniards and the British. Notwithstanding the similar values, beliefs, and
ideas the settlers of the 13 North American colonies brought with them,
they encountered various natural and human environments, and as they
adapted to them, they started to generate different economies. The differ-
ent economies, in turn, helped shape their political and social structures.
By the time the leaders of colonies agreed to seek independence, the
northern and southern colonies had developed different economies and
social norms that would generate deeper roots as each sought to construct
a state and a political regime. The same type of argument applies to the
Spanish colonization of the Americas. Though the Spaniards were also
guided by their own common set of values, beliefs, and ideas during the
early stages of colonization, the type of terrain, the kind and scope of the
natural resources, and the size and attributes of the indigenous population
they encountered had profound effects on how they went about coloniz-
ing a region.
In both the British and the Spanish American cases, a region’s eco-
nomic significance helped determine the size of the military—the greater
a region’s economic importance, the greater the size of the military
deployed by the colonial power. However, it is at this juncture that the
processes began to differ markedly, not only between the British and the
Spanish colonizers but also among members of the latter group. Though
a great number of the British colonizers were deeply religious and devel-
oped strict rules of social behavior, the structures of control they imposed
on themselves were markedly less hierarchical than those created by the
Catholic Church. In Spanish America the relationship between the two
sets of factors was relatively simple—the greater a region’s wealth and size
of its indigenous population, the larger the size of the armed forces
deployed by the Spanish monarchy and the number of clerics posted by
the Catholic Church.
Third, this study concurs with analysts who have noted that though
both the British and Spanish colonizers traversed the Atlantic in search of
a more prosperous material life, the role religion played in their lives dif-
fered measurably. A vast number of British colonizers emigrated in order
to be able to practice their own faith freely. Though anti-Catholicism was
predominant among the various Protestant sects that settled in the North
American colonies, and though many of them demanded the strict enforce-
ment of their religious doctrine, its practice was not controlled by an all-
powerful centralized church. The lives of the Spaniards and their
12 A. R. HYBEL
progenitors in the Americas were bounded by a religious construct that

was as severe and hierarchical as the one they had left behind in their
homeland. This difference between the Spanish American and the British
American colonies are reflected, in part, in their state-creation and political-
regime-formation processes.
The fourth finding is related to Stein Rokkan’s and Charles Tilly’s sepa-
rate analyses of state creation in Europe. Both analysts stress that the first
step in the state-construction process entails generating an agreement
between competing elites. In Spanish America, a small number of factors
determined the likelihood that rival elites would agree on how to structure
the new state. Typically, the challenge they faced was determining whether
to create a federal or a unitary state. Leaders of a state where regional divi-
sions had been substantial had a much harder time agreeing on whether to
create a federal or a unitary state than leaders of a state where regional
divisions had been minor or nonexistent. The Catholic Church com-
pounded the problem in cases in which critical divisions existed between
those who aspired to create a unitary state and those who advocated form-
ing a federal one. In those situations, advocates of a unitary form invari-
ably wanted the Catholic Church to continue the vital role it had played
during the colonial period, while supporters of a federalist arrangement
argued that it should not. The presence or absence of such reinforcing
cleavages explains why some Spanish American entities found the task of
creating the state and its political regime less or more cumbersome
than others.13
The fifth finding is closely related to the fourth one. As other scholars
have noted, military force has been one of the most commonly used and
effective means for creating a state and forming its regime. Its constant
use, however, also had a negative effect—the longer political leaders relied
on martial means to address critical domestic political problems, the lon-
ger it took them to consolidate and legitimize the power of the state. For
much of the nineteenth century, newly empowered Spanish American
political leaders used their own militias to address political, social, and
economic differences. The stronger the reinforcing cleavages, the longer
they relied on martial means. During that period, political rivals advocated
economic growth and created their own distinct political parties. Economic
growth and the emergence of rival political parties did not bring a reduc-
tion in violence; rivals continued to use force in an attempt to impose their
will and vision on others.
The sixth argument explains the connections between economic
growth, the rise of non-status quo parties, and military activity. Every
newly created state in the Americas underwent an economic transforma-

tion. Differences on how to generate economic growth and development
divided political leaders. Economic growth was accompanied by demands
that voting restrictions be reduced or eliminated, by the emergence of
political parties with distinct political, economic, and social agendas, and
by the increase in actual political participation. As those changes ensued,
the military evolved; but it evolved differently depending on the state. In
the United States, the military did not seek to dictate the country’s politi-
cal path. Its involvement during the Civil War was the exception. On the
other hand, throughout much of the twentieth century, the armed forces
continued to intervene in the political affairs of Guatemala, Venezuela,
and Colombia either to prevent the political participation of unacceptable
political leaders and/or parties or to remove those who upon assuming
power generated too much uncertainty or threatened to challenge the
status quo. The behavior of Mexico’s military was different from Costa
Rica’s. In the case of Mexico, the military agreed to diminish measurably
its political role after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had
incorporated it into one of its political branches. In the case of Costa Rica,
the winner of the 1948 Civil War put an end to the role of the military.
This decision helped transform Costa Rica into a democracy.
The seventh inference brings to light the critical but very different
effects the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the end
of the Cold War had on the United States and a substantial number of
Spanish American states. Participation by African Americans in the Second
World War and the Korean War helped strengthen their argument that
they merited equal rights. Though other factors also contributed, the wars
enhanced the status of African Americans and reduced, but did not
eliminate, the racism that had permeated the American political system
since its conception. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 were reaffirmations of the equal status deserved by African
Americans and people in general, regardless of gender, race, or religion.
In their introduction to their edited volume, Larry Diamond, Jonathan
Hartlyn, and Juan Linz initially state that studies have provided little sup-
port for the view that the source of Latin America’s political turmoil and
democratic failures was primarily external. Subsequently, however, they
acknowledge that throughout history, international factors have had an
impact, sometimes crucial, on the development of Spanish American dem-
ocratic regimes. Their argument needs to be placed in a time framework.
The end of the Second World War brought to the fore the Cold War. The
net impact of the Cold War on Spanish American states was negative. The
14 A. R. HYBEL
fear of communist takeovers emboldened the military throughout Spanish

America, often with the backing of the United States, to intervene if they
suspected that a communist takeover was likely. Thus, between the early
1960s and middle 1980s, military regimes became the norm in several
Spanish American states and prevented or delayed the creation of demo-
cratic regimes.
Two more arguments must be considered. Military regimes through-
out Spanish America failed to cure their countries’ economic ills. With the
end of the Cold War and communism no longer being perceived as a criti-
cal threat, attempts to create democratic regimes throughout Spanish
America gained momentum. The so-called third wave of democratization,
however, was not caused primarily by deep public commitments to creat-
ing political systems governed by democratic norms and rules. Rather, it
was born largely out of discontent with the failure by military regimes to
solve the grave economic problems of the Spanish American states.
No longer able to justify their domestic political involvement, military
regimes gave in to domestic and international pressures to authorize the
establishment of democratic governance. The reduction in the domestic
political role played by military regimes, however, did not always give way
to the creation of effective democratic systems. Failures by a few embry-
onic democracies to resolve the economic problems that had afflicted ear-
lier military regimes led to the rise of authoritarian populist regimes. The
Hugo Chávez phenomenon in Venezuela spread rapidly into Nicaragua,
Bolivia, and temporarily Ecuador and Argentina. In every instance, the
common claim by the emerging authoritarian leaders and their closest
allies was that they possessed the capacity and knowledge to build equitable
and just socioeconomic systems. In order to strengthen the power and
authority of the executive power, such leaders and their closest allies typi-
cally relied on democratic instruments to diminish the capabilities of
potential adversaries to pose viable political challenges. The end result has
been the creation of populist authoritarian regimes.
Notes
1. Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracy,”
Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, Number 2, April 1996: 14–33.
2. See Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation,”
Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January 2017): 5–16.
3. See Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2014, https://freedomhouse.

org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2014.
4. Foa and Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation.” See also, “Democracy
Index 2016: Revenge of the ‘deplorables’,” The Economist Intelligence
Unit, January 25, 2017.
5. Winston Churchill, Churchill by Himself, edited by Richard Langworth
(New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 574. Churchill did not originate the
comment, according to Langworth, he was quoting someone else.
6. See Alex Roberto Hybel, The Making of Flawed Democracies in the
Americas: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Argentina, Chile
and Peru. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
7. David Collier, “Understanding Process Tracing,” in Political Science and
Politics, 44 (No. 4), 2011: 823–830.
8. Ibid, 823–830.
9. See Alex Roberto Hybel, The Logic of Surprise in International Conflict
(Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1986), 18. See also Hybel’s
endnote 57, 23.
10. See Hybel, The Making of Flawed Democracies in the Americas.
11. In late 1903, Panama proclaimed its independence from Colombia and
granted rights to the United States “as if it were sovereign” to a zone
where the United States built a canal, administered it, fortified it, and
defended it until the late 1970s. Other states did lose territory, but the
United States was not the actor that provoked their loss. Puerto Rico was
appropriate by the United States during the Spanish American war in the
late nineteenth century, but prior to that time Puerto Rico had not existed
as an independent state.
12. Charles Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
7–11.
13. See Chaps. 2 and 5 in Hybel, The Making of Flawed Democracies in the
Americas: The United States, Chile, Argentina, and Peru.
Bibliography
Collier, Simon. 1967. Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence: 1808–1833.
Cambridge University Press. Print.
Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W. W. Norton and
Company. Print.
Diamond, Larry, Jonathan Hartlyn, and Juan J. Linz. 1999. Introduction: Politics
Society, and Democracy in Latin America. In Democracy in Developing
Countries, ed. Larry Diamond, Jonathan Hartlyn, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour
Martin Lipset. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers.
16 A. R. HYBEL
Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Yascha Mounk. 2017. The Signs of Deconsolidation.
Journal of Democracy 28 (1): 5–15. Print.
Freedom House. 2017. Freedom in the World, 2014. Web. January 24.
Hybel, Alex Roberto. 1986. The Logic of Surprise in International Conflict.
Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company. Print.
———. 2019. The Making of Flawed Democracies in the Americas – the United
States. Chile, Argentina; Peru, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
Langworth, Richard. 2008. Churchill by Himself. New York: Public Affairs. Print.
Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Toward Consolidated Democracy. Journal
of Democracy 7 (2). Print.
CHAPTER 2
Theories of State Creation

and Democratization
Introduction
This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part discusses and evalu-
ates alternative definitions of the state and theories of state creation. The
second one examines and assesses different conceptualizations of democ-
racy and theories of democratization.
The State
Charles Tilly proposes that an organization that controls the population
occupying a defined territory is a state insofar as it is characterized by the
following conditions:1
1. It is differentiated from other organizations in the same territory.

