The "Kling Thesis": An Early Effort at Systematic Comparative Politics

Unlike the lives of our itinerant contemporary scholars, who do their undergraduate studies at one institution, their PhD degrees at another, get their "starter jobs" at a third, and often move several more times before retiring, Kling received his BA, MA and PhD from Washington University and joined the Political Science Department faculty in 1946, three years before completing his PhD in 1949. By requiring acceptable theories to be able to account for change, Kling makes a strong case against deterministic arguments, even though he does not explicitly refer to them in those terms.\n Kling's argument is that "The control of mineral wealth... introduces an external element of restraint on the exercise of power by domestic forces and movements within Latin America" (p. 30).