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A Micro-Political Explanation of the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Alfred G. Cuzán  and
Richard J. Heggen
Alfred G. Cuzán
Affiliation:
University of West Florida
Richard J. Heggen
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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This paper presents a tentative explanation of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution using a “micro-political” model of political profit, governmental efficiency, and political stability applied to data on the history of Somoza's fall. The revolution is explained as the outcome of a loss of stability by a government that attempted to control a greater share of the resources of the nation than its capabilities to persuade and coerce the population would allow. The initial results of the model, though preliminary, permit us to raise some important questions about the future of Nicaragua's political economy.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , 1982 , pp. 156 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented before the 1980 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 5 April, 1980. Cuzán thanks James L. Busey, James Buchanan, William Glade, and Gordon Tullock for their criticisms and encouragement while these ideas were being developed. He also expresses appreciation to his students in political economy at New Mexico State University who listened and argued sympathetically as the model was presented to them in lectures and individual discussions. Finally, he gratefully acknowledges the intellectual and moral support provided him by Paul Sagal and Cal and Janet Clark.

References

Notes

1. For a complete exposition of the theory see the following papers by the authors: Richard J. Heggen and Alfred G. Cuzán, “Legitimacy, Coercion and Scope: An Expansion Path Analysis of Five Central American Countries and Cuba,” Behavioral Science 26, no. 2 (Apr. 1981):143–52; Cuzán, “Authority, Scope, and Force: An Analysis of Five Central American Countries,” Public Choice 35 (1980):363–69; “Political Profit: Taxing and Spending in Democracies and Dictatorships,” and “Political Profit: Taxing and Spending in the Hierarchical State,” both in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (in press).

2. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1969), pp. 217–18. This book was originally published in 1851.

3. See, for example, Gordon Tullock, The Politics of Bureaucracy (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965) and Richard D. Auster and Morris Silver, The State as a Firm (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishing, 1979).

4. Plato, “The Laws,” in B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 493. (Emphasis added).

5. David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” in Henry D. Aiken, ed., Hume's Moral and Political Philosophy (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1948), p. 307.

6. There are other sources of legitimacy, such as the one derived from the personality of political leaders. However, as Max Weber pointed out, that is an unstable source. See “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 245–52.

7. Martin C. Needier, An Introduction to Latin American Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1977), p. 107.

8. Hume, “First Principles.”

9. In the first paper listed in note 1 we argue that rulers seldom pay the full costs of coercion themselves. Rather, these are borne in large part by the victims of the regime. Hence, rulers have a tendency to use too much of this factor, as Plato observed in the quote cited earlier (see note 2).

10. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 128–36.

11. Empirically, legitimacy has been found to vary negatively with coercion. See Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 185–92.

12. This term was suggested by an anonymous referee of LARR.

13. Statistical Abstract for Latin America (SALA) (Los Angeles: University of California, 1978), pp. 140–41.

14. Thomas W. Walker, “Nicaragua: The Somoza Family Regime,” in Howard J. Wiarda and Harvey F. Kline, eds., Latin American Politics & Development (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979), p. 324.

15. Ibid., p. 325.

16. Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr., Mass Political Violence: A Cross-National Causal Analysis (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973), pp. 182, 185. We are grateful to another anonymous referee of this journal for bringing this excellent book to our attention.

17. Ibid., p. 186.

18. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, p. 429.

19. James L. Busey, “Nicaragua and La Prensa after Somoza,” paper presented at the Caribbean Studies Association V Annual Meeting, Curação, N.A., May 1980.

20. According to an anonymous referee of LARR, that is the term used by Juan Linz to describe the Somoza regime.

21. Busey, “Nicaragua and La Prensa,” p. 157.

22. Ibid., p. 127.

23. The theory of “expansion paths” is explained in the first paper listed in note. 1.

24. The history of the FSLN government through 1 April 1980 is carefully documented in Busey, “Nicaragua and La Prensa.”

25. On the French revolution see Alexis de Toqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955; originally published in 1856); on the Russian and Chinese revolutions, see Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, pp. 438–46.