2. It is autonomous.
3. It is centralized.
4. Its divisions are formally coordinated with one another.
Jorge Dominguez’s version of the state differs somewhat from Tilly’s.

Dominguez defines the state as “a set of institutions with claim to legiti-
mate monopoly of force over a certain territory and an ability to exercise
it.”2 By asserting that a state is a set of institutions with claim to the legiti-
mate monopoly of force, Dominguez concurs with Tilly that such institu-
tions are different from other organizations in the same territory, are
© The Author(s) 2020 17

A. R. Hybel, The Challenges of Creating Democracies in the
Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21233-9_2
18 A. R. HYBEL
autonomous, and are either centralized or divided but formally coordi-

nated. Tilly, however, does not specify the way the state controls the popu-
lation, while Dominguez emphasizes that such control is a function of the
state’s claim to the monopoly of force.3 Both Tilly and Dominguez stipu-
late that for an entity to be a state, it must be sovereign.
Eric Nordlinger challenges the tendency to define the state in the con-
text of institutions. Institutions, he contends, do not engage in authorita-
tive action; only individuals do. Nordlinger’s alternative is to define the
state as “all those individuals who occupy offices that authorize them, and
them alone, to make and apply decisions that are binding upon any and all
parts of a territorially circumscribed population. The state is made up of,
and limited to, those individuals who are endowed with society-wide deci-
sion-making powers.”4
Nordlinger’s challenge and proposed alternative have limited value.
First, his definition does not escape the problem he attributes to those
who place the emphasis on the legitimate monopoly of power. States differ
and change in terms of how much authority their representatives have to
make decisions, and how binding their decisions are. Second, the concept
of legitimacy, which is closely linked to sovereignty, pertains to a system of
relations, and some states are not more sovereign or legitimate than oth-
ers; an entity is not a state if it is not legitimate or sovereign. Third,
although Nordlinger is correct in stipulating that individuals, not institu-
tions, engage in authoritative actions, the authority of such actions resides
not with the individuals but with the institutions. The authority of the
decision-maker, in other words, is a function of the authority of the insti-
tution in which she or he works. And finally, by placing the emphasis on
individuals rather than institutions, Nordlinger is unintentionally con-
tending that every time a new group replaces a core group of individuals,
the state changes. Obviously, that would not always be the case.
In 1758, Eric Vattel contended that sovereignty helps maintain the
relationship between the “international community and the preservation
of the separate existence of its parts.” It does so by legitimizing the right
of only one actor to claim possession and control over a certain territory
and its population, and by setting up a system of relations among the enti-
ties that make up the international system.5 Internally, the state must be
able to claim supremacy over all other institutions within a particular ter-
ritory and population. Externally, it must be able to assert its indepen-
dence from outside authorities.6 In short, the state refers to an organization,
or set of institutions, that is guided by specialized personnel who control
2 THEORIES OF STATE CREATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION 19
a consolidated territory and its population, and that is recognized as the

ultimate sovereign authority by other organizations operating in the same
territory and by the agents of other states.7
Students of states in the developing world have proposed the inclusion
of two additional categories: failed and collapsed states. A failed state is
one that is “deeply conflicted, dangerous, and contested bitterly by war-
ring factions.” The state cannot control its borders—it lacks authority over
sections of its territory.8 A collapsed state is an extreme version of a failed
state. A collapsed state displays a vacuum of authority in which security is
equated with the rule of the strong, and political goods are obtained
through private or ad hoc means.9
It has been argued that the modern state is not an entirely autonomous
actor and that its strength is not static. Timothy Mitchell writes that the
“boundary between the state and society is elusive, porous, and mobile.”10
Theodore Lowi emphasizes that “there is no single dimension of strength,
and there is no single dimension of autonomy.”11 Theda Skocpol reminds
analysts that state autonomy “is not a fixed structural feature of any gov-
ernmental system. It can come and go.”12 This study is attentive to the
above warnings.
Theories of State Creation

Few analysts have paid more attention to the issue of state formation than
Tilly and Stein Rokkan. Their initial focus was the process of state creation
throughout Europe. Their general argument has been that entities north
and west of the city belt in the middle of Europe were markedly more suc-
cessful at forging centralized states earlier than the territories in the center
of Europe, which remained fragmented until the nineteenth century.
Their capacity to create centralized states depended on relative ethnic,
religious, and language homogeneity, as well as access to extractable
resources. Control over resources could not be attained without the pres-
ence of a powerful army.
According to Tilly, the ability of a European entity to form a state was
determined by whether it possessed the following advantages:13
1. Access to extractable resources;

2. Relative invulnerability to military attacks or conquests for signifi-
cant periods;
3. Competent political leaders;
20 A. R. HYBEL
4. Powerful army and success in wars;

5. Homogeneous population;
6. Capacity to design a strong coalition with the major segments of the
landed elites; and
7. Advantageous position within the international system
Tilly presents two arguments. A culturally divided society will be less

willing to accept the authority of the state than a culturally homogeneous
one. European actors that took firm steps to homogenize the population
by imposing a state religion, expelling minorities, institutionalizing a
national language, and standardizing education, were more successful at
creating stable and unified states than those that tolerated diversity.14 He
also notes that the continuous, aggressive competition for trade and terri-
tory among changing European states of unequal size made war a driving
force. To fight a war, a political entity had to build an effective political
machine. If the political actor was militarily successful, it would have polit-
ical institutions capable of delivering revenues for other purposes and
would possess an army with the power to enforce the government’s will
over stiff resistance.15 The centralized state apparatus typically started in
one or more fairly well-populated cities. Urban ruling classes relied on
capital to “extend their influence through the urban hinterland and across
far-flung trading networks.”16
Rokkan’s argument parallels Tilly’s. State-building, explains Rokkan,
can be divided into four phases. The first step entails “a period of political,
economic, and cultural unification at the elite level: a series of bargains are
struck and a variety of cultural bonds are established across networks of
local power-holders and a number of institutions are built for the extrac-
tion of resources for common defense, for the maintenance of internal
order and the adjudication of disputes, for the protection of established
rights and privileges and for the elementary infrastructure requirements of
the economy and the polity.”17 During the second phase, the center creates
new channels of contact with the peripheries in order to induce the popu-
lation to identify more closely with the political system. In the third phase,
the level of participation of the masses increases through the establishment
of privileges of opposition, the creation of political parties, and the exten-
sion of the electorate. In the final phase, the state experiences growth in
the agencies of redistribution.18
Rokkan then isolates the conditions that affected the ability of European
actors to create the state. First, the only efforts of aggressive state-building
took place on the fringes of economic Europe. “In the smaller of these
peripheral nation-states, the typical sequence was one of gradual build-up
at the ethnic center, rapid imperial expansion, [and] consolidation within
a more homogeneous territory.”19 Second, democracy in Europe began to
take form only after political, economic, and cultural unification at the
elite level had been attained and channels of contact between the center
and the periphery had been established.
The drive to form a nation requires building a national identity, unify-
ing administrations, and roping in territories that were accustomed to
high levels of autonomy and had resisted centralization.20 Before the era of
mass politics, the transition from state-building to nation-building, and
then to the development of unified cultures, depended greatly on three
factors. States that underwent the Protestant Reformation were markedly
more successful than states that did not experience such change. States
that were not deeply divided along linguistic and ethnic lines were also
more effective.21
Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan address questions similar to those just
articulated. They first differentiate the state from the nation. The nation
lacks autonomy, agents, or rule. Its only resources are derived from the
psychological identity developed by leaders and the people within a state.22
Based on this differentiation, they ask: “Under what empirical conditions
are the logics of state policies aimed at nation-building congruent with
those aimed at crafting democracy?” Conflicts, they explain, are reduced
“when almost all of the residents of a state identify with one subjective
idea of the nation, and when that nation is virtually coextensive with the
state. These conditions are met only if there is no significant irredenta
outside the state’s boundaries, if there is only one nation existing (or
awakened) in the state, and if there is little cultural diversity within the
state.”23 When such conditions are present, governmental leaders can pur-
sue democratization and nation-state policies at the same time.
The United States did not become a state overnight. In Saskia Sassen’s
words, a powerful and legitimate state “evolved out of a loose confedera-
tion—eventually a federation—with extensive decentralized powers resid-
ing at local levels, with a culture of local self-government, and with strong
participatory democracy.”24 An examination of existing studies of the
United States’ state-creation experience, however, reveals that the com-
mon shortcomings they all share are failures to explain the actual evolu-
tion of the United States as a state and the reasons it evolved in the
manner it did.
22 A. R. HYBEL
Samuel Huntington proposes that there are three patterns of political

modernizations: Continental, British, and American. There is no need at
this stage to discuss the differences and similarities between the three. For
the moment, all that is required is to explicate the way the American pat-
tern differed from the other two, but principally from the British. In the
seventeenth century, notes Huntington, the state replaced fundamental
law as the source of political authority, and within each state, a single
authority replaced the many sources of authority that had existed during
the feudal era. In the newly independent American states, its people con-
tinued to adhere to fundamental law as the source of authority for human
actions and as an authoritative restraint on human behavior. Sovereignty
was never concentrated in a single institution or individual. Instead, it was
dispersed throughout society and among many political bodies.25 The dis-
tinctions identified by Huntington are helpful as one tries to understand
the initial stages of the state-creation process in the United States. But as
he also notes, it was not the intent of his discourse to explain the transi-
tions the United States experienced as a state, and the types of effects such
transitions had on the US polity.
According to Stephen Skowronek, American leaders tried to create a
state with a structure that would differ measurably from the type of frame-
work the arising European entities were designing. Skowronek concurs
with Alexis de Tocqueville, Marx, and Hegel, all of whom, in their own
distinct ways, argued that the United States was the great anomaly among
Western states.26 Hans Daalder does not necessarily challenge the conclu-
sions arrived at by the aforementioned scholars, but emphasizes that
though the United States sought to create a different type of state system,
ultimately it is an offshoot “of English political traditions, whittling down
the royal powers of colonial days in favor of elected chief executives at
federal and state levels, giving greater weight to representative principles,
creating institutional checks and balances both in central institutions and
in the federal makeup of the new polity, and providing a greater role for
popular control and election.”27
Though Skowronek’s work is not designed to explain the evolution of
the United States as a state, his work merits careful consideration.28 The
sovereignty of the United States, he writes, was embodied in 13 separate
state legislatures. This kind of power distribution left government “at the
mercy of fast-changing popular sentiments.” Aware of the destabilizing
effects of such a loose arrangement, those who met in Philadelphia in
1787 tried to create a state organization that would enable a central
government to control the territory and would distribute power between

