Summary

In most accounts Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship is understood to have impeded the development of political science in Chile. This article seeks to destabilize this understanding by showing that important elements of the infrastructure of the discipline were created during, and sometimes by this authoritarian regime. More concretely, through an in-depth and extensive examination of the political science produced during the Chilean dictatorship, I identify and characterize an institutional and intellectual space that I will call Authoritarian Political Science (APS). The findings challenge the dominant narrative that links the institutionalization of our discipline in Latin America to liberal democracy in a linear fashion, and suggest the need for a nuanced, empirically informed and theoretically dense understanding of political science’s multiple historical trajectories.