Making Sense of Suffrage Expansion and Electoral Institutions in Latin America: A Comment on Colomer's “Tiger”

In his article “Taming the Tiger: Voting Rights and Political Instability in Latin America,” Josep Colomer proposes to go beyond the “singlecountry stories… typical… of the existing historiography” on Latin American elections and politics and to develop instead “an explicitly comparative, theory-driven analysis, which is more characteristic of the social sciences literature.” I am all for such comparative analysis, although I would guard myself from belittling the achievements of historians who have examined national experiences in painstaking detail or the merit of a highly analytical comparative history such as that presented in Eduardo Posada-Carbó’s recent work (2000). But theory-driven comparative analysis is difficult to do well. One has to know the historical experiences one is comparing very thoroughly, and one has to know how to develop the concepts that will build the theoretical argument in a dialogue with the evidence. The result should be to provide a better understanding of the evidence in ways that even those who know the histories well will find both useful and illuminating.