three branches that would share it equally at the national level.
“Constitutional federalism,” he writes, “inhibited the penetration of cen-
tral power throughout the nation by ensuring the integrity of these states,
each with its own institutional organization, legal code, and law enforce-
ment apparatus.”29 By the start of the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, political and economic leaders, along with members of the intellectual
elite, recognized that they had to readjust the organization of the state.
They concluded that in order to deal with the forces of industrialization,
Washington had to expand the administrative capacities of the central
state. The modernization of the state did not involve making it more effi-
cient—instead, it entailed “building a qualitatively different state.”30
A number of students have sought to explain the conditions that facili-
tated and obstructed the process of state creation throughout Latin
America. According to Frank Safford, the literature on state-building in
Spanish America can be divided into three categories. One category
stresses the significance of Spanish American culture, the second contends
that structural economic problems were the principal influences, and a
third emphasizes the conflicting ideologies and the fear of the potential
power of the lower classes.31 As an alternative, Safford proposes a more
complex argument. He contends that a combination of seven factors
enabled or inhibited state development in Spanish America during the
nineteenth century. Independently, they are: (i) economic geography,
including topography, resources, and relative economic integration; (ii)
political geography, including geographic and transportation conditions
affecting political integration; (iii) relative economic and fiscal strength;
(iv) relative public acceptance of the political systems, regardless of whether
it was framed in the constitution or not; (v) the extent to which the civilian
authorities control the military; (vi) the role of the Catholic Church; and
(vii) the relative vulnerability of the evolving state to external pressure or
attack.32 The significance of those factors, adds Safford, varied from state
to state, as did the way they were combined.
In a comparative analysis of five Latin American states, Fernando
López-Alves postulates several additional arguments. He proposes that
state formation throughout Latin America has been defined as a pro-
cess whereby elites committed to creating states overcame deeply seated
opposition from their populations and vanquished regional political
leaders.33 The feudal characteristics of rural life in Argentina, Uruguay,
and Colombia, he adds, are poor predictors of state-making, and
24 A. R. HYBEL
mode-of-productions arguments regarding state creation in Latin America

are not particularly relevant. Though he acknowledges the significance of
domestic structural elements, he stresses that the inclusion of war and
conflict-resolution factors enhances measurably the predictive quality of a
theory of state creation. “Conflict and concomitant collective action,” he
explains, “determined access to the means of production, altered property
relations, created new classes, and displaced old monopolies and land and
trade.” He adds that the ability of the state to recruit members of the
nobility and secure their support during wars affected the timing and char-
acter of class alliances and the development of state bureaucracies.
Based on the above generalizations, López-Alves advances several
hypotheses that can be summarized as follows:
1. Failure on the part of a rebellious upper class to coalesce against the

central power accelerated power centralization.
2. When the landed gentry were defeated in their own domains, the
process of centralizing power took place faster.
3. When wars ensued within the area controlled by the central govern-
ment and territory nearby, the process of power centralization pro-
ceeded at a slow pace. If battles were fought far away, political
leaders were able to invest more resources in the construction of a
central army, which in turn strengthened the elites’ capacity to con-
solidate the power and authority of the state.34
The Resource Curse or Paradox of Plenty Theory has been designed to

explain the process of state creation in states with extensive mineral wealth.
According to the theory, states rich in minerals and fuel are predisposed to
generate high levels of corruption, ineffective governance, and violence.35
Terry Karl uses elements of the theory to explain the type of impact
Venezuela’s dependence on oil revenues had on its state capacity.
Venezuela’s heavy reliance on petrodollars, she notes, expanded the state’s
jurisdiction and weakened its authority as other extractive capabilities
withered. As a result, when faced with competing pressures, state officials,
accustomed to relying on the progressive use of public spending as a sub-
stitute for statecraft, weakened the state’s capacity to address problems.36
The first thing that becomes evident from the brief discussion is that
analysts are not in agreement as to which are the leading factors that help
explicate the state-creation processes throughout Latin America. For
Safford, the most important ones for each country are: political and
economic geography; economic and fiscal strength; public acceptance of

the political systems; extent to which the civilian authorities control the
military; the role played by the Catholic Church; and vulnerability to
external pressure or attack. For López-Alves, the leading causes are con-
flict and concomitant collective action. Together they determined access
to the means of production, altered property relations, created new classes,
and displaced old land and trade monopolies. Related to the issue of con-
flict was whether those striving to create the state and consolidate its
power were able to recruit members of the nobility and secure their sup-
port during wars. Their level of success affected the timing and character
of class alliances and the development of state bureaucracies. In related
arguments, López-Alves proposes that the process of centralizing the
power of the state was less cumbersome when the members of the rebel-
lious upper class were unable to unite against the elites at the center, when
the landed gentry were defeated in their own domains, and when battles
took place in distant regions not controlled by the central government.
Karl does not posit a theory of state creation. Instead, she applies elements
of the Resource Curse Theory to explain the effects oil has had on the capa-
bility of the Venezuelan state. She does not suggest that all resource-rich
states are destined to experience Venezuela’s fate.37
For present purposes, it is not necessary to engage in a critical analysis
of the various theoretical alternatives. Such an analysis will evolve from the
empirical cases.
Democracy
According to Robert Dahl, a contemporary democracy is a political system
that is “completely or almost completely responsive to all its citizens.” A
political system will remain responsive to the preferences of its citizens
only if they have unimpaired opportunities to:
1. Formulate their preferences;

2. Manifest their preferences to one another and to the government by
individual and collective action; and
3. Have their preferences weighted equally, with no discrimination
because of the content or source of the preference.
For the aforementioned opportunities to exist, the regime must pro-

vide its citizens the following guarantees:
26 A. R. HYBEL
1. Freedom to form and join organizations;

2. Freedom of expression;
3. Right to vote;
4. Eligibility for public office;
5. Right of political leaders to compete for support and votes;
6. Access to alternative sources of information;
7. Free and fair elections; and
8. Institutions for making government policies that depend on votes
and other expressions of preference38
The extent to which the eight conditions are present in a contemporary

political regime can be represented along two dimensions: liberalization
(public contestation) and inclusiveness (participation). Throughout his-
tory, political systems have varied in terms of which, or whose, political
preferences were accounted for when policies were made. At one extreme,
the government responded to the political preferences of only one person;
at the other extreme, it weighted equally the political preferences of all the
citizens and formulated its policies based on the preferences of the greater
number. Political systems, however, have also varied in terms of the barri-
ers or opportunities they extended for “the expression, organization, and
representation of political preferences and thus in the opportunities avail-
able to potential oppositions.” The fact that all the eligible adult citizens
in a political system had the right to vote did not mean that such a regime
respected their votes. For such votes to be meaningful, the voters had to
have open access to political institutions that they could employ openly to
challenge the government.39
By positioning public contestation on the vertical axis and participation
on the horizontal one, Dahl creates a theoretical space in which he can
place at least four types of regimes. Where public contestation and partici-
pation are nonexistent, Dahl situates closed hegemonic regimes. These
regimes ban completely the expression, organization, and representation
of political preferences, and prohibit any form of organized dissent and
opposition.40 In the second space are polyarchies, that is, regimes that
“impose the fewest restraints on the expression, organization, and repre-
sentation of political preferences and on the opportunities available to
opponents of government.”41 Competitive oligarchies occupy the third
space. These are regimes that authorize an increase in public contestation
but limit extensively the number of participants. Though opportunities to
oppose the government exist, only a small number of individuals are
authorized to participate in the political process. And finally, in the fourth

space are the inclusive hegemonies. In these regimes, there are no major
constraints on participation, but the participants lack access to organiza-
tions with the authority and power to project dissent and oppose the
government.42
According to Wolfgang Merkel, each liberal democracy consists of five
partial regimes with these requirements:
1. It must have an electoral regime that is competitive and transparent;

2. Elections and the pursuit of collective interests must be allowed by
granting citizens the right to freedom of speech, of opinion, of asso-
ciation, and of demonstration;
3. Civil rights that contain and limit the exercise of power by the state
must exist;
4. Power between the executive, legislative, and judiciary bodies must
be divided, and each must be accountable; and
5. The government must be able to govern without the threat of being
vetoed, overruled, or overthrown by a nonelected group.43
Merkel proposes that for a political regime to be considered a democ-

racy, certain partial conditions must support the performance of other
partial conditions. The division into partial regimes serves several analyti-
cal purposes. First, it enables the analyst to identify defects within a democ-
racy. Second, by aggregating the defects within a democracy, the analyst
can compare them with the defects of other democracies. And third, it
enables the analyst to conduct a systematic and comparative analysis of the
way in which defects in a partial condition affect other partial conditions.44
Merkel completes his analysis with the identification of four types of
defective democracies. In an exclusive democracy, one or more segments of
all adult citizens are “excluded from the civil right of universal suffrage.”
In an illiberal democracy, “constitutional norms have little binding impact
on government actions and individual rights are either partially suspended
or not yet established.” In a delegative democracy, the division of power is
not well rooted and the power of the executive branch is not kept fully in
check by the legislative and judiciary branches. And finally, in a domain
democracy, the effective conditions that prevent the illegal intervention by
unelected officials, such as the military, are absent.45 Merkel’s types of
democracy are built on the idea that certain defects are qualitatively worse
than others. Defects present in an exclusive democracy are considered to be
28 A. R. HYBEL
the worst, while defects found in either a delegative or a domain democ-

