success in handling this contradiction. Brazil was better than Argentina at inte-
grating the national bourgeoisie after establishing political and economic sta-
bility to ensure large injections of foreign capital. The case of Chile shows that
the pre-coupcrisis and post-couprepression in the 1970s were so extreme that
there was great difficulty in attracting foreign investment.
Bureaucratic-authoritarianism is not exclusively associated with later
phases of industrial modernization in Latin America. There are other
regimes where it seems equally likely that the phenomenon has appeared at
different phases of industrial development. Certainly the ‘regime’ and
‘coalition’ features of bureaucratic-authoritarianism have been experienced
in other regions of the Third World. What may be distinctive about the Latin
American case is the association with a particular policy, that of promoting
advanced industrialization. Further refinement of the concepts would make
it possible to identify whether one type of policy is a necessary condition for
a bureaucratic–authoritarian state, or whether certain kinds of regime and
coalition are consistent with other policies for the distribution of resources
within a society. As Collier (1979) notes for Latin America, interaction
between regimes and policy changes seem to cut across the BA/non-BA dis-
tinction. The possible explanations of the rise of authoritarianism are many
and varied. Not all confirm the ‘deepening of industrialization’ hypothesis,
or the preceding strength of the ‘popular’ sector.
State–society dialectics
Inquiry into the Third World state needs to consider an ambitious attempt to
produce a comparative framework designed to encompass states in all
regions of the world, whatever their level of wealth, industrialization or eco-
nomic development. Here the state was to be ‘brought back in’ as part of a
dialectical relationship with a political environment that shapes state action
and structure as well as being affected by them (Evans et al., 1985).
Seen from this perspective, tendencies towards autonomous state action
vary according to the type of state structures available to support such inter-
ventions. Some states are better placed than others constitutionally, politically
and culturally. Bureaucracies vary in levels of centralization and integration.
Constitutional powers vary in their degree of dispersal among sub-national
governments. Administrative agencies differ in the degree of penetration by
organized interests. State executives vary in their level of power over repre-
sentative legislatures. Organizational structures are themselves the conse-
quence of past state policies which vary from country to country.
124 Understanding Third World Politics