2002 Events

Human Rights in Transitions to Democracy: Reflections on Post-Pinochet Chile

Samuel Valenzuela
University of Notre Dame

Valenzuela’s research has centered on the origins and development of Chilean democracy and its party system since the nineteenth century, on the formation of labor movements and their political roles in Europe and the Americas, and on problems of transitions to democracy from recent authoritarian rule, including the issue discussed in his Bildner presentation —institutionalizing human-rights policies in democratizing nations. He has also written on comparative methodology and development theory.

The findings in his Democratización via reforma: La expansión del sufragio en Chile (1985, and soon to be published in a revised edition) provided a major reassessment of Chile’s nineteenth-century democratization, demonstrating—contrary to previously accepted interpretations —that it was not only the rich that voted, that the expanded electorate was not entirely captive of large landholders, and that the dynamics of democratic competition served to make Chilean Catholic activists and officials into supporters of, rather than conspirators against, democratic institutions.

The most recent of his sixty-some academic articles in journals and in books is “Class
Relations and Democratization: A Reassessment of Barrington Moore’s Model,” in Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves, The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton University Press, 2001).

J. Samuel Valenzuela received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 1979. He research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He has taught at Harvard and Yale Universities, and served as Visiting Professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris and Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

More information on J. Samuel Valenzuela may be found on his webpage at the University of Notre Dame: ww.nd.edu/~jvalenzu.
The webpage includes a link to the text of his chapter, “Macro Comparisons without the Pitfalls: A Protocol for Comparative Research”
(1998), and to his extended c.v.

When: Monday, May 6, 4:00 PM
Where: Room C-203 (Concourse Level)
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
(Across from the Empire State Building)

To reserve, please send an e-mail to bildner@gc.cuny.edu OR call 212 817-2096.