racy are thought to be the least troublesome.46
Giovanni Sartori reminds us that the standard way of delimiting a concept
is by establishing its opposite. Thus, in order to determine what a democracy
is, one must also establish what it is not. He also prompts us to keep in mind
that when discussing democracy, it is critical to differentiate between two
questions: “What is democracy?” and “How much democracy?” These two
questions complement one another, but in order to answer the second ques-
tion, one must first establish what a democracy is, and what it is not. Sartori
contends that the tendency to overlook the critical difference between both
questions is a result of our general tendency to place tremendous emphasis
on quantitative analysis. He does not suggest that such focus is misplaced;
instead, he proposes that sometimes it compels us to overlook the value of
differentiating between regimes that are democratic and those that are not.
Failure to attend to this distinction could easily lead one to infer that all
political regimes are to a lesser or greater degree a democracy.47
Dahl’s and Merkel’s alternative conceptualizations of democracy do not
address the problem identified by Sartori. Neither framework enables the
analyst to determine when a political regime is no longer a democracy. The
problem can be best identified in the form of distinct but related q uestions:
When does a polyarchy become a competitive oligarchy? Is a competitive
oligarchy a defective democracy? When does a defective democracy
become a non-democracy?
A partial analysis of the political conditions in the United States during
the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the
twentieth century helps illustrate the problem. During that period, the
level of political competition between the Democratic Party and the
Republican Party was intense, but not every adult was allowed to partici-
pate. White women who had been born in the United States, or who had
been naturalized and were in “good moral standing,” were legal citizens;
members of neither group, however, had the right to vote until 1920.
African American men were recognized as citizens in 1867 but were
denied the right to vote for two more years. Then, between 1896 and
1900, several Southern states adopted “grandfather clauses” in order to
prevent former slaves and their descendants from voting. Many of these
clauses remained in place until the mid-1960s. Native Americans were not
considered citizens until 1924, and in many states, they were denied the
right to vote until 1957. Thus, were one to adhere to Merkel’s criteria that
a democracy protects the civil rights of adults to participate in elections,
speak freely, voice their opinions, and associate, one could claim that in the
year 1900 the United States was both an exclusive democracy and an illib-
eral democracy, but still some kind of democracy.
The above argument begs the question: How do we justify categorizing
the United States as a defective democracy in 1900 when more than half
of its citizens did not possess the legal right to vote? More directly, why
even label the United States a democracy? Were one to rely on Dahl’s
alternative classification, in 1900 the United States was a competitive oli-
garchy, not a polyarchy. Or if one were to use Guillermo O’Donnell’s
terminology, it was a democratic oligarchy, as less than half of the adult
population who were born in the United States or who were naturalized
citizens and over the age of 21 possessed the right to vote. Though other
states throughout the globe that were permitting only a portion of its
population to participate in the electoral process did not have to cope with
a racial divide, they would also be depicted as a competitive oligarchy or a
democratic oligarchy rather than a polyarchy.
Based on Sartori’s argument and the example just presented, it is clear
that one must first differentiate democratic regimes from nondemocratic
ones. A competitive oligarchy is not a democracy, not even a defective
democracy. This distinction does not preclude determining which
democratic regimes are more or less democratic. In short, a minimum
standard must be designed to determine when a regime begins being, or
stops being, a democracy.
The modern demos is a vast, atomized, and depersonalized mass soci-
ety, incapable of functioning as a collective decision-making body. This
condition forces the members of the demos to rely on representatives to
design policies. In such a world, free elections become the protectors of
the people’s power. Representatives make policies, but free elections force
policymakers to account for the preferences of the demos during the poli-
cymaking process. Without open access to information, however, free
elections would express nothing. To the extent that free elections protect
the power of the people, open access to information ensures that the rep-
resentatives do not undermine such power. In addition to representation,
elections, and access to competing sources of information, the contempo-
rary democratic state is characterized by the presence of political parties.
As Dahl notes, “elections cannot be contested in a large system without
organization. To forbid political parties would make it impossible for citi-
zens to coordinate their efforts in order to nominate and elect their pre-
ferred candidates.”48
30 A. R. HYBEL
A regime is nondemocratic when contested elections are not permitted.

The absence of public contestation can take at least two forms. In its first
form, the state has only one party, which is a duplicate of the state. A
party-state system is a “system of unitarism.”49 Communist, Nazi, and
fascist regimes fit in this category. In its second form, the state has one
party and permits the presence of secondary minor parties. This system is
noncompetitive, because the state does not authorize the peripheral par-
ties to compete with the hegemonic party on an equal footing. A hege-
monic party system remains undemocratic even if competition were to
ensue solely among leaders of the party. It is not the case, as Maurice
Duverger argues, that to the extent that competition within a party ensues
freely, the system can be categorized as being democratic. Competition
within a party between leaders who do not have to consider the voters’
preferences is very different from competition when such preferences must
be taken into account. Competition in the first case lacks the elements that
make a system democratic: electoral competition and free elections.50
To the extent that public contestation focuses on the degree of opposi-
tion permitted, participation focuses on whose preferences the system
considers. As already explained, constitutions have differed throughout
history partly by dictating who possessed the legal right to participate in
the electoral process. Thus, if by democracy one means the rule or power
of the people, then one must first determine who the people are. The
analysis must begin with this question: “What persons have a rightful claim
to be included in the demos?”51 According to Dahl, the Strong Principle of
Equality provides the ground needed for the criteria of inclusion. In line
with this principle, all members of an association “are adequately qualified
to participate on an equal footing with the others in the process of govern-
ing the association.”52 Dahl then uses the principle to infer that the “demos
should include all adults subject to the binding collective decisions of the
association.”53
Dahl’s rule rejects Joseph Schumpeter’s claim that it is “not relevant
whether we the observers admit the validity of those reasons or of the
practical rules by which they are made to exclude portions of the popula-
tion; all that matters is that the society in question admits it.”54 To agree
with Schumpeter’s justification, notes Dahl, is to accept the argument that
if a group of people within an association were not considered to be “peo-
ple” by another group also in the same association, the system could not
be considered to be undemocratic.
Dahl is cognizant of how difficult it is to rely on logical criteria to deter-

mine who the people are. But he questions the idea of relying on the
principle of competence to decide who should be part of the demos. This
principle has been used repeatedly to prevent women, artisans, laborers,
those without property, and racial minorities from acting on behalf of their
own interests. Moreover, whenever such constraints existed, those who
were part of the demos did not necessarily protect the interests of those
who were excluded from the political process. Dahl emphasizes that the
rule has always been applied to ensure that children were not considered
part of the demos, and argues that such a stand is justified.55 He accepts its
application to children by siding with John Locke, who argues that though
children are denied certain rights, they receive them as they mature, while
for excluded adults “the bonds of … subjection” never “quite drop off.”56
Dahl concludes that though it is necessary to rely on a judgment of com-
petence, it is imperative to use a standard that helps reduce the arbitrari-
ness of such a judgment. O’Donnell concurs, adding the very important
clarification that in a democracy the “attribution of rights and obligations
is assigned by the legal system to most adults in the territory of a state.”57
This brings us back to one of the original questions. When does a polit-
ical regime stop being democratic? Neither O’Donnell nor Merkel pro-
vides clear guidelines. Throughout his analysis, O’Donnell refers to an
“inclusive democracy,” to a “non-inclusive democracy” and to an “oligar-
chic democracy.” These three references generate confusion. By classifying
one type of government as an inclusive democracy, O’Donnell is propos-
ing that if a regime enables political competition between parties but not
every adult citizen is authorized to vote, it can also be referred to as a
democracy, albeit an oligarchic democracy or a non-inclusive democracy
or, as Merkel would call it, an exclusive democracy. Based on this unclear
differentiation, it is difficult to determine when a democracy ceases to be
a democracy.
The boundary between a democratic and a nondemocratic regime is
delineated along the public contestation axis, which indicates whether free
competition between at least two political parties is permitted, and along
the participation axis, which specifies the extent to which a state’s adult
citizens can participate in the electoral process. Accordingly, a political
regime is democratic if all adult citizens are empowered to participate in
contested free elections between at least two political parties. It is non-
democratic if political competition between at least two political parties is
32 A. R. HYBEL
not permitted, or if the criterion of inclusion provided by the Strong

Principle of Equality is not applied.
Adherence to the proposed rule would indicate that the United States
did not become a democracy until after 1965. At that time, of more than
five million African Americans of voting age living in 11 Southern states,
only 1.4 million were registered to vote. Moreover, during debates in the
Senate, 18 southern Democratic senators and 1 Republican senator
launched a filibuster designed to prevent the passage of the Civil Rights
Act. No single senator explained his intent to deny racial equality, and
consequently his opposition to the idea of creating a democracy, more
unmistakably than Richard Russell (D-GA) when he stated: “We will resist
to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a ten-
dency to bring social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the
races in our Southern states.”58
As already noted, to argue that there must be a well-defined boundary
between a democratic regime and a nondemocratic one is not to propose
that all democratic regimes are equally democratic. Because preferences
within a state can vary notably, no single political party can represent all of
them at all times; hence, there is competition between political parties.
The level of competition is dictated by constitutional design.59 Certain
constitutions decree that elections use proportional representation and
multimember electoral districts, while others rule that elections be
bounded by a plurality system and single-member districts. Of the two,
the first one is more “democratic.”60 As Sartori, an ardent defender of the
“elite” theory of democracy, notes, if democracy is rooted in the concept
of the people’s power, then logic dictates that “true representation is, and
can only be, proportional representation.”61 Proportional representation
is more democratic in the sense that it facilitates the formation of a multi-
party system, while plurality elections promote the construction of two-
party systems. One of the critical differences between these two types of
systems is that in a proportional-representation type of system the political
parties are responsive, in the aggregate, to a broader set of preferences
than in a plurality-type system.62 Stated in Dahl’s terms, public contesta-
tion is greater in the first system than in the second one.63 It can be pro-
posed, thus, that a democracy’s degree of democracy is in part determined
by its level of public contestation—the broader the range of preferences
the political parties can respond to, the more democratic the regime.
A democratic regime’s capacity to address a wide range of preferences
is not the only determinant of its level of democracy. Elections alone do
not guarantee that the elected officials will be permitted to perform their
assigned roles. Throughout history, there have been many cases in which
elected officials were prevented from assuming office, Congress or the
Judiciary was dismissed, or the holder of the executive office was either
toppled or forced to resign by a group or organization insulated from the
electoral process.64 Those actions engender an analytical problem.
Let us imagine a regime in which there is political competition between
the parties, information flows relatively unhindered, civil rights are fairly
well protected, and public participation is not restricted in any of the
forms identified earlier. At the same time, however, the voters’ level of dis-
satisfaction and the tension between the competing parties have grown
measurably. Then, after repeated failed attempts on the part of the elected
political leaders to resolve their differences, the military intervenes, top-
ples the government, dismisses the Congress, and decides who should rule
or appoint some of their own as the new rulers. Is the regime that was
toppled a nondemocratic regime? Or is it a democratic regime that was
not solid enough to protect itself by resolving the existing tensions, and
thus unintentionally empowered the military to take over the reins of
government?
It is not possible to draw a precise line that separates one category from
the other. However, it is feasible to differentiate between two types of
regimes: one is structured according to democracy’s basic tenets and exists
uninterruptedly for an extended period, but at some point, is toppled by
the military; the other is a regime that, despite its one or many attempts to
adhere to democracy’s basic tenets, is toppled by the military shortly after
its creation. The crucial factor in this comparison is the longevity of the
political regime. The regime in the first case can be characterized as a
defective democracy; the regime in the second case never managed to
achieve the status of democracy. In other words, durability matters.
Theories of Democracy
What are the conditions that enable certain countries, but not others, to
develop stable polyarchies? According to Dahl, a country’s chance to
develop a polyarchy is dependent on whether the following conditions are
present:65
1. Means of violent coercion are dispersed and controlled by the civil-

