Barbara Geddes
American political scientist
Barbara Geddes (born October 15, 1944) is an American political scientist. One of the primary theorists of authoritarianism and empirical catalogers of authoritarian regimes, she is currently a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her 2003 book Paradigms and Sand Castles is an influential research design book in comparative politics.
Research
Geddes studies various authoritarian regimes and classifies them in five typologies: Military Dictatorships, Single-party Dictatorships, Personalist Dictatorships, Monarchies, and Hybrid Dictatorships. "Geddes' (1999) categorization of personalist, party, and military regimes and her use of this classification to examine theories regarding the survival of dictatorships and the likelihood of democratic transitions have been path breaking." In a 2014 article, the classification had seven typologies: dominant party regimes, military regime, personalist regimes, monarchies, oligarchic regimes, indirect military regimes, or hybrids of the first three. Thomas Pepinsky has described Geddes's work on authoritarianism as "path-breaking."
She is also interested in collapse of and transition between regimes. Her earlier work, "investigated bureaucratic reform and corruption in Brazil, the politics of economic policy making in Latin America, and political bargaining over institutional choice." Geddes has a regional focus on Latin America.
Major works
Geddes, Barbara (1994). Politician's Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America. University of California Press.
“Barbara Geddes” enters the record as american political scientist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Barbara, Geddes and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q62129808. VIAF identifies the subject as 54238392. The Library of Congress control number is n93055911. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 2003, 1999 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara Geddes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.