1. Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell Ure was a prominent Argentine political scientist who specialized in comparative politics and Latin American politics.
25 Facts About Guillermo O'Donnell
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Guillermo O'Donnell spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States, and who made lasting contributions to theorizing on authoritarianism and democratization, democracy and the state, and the politics of Latin America.
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Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell Ure was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a family of Irish descent from County Donegal.
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Guillermo O'Donnell studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and became a lawyer in 1958, aged 22.
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In 1968 O'Donnell left Argentina to pursue graduate studies in political science at Yale University.
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Guillermo O'Donnell earned his master's degree in political science in 1971, but rather than complete his dissertation and take a job offer from Harvard University, he returned to Buenos Aires.
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Subsequently, Guillermo O'Donnell was a founding member of CEDES, where he worked from 1975 until 1979.
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In late 1979, Guillermo O'Donnell left Argentina again, this time for Brazil.
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Guillermo O'Donnell worked as a researcher at IUPERJ and then moved to the research center CEBRAP in Sao Paulo in 1982, replacing sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had become a national Senator.
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Guillermo O'Donnell was academic director of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies of the University of Notre Dame from 1983 until 1997.
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Guillermo O'Donnell held many short term appointment at universities around the world.
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Guillermo O'Donnell bridged the worlds of academia and politics, working with the United Nations Development Programme during the 2000s, collaborating with Dante Caputo and Gerardo Munck in the preparation of the United Nations Development Programme's report Democracy in Latin America.
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Guillermo O'Donnell was a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Democracy Fund and a member of the scientific committee of Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think-tank.
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Guillermo O'Donnell joined the Escuela de Politica y Gobierno, at the National University of General San Martin, his last professional affiliation.
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At UNSAM Guillermo O'Donnell founded the Centro de Investigaciones sobre el Estado y la Democracia en America Latina, in 2010.
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Guillermo O'Donnell was a theorist of authoritarianism, democratization, and state capacity.
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Guillermo O'Donnell introduced several new concepts into political science, such as bureaucratic authoritarianism, horizontal accountability, delegative democracy, and brown areas.
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Guillermo O'Donnell's best known work is Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, with Philippe C Schmitter.
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Guillermo O'Donnell argued that the form of authoritarianism experienced by South America starting in the 1960s was novel because it was based on modern technocrats and a professionalized military organization, instead of populist politicians or traditional military strongmen.
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Guillermo O'Donnell argued that this new form of authoritarianism emerged as the result of political conflict generated by an import-substitution model of industrialization.
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Guillermo O'Donnell cast his argument as an alternative to the thesis, advanced most notably by Seymour Martin Lipset, that industrialization produced democracy.
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In South America, Guillermo O'Donnell argued, industrialization generated not democracy, but bureaucratic authoritarianism.
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The next phase of Guillermo O'Donnell's research focused on the demise of authoritarianism and transitions to democracy.
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Guillermo O'Donnell's book, co-authored with Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, was a widely-read and influential work in comparative politics during the 1980s and 1990s.
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Guillermo O'Donnell's work warns against teleological thinking, that is, the tendency to see countries that democratized in the 1970s and 1980s as following in the tracks, though several steps behind, of the longstanding democratic countries of the West.