ian government;
34 A. R. HYBEL
2. Those who control the means of coercion are subject to the demo-
cratic process; and
3. Power, influence, authority, and control are dispersed from a single
center toward a variety of entities;
4. Society is marked by a “relatively high level of income and wealth
per capita, long-run growth in per capita income and wealth, a high
level of urbanization, rapidly declining or relatively small agricul-
tural population, great occupational diversity, extensive literacy, a
comparatively large number of persons who have attended institu-
tions of higher education; an economic order in which production
is mainly carried on by relatively autonomous firms whose decisions
are strongly oriented toward national and international markets, and
relatively high levels of conventional indicators of well-being, such
as physicians and hospital beds per thousand persons, life expec-
tancy, infant mortality, percentage of families with various consumer
durables, and so on;”66
5. People are culturally homogeneous or are at least not segmented
into strong and distinctive subcultures;
6. People are supportive of democratic institutions, particularly in their
political activities and
7. Government is free of threats by foreign powers hostile to
democracy.67
Linz and Stepan identify a similar set of factors. The creation of the
state, they note, is a necessary condition for a regime to become a consoli-
dated democracy, but not a sufficient one. Five other mutually reinforcing
conditions must also be present. They are:68
1. A free and lively society;

2. A relatively autonomous political society;
3. Laws that regulate the actions of all the political actors and the gov-
ernment, and that protect individual freedoms and associa-
tional rights;
4. A functional state bureaucracy; and
5. An institutionalized economic society
Linz and Stepan then postulate that a state that has a plurality of
national, linguistic, religious, or cultural societies will have great difficulty
creating and maintaining a stable democracy.69
For a somewhat more detailed discussion of the extent to which differ-

ent factors contributed to the creation of democratic regimes and their
consolidation in Latin America, it is helpful to rely on, and when appropri-
ate combine, the conclusions derived by Jeff Haynes, and by Larry
Diamond, Jonathan Hartlyn, and Juan Linz.
Haynes reviews the effects three distinct conditions have had on the
consolidation, or the failure to consolidate, democracy in Latin America.
They are:70 political culture and the legitimacy of the post-authoritarian
regime; political participation and institutions; and economic and interna-
tional factors. Based on the analysis of the aforementioned factors, Haynes
proposes that in the consideration of cultural conditions, what matters is
whether a political regime is backed by a civic culture “characterized by
high levels of mutual trust, tolerance of diversity and a propensity for
accommodation and compromise.” The development of such a culture is
the by-product of democratic institutions and structures working jointly
over time. More to the point, institutions help engender and disseminate
democratic values and beliefs among the people of the state.71
Political leaders, adds Haynes, particularly in developing states, are
rarely willing to relinquish power. Power-holders in developing countries
typically rely on the military to either retain power or topple those in
power. Or as he notes, in many cases the military intervenes to help
“defend members of the political and economic elite from the rigors of
democracy.” To obstruct this process, continues Haynes, a strong civil
society must be present.
The last issues Haynes addresses are whether economic and interna-
tional factors affect the democratization process. He takes as his starting
point a question posited by Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, José
Antonio Chibub, and Fernando Limongi. The four scholars ask: What
conditions should be present in any country for it to have a democratic
regime the following year? They contend that for a country to have a
democracy in the following year, it must already have a democracy in
place, be affluent, experience economic growth but with no-more-than-
moderate inflation, undergo a decline in inequality, face a favorable inter-
national climate, and have parliamentary institutions.72 Last, Haynes
points out that despite an initial, multipronged drive by developed coun-
tries and institutions in the Western world to nondemocratic regimes to
transform themselves into democracies, the outcomes have been disap-
pointing. Though initially, efforts by members of the international com-
munity seemed to compel some developing countries to hold their first
36 A. R. HYBEL
free elections, as time went by the intensity of the external appeals and
pressures weakened.73
Diamond and his co-authors present and assess the relevance of a large
number of potential “causal” variables. Within those variables, they some-
times identify conditions that impact them. They are the following:74
1. Historical legacies, paths, and sequences;

2. State structure and strength:
a. The crisis of state expansion and economic intervention,
b. Centralization and decentralization, and
c. The military;
3. Political institutions:
a. Parties and party systems,
b. Constitutional structure;
4. Political leadership:
a. Founding of democratic leadership,
b. Political adaptation and reform,
c. Response to economic crisis,
d. Response to generalized political crisis;
5. Political culture:
a. Sources of political culture,
b. Effects;
6. Socioeconomic development and economic performance:
a. Economic performance;
7. Inequality, class, and other cleavages;

8. Civil society and associational life:
a. The mass media;
9. International factors:
a. US Policy.
The three authors’ first contention is that colonial rule throughout

Spanish America did not leave behind a homogeneous legacy. They add
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Wyoming and Nebraska, where northern bunch grass merged into
the arid desert of the southwest.
But Robin had imagination, without which indeed few men
functioned long on the range, and he could sometimes see this bit of
rich black soil about his cabin blooming with color and tender green
of grass and shrubs, a bit of the wilderness taking on the
atmosphere of a home where beauty was something more than a
casual word.
That was why he had claimed and homesteaded this—a half-mile
square of creek bottom—in a day when America had millions of
acres to bestow on her sons for the asking. Title to it had been
issued Robin only a month since. He had proved up. It was his own.
The first definite stirrings of the pride of ownership moved in him
now. He didn’t see it so much as it was, but as it would be; and Ivy
Mayne loomed in the forefront of the picture.
“She’ll be a ranch some day,” he said to Red Mike. “And we won’t
have to steal nobody’s calves to get up a herd, either.”
Then he shook up the red horse, fell in behind the others and
stirred them to a jog trot that carried him rapidly across the rolling
land under the shoulder of the Bear Paw Mountains, toward the
Block S camp.
CHAPTER III
MACHIAVELLI?
From the Bar M Bar to Shadow Butte, where the Sutherland riders
lay ready to start the fall work, was a matter of three hours’ riding.
The round-up was camped under the Butte itself on a natural
meadow in Little Eagle, a lovely spot ringed about by groves of
poplars and clumps of willows, just where the foothills lifted sharply
to the timbered slopes of the Bear Paw Mountains.
Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle
bunch scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself
drew up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen
round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one
horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember.
Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old,
commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and
sounds of range work. Perhaps because he was and had always
been a part of it, dimly conscious of its dramatic significance as the
greatest pastoral movement in the history of the world, of himself as
a minor figure playing a part in a spectacle bigger than any of its
actors.
He had risen in his stirrups many a time on last guard to sniff the
morning air, to stare at the sun’s brilliant upper segment thrusting
above the eastern sky line, shooting yellow fingers across grassland
that waved and shimmered like silken crêpe. At such a moment a
queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the
fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give
Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went
thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out,
reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the
creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for
a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a
dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings.
He only knew that when he looked down into Eagle Creek the sight
pleased him in a way he could not describe.
The white tents gleamed like snowflakes against the poplar green.
The yellow grass spread like a carpet under the feet of two hundred
grazing horses, sleek-bodied brutes well broken to range use. Bells
on the leaders tinkled as they moved their heads in feeding. The
horse wrangler sat on the opposite bank, a lone horseman
silhouetted like a statue against the evening sky. Figures moved
about the chuck wagon. The smell of coffee and frying beef floated
up to Robin’s nostrils. In dry, thin air that doubled the range of the
human eye over a sea-level atmosphere and lent an uncanny
resonance to sounds, the voices of the cowboys had a mellow ring.
Some one was singing a ribald trail song. Half a dozen voices joined
lustily in the chorus:
“Comin’ up the Chisholm Trail

