The Great Gap

“I find The Great Gap to be the best and most important contribution to the study of Latin America written for quite some time.”

—Guillermo O'Donnell, University of Notre Dame

“Inequality encompasses diverse aspects of social, political, and territorial relations that commonly elude even learned discussions and debates. The Great Gap sets a high standard for Latin Americanists as well as comparativists in terms of both the breadth and depth of its analyses of this fundamental issue.”

—Richard Tardanico, Florida International University

“Social scientists have long assumed that political democracy will reduce social and economic inequalities. Thus, they have been puzzled by the persistence of extreme inequalities under democratic regimes in Latin America. Merike Blofield and her co-authors shed new light on this question by exploring how inequalities shape group interests, political power, and democratic processes, often in ways that reproduce those very inequalities. This provocative and insightful text breaks new ground in the study of the political economy of inequality, in Latin America and beyond.”

—Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University

“Blofield’s volume is itself a wake-up call that democracy is only as strong as the level of equality it can help to produce.”

—Darryl McLeod Americas Quarterly

“In The Great Gap: Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution in Latin America, University of Miami political scientist Merike Blofield assembles a distinguished group of social scientists to look at why democracies tolerate high inequality. Blofield concludes that a ‘window of opportunity’ may be opening for more redistributive policies as populist regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia offer a wake-up call to the region’s elite about the perils of not acting. This may help persuade the middle and upper classes to invest in a new social contract where more public expenditures target the ‘unincorporated’ poor. . . . Blofield’s volume is itself a wake-up call that democracy is only as strong as the level of equality it can help to produce.”

—Darryl McLeod Americas Quarterly

“Blofield’s outstanding volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between inequality and politics. In addition to showing how inequality is reproduced, it persuasively demonstrates how pervasive inequality is in Latin America, how elites, the media, and the public perceive inequality, and how inequality affects taxation and social policies. . . . [It] deserve[s] a wide audience, and not only among Latin Americanists.”

—Benjamin Goldfrank Perspectives on Politics

“Interdisciplinary attempts to understand the increasingly complex relationships between continuing inequality and politics in Latin America are somewhat thin on the ground. Merike Blofield's excellent edited volume, prepared under the aegis of the Observatory on Inequality in Latin America at the University of Miami, represents a welcome contribution in this regard.”

—Anthony Hall Journal of Latin American Studies