Comparative Analysis

J. Samuel Valenzuela is a Political and Historical and Comparative Sociologist who has studied labor movements, elections, and nineteenth as well as twentieth-century processes of democratization. While his research questions often stem from puzzles that he seeks to elucidate in Chilean history and society, he normally pursues them through comparisons with other settings, usually in Latin America and in Western Europe. His publications have been viewed as original and even iconoclastic contributions. They are widely cited and used in graduate and undergraduate courses throughout the world.

Valenzuela is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He was previously on the faculties of Yale and Harvard Universities as Assistant to Associate Professor. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris, and a Visiting Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford University. The respective dates for these appointments can be viewed in the curriculum vitae which can be opened by clicking below.

In addition to his teaching and research positions in Universities, Valenzuela has also served as a consultant in a variety of settings that relate directly to his areas of expertise as a Sociologist. Most recently he has advised the new Chilean government of President Ricardo Lagos on labor law reforms. He has suggested ways to instill equity in labor relations while retaining and even enhancing the competitive ability of firms in an open economy. In December 1999 he worked on the second-round campaign strategy and television messages of then candidate Ricardo Lagos. He coached the candidate on his image, suggested new ways of appealing to target voters, worked on brief captions to accompany television images, and co-wrote Lagos' main speech for the closing two weeks before the vote. Valenzuela has also worked as a consultant to a major publisher on a textbook on Latin American history and society aimed at the junior high school level.

A native of Chile, Valenzuela moved to the United States in order to pursue doctoral studies at Columbia University. The 1973 military coup led to the closing of most Departments of Sociology in Chilean Universities, and Valenzuela was therefore unable to return to his home country. He turned to studying European societies and politics, and eventually he went to Paris for research on the French labor movement while based at Sciences Po. After returning to the United States in 1976 he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation comparing labor movement formation in Chile and France as well as in other countries. It showed that similar causes could be found for a Chilean and French anomaly, namely, that of being the only nations with democratic institutions that saw the development of strong Communist as well as Socialist Parties in connection with their processes of labor movement formation. Valenzuela has since done considerable new research on Chilean labor history with primary sources in Santiago, and has written regularly in the field of comparative labor.

Valenzuela began research on nineteenth-century democratization in Chile when he wrote a paper for a course in 1971 on the process leading to the 1874 law expanding suffrage to all literate males. Further research over the years using primary sources has led to publications that have altered the pre-existing views on the origins and development of Chilean democracy. It is not true that only the rich voted, or that the electorate was entirely captive, as is often asserted. By 1894 Chile could be considered an incomplete suffrage democracy-incomplete given the lack of voting rights for women and for illiterates. This research has been essential in order to understand the political context in which labor movement formation took place. In addition, given its connections with the creation and development of political parties, several of Valenzuela's publications have been devoted to this subject as well.

The lengthy dictatorship that followed the crisis of Chilean democracy led Valenzuela to examine its consequences on civil society, the labor movement, and political parties. He also examined the characteristics of governmental institutions and their evolution. When the dictatorship was at its strongest in 1980, he predicted, against conventional opinion, that it would nonetheless fail in its attempts to depoliticize society and to thereby reconfigure the partisan allegiances of the electorate.

The processes of transition to democracy that were rapidly making headway around the world in the 1980s led Valenzuela to examine the relationship between labor and such transitions. In addition, as the Chilean transition began he examined the institutional legacies of the dictatorship for the redemocratized regime. He also studied the reconfiguration of the Chilean party system, showing both the changes that occurred as well as the validity of the original prediction that there would be remarkable continuities in the political allegiances of the electorate.

Valenzuela's experience with comparative research led him to write a paper, presented as a hommage to Comparative Political Sociologist Juan Linz, on how to do such research while avoiding the major pitfalls. Most courses in social science methodology hardly devote any attention to comparative historical research. Perhaps the underlying assumption is that its procedures are simple and straightforward, requiring little thought on how to select the cases for comparison and how to design the research procedures. Valenzuela's paper shows, instead, how complex comparative research procedures are. In particular, the analyst must devote considerable attention to the kind of "universe" of cases that his or her question refers to, and must adopt strategies to cope with the size of such universe if it is excessively large. This paper may be downloaded by interested readers by clicking below.