I tell you what you’ll get,
A little chunk of bread and a little chunk of meat
Little black coffee with sugar on the sly,
Dust in your throat boys, and gravel in your eye!”
Robin whooped once, long and loud, and jumped Red Mike down
the hill. He loosed his reata and slung a noose. Fifty yards short of
the wagons he swept like a whirlwind upon the heels of his string,
shot the rawhide full length to encircle the head of the horse packing
his bed.
Five minutes later his riding gear was stacked under his saddle
blanket, and Robin was squatting on his heels by the bed wagon
swapping repartee with a dozen riders he knew.
Shortly the cook sounded an alarm. He did not approach these
youths where they lounged and say in a softly modulated tone,
“Gentlemen, dinner is served.” He seized a dishpan, hammered it
vigorously with an iron spoon, shouted raucously, “Grub pi-i-ile!” And
the crew swooped down on the chuck wagon like a flock of chickens
gathering about the mother hen when she clucked discovery of fat
worms.
The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up.
The rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent,
sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without
capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those
who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource,
initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold, rain,
sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night watches
on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses, lip-cracking thirst
allayed by alkali water, days when they rode from sun to sun and
slept with their boots on wherever they could lie down—it was all
one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled space, action swift and
purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work that was always tinged
with the excitement of the unexpected, barred monotony from the
range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what often was
necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought diversion
in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of being a unit in
Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and colorful
background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a sense of
humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that his
phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass current
in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire of talk among
the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no more to do
with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as he lay
on his unrolled bed.
He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one
remarked that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the
dusk Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his
uncanny skill with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them.
Mark remained in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the
wagon boss, he slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his
fellows.
“Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced.
“Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow
then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.”
Which was an oblique way of anticipating days in the saddle and
nights on guard while the Block S combed the range for marketable
beeves.
In twenty minutes silence fell on the camp. The men were in their
blankets. The nighthawk relieved the day wrangler and moved his
horse herd away from about the tents. A moon swam up and
Shadow Butte cast a long black cone toward the northwest. Bells
tinkled with distant sweetness where the ponies grazed. Midnight
passed. When the few hours of darkness began to wane a lantern
broke out yellow in the cook tent. As the first paleness showed in the
east the cook lifted his call.
In less than an hour, with the sun heaving up above the sky line
the outfit was under way, all their equipment, tents, cooking layout,
beds, extra ropes and gear piled high and lashed on two wagons
drawn by four-horse teams.
There were few trails and those dim ones over that sparsely
settled land. One rider acted as pilot across country. In his wake the
chuck wagon led the van. Behind this rattled the bed wagon driven
by the nighthawk. Behind these came the saddle herd, urged on by
the horse wrangler with a trailing rope. Last of all the riders mounted,
shook the kinks out of their fractious horses and broke into a gallop.
Some passed the remuda and the wagons. Some jogged leisurely.
They rode as they pleased, in pairs, in clusters, at a walk or a gallop.
Robin found himself riding elbow to elbow with Mark Steele,
“Shining” Steele. Appropriate name, apart from the beaten silver
ornaments with which he adorned his gear, even to a row of conchos
down the outer seam of his leathern chaps, for the man himself was
like a steel blade, tall, lithe, thin-faced, a rider born and a cowman
from his heels up. Mark Steele had come into the Bear Paws
unheralded and unsung, and in two years had become range boss of
the Block S over the heads of older hands.
He jogged beside Robin, hat pushed back, swaying to the gait of
his horse, humming a little tune, his eyes roving over what spread
before them as they topped each little rise.
“Mayne give you a good mount, kid?” he asked presently.
“Thirteen head. And I brought along a ridge runner of my own,”
Robin answered.
“Uh-huh. You won’t be afoot, then, half the time, like you was with
the Pool last spring.”
Mark said it with a smile but there was a sting in the remark, an
implied sneer. Robin had joined the general round-up with the Bear
Paw Pool that spring, having only ten horses in his mount. Of these
one had gone crazy with loco weed, another grew lame. He rode the
remaining eight to a standstill trying to hold up his end with men far
better mounted. It was neither his fault nor Dan Mayne’s—just ill
luck. Saddle horses had vanished, others had got crippled. There
was no time to break colts. But both Robin and the Bar M Bar had
lost a modicum of prestige. He didn’t thank Steele for reminding him.
He knew that with his present string he could take the outside circle
and come into camp with the best of the Block S. So he kept silent.
“I was down to Mayne’s night before last,” Steele observed. “You
weren’t in sight.”
“Hunting horses,” Robin explained. He knew Mayne, or Ivy, or
both, had told Steele that. What business of Mark’s was it, anyway?
“Where’d you ride?” Shining asked quite casually.
“So that’s it,” Robin thought—recalling the dead cows and the rifle
shot that put him on the run out of Birch Creek bottom. Aloud he
said: “Sand Coulee, Boggy Spring, west side of Chase Hill.”
“Much stock in sight?”
“Quite a lot.”
They rode two hundred yards in silence.
“There’s thieves workin’ on this range,” Shining Mark broke out
suddenly.
“The hell you say!” Robin’s surprise was not simulated, but it was
surprise at information coming to him from this source.
“I been ridin’ myself some lately,” Mark went on in his crisp tone.
“I’ve seen things.”
“What you been drinkin’?” Robin tried raillery.
Steele frowned.
“I seen some pretty fishy lookin’ work,” he growled. “Pretty raw.
There’ll be a necktie party when I get it figured out.”
“Well, they can’t steal no cows of mine,” Robin said lightly. “’Cause
I don’t own ary a split hoof. You don’t surprise me much. I guess
there’s no range in Montana, nor any place where cows run, that
there isn’t somebody packin’ a runnin’ iron and draggin’ the long
rope now and then.”
“Ain’t you seen nothin’—no big calves with a fresh brand and no
mother handy?” Steele persisted.
Robin shook his head.
“If I’d come across stuff like that anywhere in Bar M Bar territory I
guess old Dan Mayne would be ridin’ the pinnacles with a
Winchester and frothin’ at the mouth,” he drawled. “What’s the
brand?”
“I ain’t talkin’,” Steele said darkly. “An’ you keep this to yourself
what I say. Sabe? They’re workin’ on the Block S mostly, I expect.
But they might not overlook the Bar M Bar. So keep your eyes open,
kid, an’ let me know if you spot anything that looks queer.”
Three or four riders behind broke their horses into a lope, came
abreast, laughing, elbows flopping like limp-winged birds. Steele and
Robin fell into their pace. In a row, bobbing uniformly, hoofs beating
out a steady rhythm on the dry turf, they passed the saddle herd, the
wagons. The night hawk driving the bed wagon popped his whiplash
as they went by. The cook, acting Jehu, braced himself by the four-
horse reins, a cigarette in his lips. Far ahead of the wagons they
overtook and joined the other riders.
At noon they camped two hours on a creek bottom, ate, caught
fresh horses and moved on. Mid-afternoon saw the cavalcade top a
rise below which, in the middle of a great gray stretch of sagebrush,
the town of Big Sandy lifted a huddle of unpainted buildings. There
the chuck wagon would take on a month’s grub, the cowboys would
drink Bourbon whisky and play poker overnight, and at dawn the
Block S would depart into the wide waste of Lonesome Prairie, to
return again in due time with a herd of prime beef cattle two
thousand strong.
And all the way to town Robin wondered what Shining Mark was
getting at; what was his real object in that conversation. Was he
craftily seeking to discover if Robin had been the rider on the sorrel
horse who turned over the dead cow to read her brand?
Or was he shooting straight when he promised a necktie party for
cow thieves unknown? When Robin gazed at Steele’s easy
erectness in the saddle, the flashy ornamentation of his riding rig, he
was troubled by a promise of trouble. He was sure, yet not so sure.
More than ever he wished he had been able to see what brand
went on those calves that day.
Coupled with uncertainty went the firm conviction that if Shining
Mark once linked him with a knowledge of those dead cows and
stolen calves, he, Robin Tyler, would need eyes in the back of his
head whenever he rode alone.
CHAPTER IV
ONE STEP AT A TIME
The Block S outfit, far into that night, staged a good-natured minor
riot in a town whose population of something less than a hundred
souls was eighty per cent dependent on Block S activities for its
existence. There were half a dozen small ranches within a ten mile
radius, men who owned from three to five hundred head of stock. A
few sheep-masters with flocks and herders and camp tenders helped
put money in circulation there and lent a color—and odor—of their
own to the region. Brooklyn-born fiction to the contrary, the cattleman
and the sheep owner were not always at each others’ throats. The
man on horseback tended to look down on the shepherd who
guarded his flocks afoot. In all history the man on horseback has
done that. But physical clashes between the two groups only
occurred when one encroached too arrogantly on what the other
deemed his inalienable rights and privileges.
And all these folk lived under the tolerant shadow of Adam
Sutherland, whose Block S marked the ribs of thirty thousand cattle.
Sutherland owned the town site of Big Sandy. He owned the general
store and operated the post office. If he didn’t own the hotel and the
three saloons and the blacksmith shop it was simply because he
didn’t care to bother about petty details of commerce. So Big Sandy
supported a number of people and activities that were like mistletoe
on the parent oak, some ornamental, some possibly useful, but a
secondary growth as far as the Block S was concerned.
Sutherland had come into Montana with a beef herd for a military
post. He had remained to grow up with the country. He had become
big financially. He had been a big man physically. Now that he was
no longer young his flesh was becoming a burden. He liked to jog
around the home ranch on Little Eagle in the summer, to ride out and
watch his men handle stock when the round-up worked near home.
He liked to be in Big Sandy when his beef herds were marshaled into
the stockyards in a cloud of dust and see the fat steers go rolling
east in trainloads. He liked to see his riders have their fling in town.
His rule over all that lay under his ægis was beneficent, almost
paternal. Adam Sutherland had never heard of such a thing as an
efficiency system, but he had its equivalent at his service, functioning
smoothly, ungrudgingly. A vision of the future was a phrase he might
not have fully comprehended, but he had that too, or he would not
have owned thousands of acres of meadow land, the headwaters of
mountain streams, a score of unfenced pastures in a country where
grass and water were as yet free to all men, in a period when most
cattlemen still believed that the great plains must remain a cow
pasture for all time to come. The Sutherland holdings dotted the
foothills of the Bear Paws in a semicircle fifty miles south and east.
He sat on the counter in the big store now, and greeted his riders
as they passed in and out making sundry small purchases. Later in
the evening he made the round of the saloons and hotel bar, the
Silver Dollar, Monty’s Place, the Exchange, bought a round of drinks
for “the house” in each place. Then he went away to his house set
off on a knoll to one side of the town, a white, sprawling cottage with
a green patch of lawn about it, surrounded by a picket fence to keep
out the wandering stock that sometimes strayed wide-eyed into the
single street of this frontier hamlet. The fence served also the
secondary purpose of keeping out over-hilarious cow-punchers who
might mistake the place for something else and in high spirits—both
literally and figuratively—undertake to ride their horses up the front
steps and along the porch, crying a jovial challenge to those within to
come out and “whoop ’er up.”
Mark Steele’s outfit went north into the flat waste of Lonesome
Prairie next morning. The Block S cowboys struck town again in
something less than three weeks. They had sent a trainload of cattle
east from Galata on the high line of the Great Northern. Now they
drew up to Big Sandy with a herd seventeen hundred strong, sleek,
fat, long-horned beasts moving like an army without banners but
armed with spears that glinted in the sun, the slender wide-curving
horns inherited from bulls of Andulasian blood.
The outfit camped where the level of the Prairie pitched down to
the sagebrush flats. Robin went on first guard with the lights of Big
Sandy glimmering two miles distant and five hundred feet below.
East, west, north, Lonesome Prairie spread its night-shrouded
breadth, an enormous, uninhabited triangle of grassland a hundred
miles on each side, with a railway crossing its middle and scarcely a
dwelling in all those miles except the dull red section houses where
the railroad laborers lived.
Robin jogged his two hours and a half, meeting and passing the
other rider, around and around the outer edge of a herd that slept as
peacefully as a babe in the cradle, a vast amorphous blot on the
shrouded plain. They crooned chanty songs as they rode, not
because they loved singing well enough to drone interminable ditties
for their hours on watch, but because a rider moving silently in the
dark might sneeze, flap a slicker, his horse might stumble—and at a
strange noise breaking the night silence that herd would jump the
bed-ground as one, in a panic, making the earth shake with the
thunder of their flight. So they sang, crooned rather. And the relief
coming on at eleven o’clock came droning or whistling to the herd.
“All right. You got ’em. See that you keep ’em.” Robin and his
mate jocularly greeted the relief, and departed.
Robin was paired for night work with Tex Matthews, a middle-aged
Texan, a quiet, soft-voiced man whose gentle ways were a
serviceable mask for a rider who had seen a good deal of wild west
in his time. They turned toward camp. Matthews rode a little way,
turned to look into the flat below. In the dark and the silence a night
breeze sighed, as if the range breathed audibly. The Texan stared at
the town lights. Half the Block S crew had ridden in when first guard
was set. Sometime before dawn they would come galloping back.
“They’ll be gettin’ action down there, I expect,” he murmured.
“Let’s ride in,” Robin suggested. “I don’t want to sleep, nohow.”
They swung their horses about. In fifteen minutes they were
dismounting before the Silver Dollar. That particular house was the
favorite resort of the Block S. They patronized all saloons without
favor, as a rule, but the Silver Dollar was roomy, clean, it had a
billiard table and comfortable chairs. More important, it was
conducted by a genial soul who, having been a range-rider himself,
knew and welcomed cow-punchers regardless of whether or not they
had money to spend over his bar.
Now Robin and Matthews had neither expectation nor purpose
beyond a natural hankering for the glow of bright lights, a drink or
two—a little diversion, so to speak. They would ordinarily have found
some of the outfit, perhaps have played stud poker an hour or two,
taken a stirrup cup and departed.
