Potential Mistakes, Plausible Options: Establishing the Legacy of Hypothesized Critical Junctures

When I was studying at Berkeley with David and Ruth Collier in the first decade of the 2000s, a recurring question on our minds was whether the shift to neoliberalism constituted a “new critical juncture” for Latin American politics. In graduate seminars, we frequently debated the political consequences of neoliberal reforms and how to make sense of the ensuing transformations of party systems and political representation. Meanwhile, others outside of Berkeley were pursuing similar themes. Most prominently, Kenneth Roberts began developing the “new critical juncture” argument in detail, both in a 2002 article and also in the draft book manuscript—circulating samizdat-style among Berkeley graduate students at the time—that eventually became Changing Course in Latin America. In exploring critical junctures, we sought to ask big questions about substantively important outcomes in Latin American politics, but also to answer these questions through a careful application of the comparative method. And while I enjoyed debating the new critical juncture question in seminars and hallway conversations, I had significant doubts at the time as to whether it could be answered in a similarly definitive fashion as Collier and Collier had done for the old one. My concern centered on the inherent difficulties in analyzing recent or ongoing transformations with a method and theoretical model that presupposes temporal distance from the events in question. Looking at the panorama of Latin American politics and party systems more than a decade later, I think many of these misgivings were justified. In this essay, I reflect upon the challenges of using the critical juncture framework to analyze the political and partysystem consequences of the shift to neoliberalism in Latin America. I do so primarily by examining the work of Roberts. I should state at the outset that I consider Changing Course in Latin America to be a masterful analysis of the transformation of Latin American party systems over the past several decades, as well as a particularly careful application of the critical juncture framework, which is often invoked much more casually. Moreover, as both Roberts’ book and his contribution to this symposium make clear, we agree on the importance of hindsight in developing a critical juncture argument.