The Original Sin of Latin American States: Formation, Building, and Capacity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The capacity of the state in Latin America is limited, preventing the implementation of policies to address problems that have been historically necessary (e.g., under-nutrition, poverty, or security). While existing explanations propose that Latin American states emerged weak as a by-product of independence — its original sin — there is no consensus on why low state capacity has persisted in spite of political and economic shocks in the last two centuries that could have been expected to influence state capacity. A research agenda on the long-term determinants of state capacity should be informed by emerging, historically rooted, scholarship on state formation and state building. We review recent publications on these topics with two objectives. First, we provide an analytical synthesis of recent contributions. Second, this synthesis suggests future research on state capacity in the region. In particular, we emphasize the role of elites, geography, institutional dynamics, mid-range theories and methods sensitive to processes and time. We believe that a consideration of these elements can contribute to the development of theory and the integration of state capacity in Latin America, as well as facilitate a more fluid dialogue with literature focused on other parts of the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".