But once inside the door Robin Tyler had a strange intuition of
something in the air. Mark Steele leaned on one end of the bar.
Three or four Block S men stood or lounged about. A couple of
strangers were present. And slumped in a chair against the farther
wall sat Dan Mayne. His chin was sunk on his breast. His dispirited
mustache drooped more dispiritedly than ever. But he was neither
asleep nor in a stupor. Mark Steele regarded him with a smile that
was a mixture of contempt and calculation.
“Hello cowboys,” Steele greeted the two. “Couldn’t resist
temptation eh? C’mon. Have a drink. Ho, Dan!”
He called Mayne.
“Line up, old-timer. Have a shot.”
“I ain’t drinkin’,” Mayne snarled.
Robin, who had started toward him, and so stood between the
two, heard Mayne add a rider to the sentence under his breath—“not
with you, damn your soul!”
“No, you don’t drink, do you?” Mark laughed unpleasantly. “You
just pour it down, that’s all. Come on, kid,” he spoke to Robin, “line
up here. The old man’s on the prod, but the rest of us are sociable.”
Robin hesitated a moment. There was something in the air. There
was a subtle shade of the peremptory in that “line up here.” The tone
nettled him out of all reason. And he didn’t like the conjunction of
Dan Mayne drunk and resentful in the same room with Shining Mark
Steele.
“Leave me out this time,” he said casually. “Looks like I better put
my boss to bed. I generally have to when he goes on a bust.”
“Suit yourself,” Steele replied tartly. “All the same to me.”
That muttered sentence of Mayne’s was apparently the last
coherent speech he was capable of making. Robin got him out of the
chair, steadied his uncertain progress across the way to the hotel
and half-carried him up to a bedroom.
He sat down beside him, and piled a wet towel on Mayne’s head.
In the course of half an hour the thickness of tongue and brain
partially cleared.
“You been squabblin’ with Mark to-night?” Robin asked then. He
wanted to know. If Mayne had jumped Steele, he, Robin, would be in
a difficult situation, working under Steele. Somehow Mark’s attitude
promised trouble.
“Naw, not about that.” Mayne understood his meaning at once. “I
ain’t a damn fool altogether. But I don’t like that hombre. And I am
drunk. When I’m drunk I ain’t got as much sense as I should have
about some things. Ivy’s in town with me. Mark he comes ridin’ in
about supper time and gets her corraled in the parlor an’ sets there
talkin’ the kid black in the face. So I tell him to lay off, that I don’t
want no flashy, silver-spangled wagon bosses in my family. I wanted
to say cow thief instead uh wagon boss, but I didn’t. Least I don’t
think I did.”
“You are a damn fool,” Robin said angrily. “Ivy’s a blamed sight
abler to stand off Mark Steele than you are. I’m a darned sight more
interested in who she talks to than you are, an’ I sure wouldn’t jump
any man for settin’ talkin’ to her in a hotel parlor. Darn it, he comes to
the ranch, and you make him welcome.”
“No more,” Mayne asserted with drunken emphasis. “’F he ever
jingles his spurs on my porch again I’ll ventilate him.”
After a minute he said thickly:
“I found them dead cows below Cold Spring. I rode a week steady
before I located the calves. I found ’em fresh marked. I can’t prove
nothin’. But I found ’em.”
“S-sh,” Robin warned. “Not so loud. What brand’s on the calves?”
“T Bar S.”
“Huh! I’ve seen a few around.” Robin wrinkled his brows. “Little
bunch was thrown in on the Block S range a year ago. Supposed to
belong to some Helena man.”
“Yeah,” Mayne snorted. “I looked into that, too. Helena hell! The T
Bar S is registered in Jim Bond’s name. I’ve known him a long time.
He keeps a two-by-four saloon in Helena. Never owned a cow in his
life. Them T Bar S’s was throwed in here last year, a hundred and
fifty head mixed stock. I bet you Mark Steele put up the money. But I
can’t prove it. I can’t prove nothin’—yet.”
“Well, if you can’t prove nothing, you can’t, that’s all,” Robin said.
“You just got to lay low, and see which way the cat hops.”
“I’m goin’ to ask old Adam to-morrow if he’s got any idea what’s
goin’ on around here,” Mayne growled. “An’ I’m goin’ to ride an’
watch. Ride an’ watch,” he repeated darkly. “Ride an’ watch!”
CHAPTER V
WATCHFUL WAITING
Robin rode to camp alone. The Block S riders were all gathered in
the Silver Dollar when he came back to where his night horse stood
with the others in a row by the hitching rack. Through the windows
he could see that a poker game had started. Tex Matthews was
playing. Robin didn’t want to drink. With his mind fully occupied he
somehow didn’t care to talk. He was aware of a faint reluctance to
facing Mark Steele while Mark was in that hair-trigger mood—a
trouble-breeding temper, certainly quickened by a few drinks, that
might or might not have been generated by something Mayne had
said in his cups.
Steele was not rated a quarrelsome man. He could be arbitrary,
high-handed, and he had never been known to give way an inch for
any one. Even his ordinary genial manner could easily take on an
edge. He had no known notches on his gun handle. But whatever
obscure inner force it is, that makes some men positive, and others
negative, in their human contracts, it resided in Mark Steele, and
exacted a certain deference among men who were lightning-quick to
resent any form of aggression.
So Robin, deep in his own reflections, swung into his saddle and
rode away to camp. If Ivy had not been asleep in her room he would
have tarried longer. But he would see her to-morrow. He fell asleep,
in a bed unrolled on the grass, with his face turned to the stars. He
wakened once when the riders came pattering into camp and got
quietly into their beds. A cloudless sky brilliant with specks of silver
arched over him, a luminous inverted bowl. Crickets chirped in the
grass. Night horses tied to the bed wagon, on picket, made their
usual noises. The bells on the remuda tinkled distantly. Small sounds
in a deep hush overlying a lonely land. Robin turned over and slept
again.
At daybreak the outfit mounted. There was a herd to trim. While
the bulk of that seventeen hundred bore the Block S there were
strays of half a dozen other brands to be shipped, and these cattle
were not jammed indiscriminately into cars to be sorted in Chicago.
The cattleman unscrambled his own eggs.
From dawn to noon the flat a mile outside the stockyards was a
scurry of dust, flying riders, steers and cows being shot out of the
main herd into little bunches held separate. Once sorted by brand
and sex each group moved into the shipping pens. By four o’clock
the last longhorn was on his way, two trainloads of him.
The riders were free until the following morning, when the Block S
would pull south. Thirty miles beyond Birch Creek, beyond the Bar M
Bar, Steele would throw his riders on circle again to comb the range
for beef. The camp would move day by day toward the railroad as
the riders gathered a herd.
But now, as the last door clanged shut on the last animal, the
cowboys flung themselves on their horses and charged down on the
Silver Dollar. For ten hours they had worked in heat and dust. They
were hot and thirsty. Cold beer was nectar to their parched mouths.
Robin stayed with the crowd for one round of elbow-crooking.
Then he crossed to the hotel. The Maynes were still in town. He
sought the store. As he clanked up the steps he passed Dan Mayne
and Adam Sutherland perched on the planking, Mayne talking with
emphatic motions of his hands and head, Sutherland big, fat, good-
natured, placidly listening, chewing on a cigar. Robin nodded and
went on in, looking for Ivy. But in that semi-public place he couldn’t
talk to her nor she to him even if she had not been deep in
purchases of dry goods aided and abetted by the blacksmith’s wife
and the hotel keeper’s daughter. Out of their natural habitat both
Robin and Ivy were shy, self-conscious. They exchanged greetings.
Robin bought a pound of Bull Durham and took himself off.
Sutherland rose as he came out and ambled away toward his
house. Robin sat down beside Mayne. The old man’s eyes were
slightly reddened. Otherwise he showed no sign of his overnight
tussle with John Barleycorn. His mind was still occupied with cows
and cow thieves.
“Sutherland don’t take no stock in any rustlin’,” he complained.
“He’s so gol darned sure nobody’s got the nerve to rustle stock on
the Block S range. ’Course I couldn’t blat it all. I only told him what I
seen myself, an’ not all that either. He just laughed. Said if some of
my cows got shot it wasn’t because somebody was stealin’ their
calves, but more likely some poison mean galoot had it in for me.”
“How’d he figure calves with no mothers and a T Bar S on their
ribs?” Robin inquired.
“I didn’t go that far.” Mayne’s normal caution was to the fore,
evidently. “I don’t want to start nothin’ I can’t finish. I got to know
more before I go hollerin’ names and brands.”
“I guess that’s good policy,” Robin agreed. “Still, I don’t sabe the
play. If it was Mark— Why’d he steal calves for a man in Helena?”
“Bond’s probably a stall. Mark’s either got an interest in that brand
or owns it. Naturally he keeps that dark,” Mayne replied sourly. “If
them calves had had a Block S on ’em I’d think my chances were
slim to make any money in the cow business around here. I thought
at first he was workin’ on me to make a good showin’ for the Block S.
I never seen a big cow outfit yet that wouldn’t back a wagon boss in
anything he did if he could show a good increase from year to year.
But when I see that T Bar S I know he’s out for himself.”
“Maybe it ain’t Mark, after all,” Robin murmured. “I’m not dead
sure, you know. I went mostly on the flash of silver.”
Robin didn’t say that he had been confirmed in his first impression
largely by Mark’s behavior since.
Mayne looked at him peevishly.
“Who’d you think it might be, then?” he inquired. “Or has Mark got
you buffaloed so’s you dassent think out loud to me? ’S he been
puttin’ the fear uh God into you? You ’fraid of him?”
“I don’t know,” Robin answered truthfully. “He’s done some pretty
high-handed things in this country and made ’em stick, hasn’t he?
He’d be a bad man to tangle with. He’s never made a gun play that I
know of. Still, everybody seems to take him for walkin’ dynamite.”
“He is, too,” Mayne agreed moodily. “He looks it, acts it once in a
while. I sized him up as dangerous the first time I ever saw him.
Some men are that way. Soon as you look ’em in the eye, you know
they’ll be poison if you go up against ’em. Same time, nobody, if he
was deadly as a Gila monster, is goin’ to keep stealin’ my stock and
get away with it, make me think I like it. I seen plenty wild west
before Mark Steele was born. You watch he don’t keep cuttin’ back
unbranded stuff on you when the outfit works south of the
mountains, Robin. The time to keep cases on him is all the time. If
he drags the long rope on my territory after round-up’s over, I bet you
I get him before the grass comes up in the spring.”
“Suppose you were dead sure, but had no evidence a stock
inspector could make an arrest on, what’ you do?” Robin asked
curiously.
“More’n one way of killin’ a cat besides chokin’ it to death with
butter,” Mayne drawled cryptically.
As the Block S wagons, saddle bunch and riders traveled south
the next forenoon they passed one equipage and were themselves
passed by another on the trail that ran to the Sutherland ranch on
Little Eagle.
The first was Dan Mayne and Ivy rolling home with a team and
wagon. Robin jogged beside them for a mile or so bantering Ivy.
Then Mark Steele detached himself from the other riders and joined
him, and somehow the light-hearted chaffering between Ivy and
Robin ceased. Mark did the talking. He was as genial as the sun.
Even old Mayne had to grin. But Robin didn’t. He kept pace and was
casual, but he wasn’t happy. And when Mark said: “Well, kid, the
outfit’s leavin’ us behind,” Robin lifted his hat and rode on with
Steele, in spite of the fact that it was his privilege to join the outfit
when he chose. He wasn’t a Block S man. He was a “rep.” But he
went.
Steele tightened up as soon as they were clear of the Maynes. It
wasn’t anything he said because he didn’t open his mouth. It was his
manner, a subtle something Robin could feel. Mark looked back at
the team and wagon once. Then he looked searchingly at Robin and
smiled—without a word. The mocking flicker in his eyes made Robin
uneasy. It was not the first time Steele had manifested an interest in
Ivy Mayne, although everybody within fifty miles knew she was
Robin’s girl.
“Maybe,” thought Robin, “he thinks he can get her the way he’s
gettin’ the old man’s calves.”
They joined the other riders. As they paced along the trail some
one noticed a little banner of dust far behind.
“Somebody’s foggin’ it on our track,” Tommy Thatcher remarked.
The “somebody” turned out to be Adam Sutherland, in a fancy
buggy, holding taut reins over a pair of standard-bred bays kicking
the dust out from under them as if they were hitched to a racing
sulky.
The buggy passed like a rider at the gallop. Sutherland nodded.
The cowboys lifted their hats when they saw a girl in the seat beside
Sutherland. The shiny top was up and all they had was a glimpse.
But that was sufficient, for some of them.
“May’s back, eh?” one commented.
Robin had a flash of a pale face, fair hair, bright blue eyes. He
knew about Sutherland’s only daughter although he had never seen
her until now. She was getting a formal education in the State
capital, where Sutherland lived in the winter, and sometimes she
came to the home ranch a few weeks in summer. She had been born
on Little Eagle when the Block S cattle numbered hundreds instead
of thousands. She was good-looking, the cowboys said, and she had
been very pleasant to crippled riders laid up at the home ranch, but
none of them knew her well. She rode about in the hills a little with
her father, and a great deal more alone. The Sutherland riders
discussed her freely as the buggy grew small on the trail ahead and
disappeared at last over a rise.
“She used to love a good rider,” Amby Phillips said reflectively. “So
you bronco fighters can have hope. One time she was half-stuck on
a kid that broke horses on Little Eagle—about four years ago, if I
remember right. I seen her sit on the fence and clap her hands when
he topped off a colt that jumped high, wide an’ handsome. She used
to run around with him a lot. An’ one day a bronc went over
backward on this kid an’ killed him. She went all to pieces over it,
they say. She ain’t been here much since. You know her, Mark?”
Steele nodded. “Met her two or three times,” he drawled. “I was
over to the house last night. Nice lookin’, all right. Kinda acts as if
she was proud as hell about something, though.”
Old Tex Matthews snickered audibly and Steele flashed a cold
glance at him.
“What you say, Tex?” he inquired with exaggerated politeness.
“I didn’t say. But I was thinkin’ that if it don’t rain soon and soften
up this ground I’ll have to shoe a couple of horses.”
Steele made no comment. There was a funny little quirk about the
Texan’s mouth when he made that answer, and he looked straight at
Shining Mark. For some reason there was a brief silence, and after
that there was no more mention of May Sutherland. Presently they
stirred up their horses and tore down into a creek bottom where the
wagons were to stop for noon.
That night they camped under Shadow Butte again. The following
day took them far east of Birch Creek, east of the Bar M Bar. The
Little Rockies loomed blue on the horizon beyond the broad reach of
the Gros Ventre Reservation. On their first ride they picked up a fair
sprinkling of beef cattle and Robin cut a score of Bar M Bars into the
day herd to throw back on his home range. After that the routine of
each day followed its usual order of saddling at dawn, riding circle,
bunching the gathered cattle in a compact mass near the camp while
they cut out the prime beef and branded such calves as had been
missed on the spring round-up. Each day they moved a few miles
back toward Big Sandy, working the range on either side of the
wagons as far as they could reach in one ride.
Robin noted a T Bar S here and there. Some of the riders knew a
Helena man owned that brand. None of them cared about the
question of ownership. They were not owners. There were other
brands on the range with absentee owners. Somehow, because a
generous honesty was the accepted range standard the calves of
such got branded with the mark their mothers bore, and the steers
got shipped to market. If no special arrangement was made for
looking after such cattle the big outfits looked after them anyhow. It
kept the range in order. Unbranded stock at large was a temptation
to men anxious to build up a big herd off a shoestring foundation. If a
rustler could get away with stuff from a little owner he soon extended
his operations to the big outfit. To the big cattleman a cow thief was
an affront to his jealous sense of property rights—to the man with

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The Challenges of Creating Democracies in The Americas: The United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Guatemala Alex Roberto Hybel

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The Challenges of Creating

Democracies in the Americas: The

Geomorphology and Volcanology of Costa Rica Jean Pierre

NAFTA 2.0: From the first NAFTA to the United States-

The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions: A View from the

The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops and

Heritage Conservation in the United States: Enhancing

The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic:

The Institutionalisation of Evaluation in the Americas

Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic

With Zander Weisman Mintz and Elise Hope Dunn

ISBN 978-3-030-21232-2 ISBN 978-3-030-21233-9 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © Marina Lohrbach / shutterstock.com

As in the past, I am indebted to my mother-in-law, Barbara Peurifoy,

Marina del Rey, California Alex Roberto Hybel

1 Introduction: The Nature of the Problem 1

2 Theories of State Creation and Democratization 17

3 The Challenges of State Creation and Democratization in

4 The Challenges of State Creation and Democratization in

5 The Challenges of State Creation and Democratization in

6 State Creation and Democratization in Costa Rica and

7 An Exploratory Theory of State Creation and

Introduction: The Nature of the Problem

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Stated differently, the investigator tries to identify the intervening steps or

by the rise of four major drug-trafficking cartels and several revolutionary

Structure of the Book

determine what constitutes a state, and then to discuss alternative theories

Axiom 1: Democracies do not emerge in stateless territories or in states

The study of each country’s processes of state creation and political-­

they faced. This portion of the analysis is completed with a description of

1. Describe the processes of state creation and of regime formation for

1. What compelled the colonizers to colonize?

critical role in shaping the colonization processes of the Americas by the

progenitors in the Americas were bounded by a religious construct that

newly created state in the Americas underwent an economic transforma-

fear of communist takeovers emboldened the military throughout Spanish

3. See Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2014, https://freedomhouse.

Theories of State Creation

1. It is differentiated from other organizations in the same territory.

Jorge Dominguez’s version of the state differs somewhat from Tilly’s.

© The Author(s) 2020 17

autonomous, and are either centralized or divided but formally coordi-

a consolidated territory and its population, and that is recognized as the

Theories of State Creation

1. Access to extractable resources;

4. Powerful army and success in wars;

Tilly presents two arguments. A culturally divided society will be less

Samuel Huntington proposes that there are three patterns of political

government to control the territory and would distribute power between

mode-of-productions arguments regarding state creation in Latin America

1. Failure on the part of a rebellious upper class to coalesce against the

The Resource Curse or Paradox of Plenty Theory has been designed to

economic geography; economic and fiscal strength; public acceptance of

1. Formulate their preferences;

For the aforementioned opportunities to exist, the regime must pro-

1. Freedom to form and join organizations;

The extent to which the eight conditions are present in a contemporary

Marina del Rey, California Alex Roberto Hybel

1 Introduction: The Nature of the Problem 1

2 Theories of State Creation and Democratization 17

3 The Challenges of State Creation and Democratization in

4 The Challenges of State Creation and Democratization in

5 The Challenges of State Creation and Democratization in

6 State Creation and Democratization in Costa Rica and

7 An Exploratory Theory of State Creation and

The study of each country’s processes of state creation and political-