Corridors of Power: Elites, Railroads and Development in Brazil and Argentina.

This dissertation explains why the same general-purpose technology—late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century rail—left such different long-run imprints in two otherwise similar federations, Brazil and Argentina. It advances a theory of infrastructure federalism: elite alignments forged at constitutional junctures fixed fiscal and representational rules that selected first-generation corridors; organizations and veto players then locked those choices in, and later modes (especially highways) layered onto the inherited map. Historically, centralized customs and interior overrepresentation in Argentina produced a dense, peripheral-reaching web; Brazil’s 1891 decentralization empowered corridor coalitions, yielding a sparse, trunk-heavy grid. A sequenced mechanism—sunk costs → organizational inertia → elite veto power → modal layering—accounts for persistence across regime change and technology turnover. Empirically, the dissertation combines historical reconstruction with a harmonized, within-country design: matched comparisons and OLS models (with non-linear distance splines) estimate the contemporary footprints of the 1914 rail network while conditioning on pre-rail geography, baseline population/literacy, and maritime and administrative access. The results reveal asymmetric legacies that map one-for-one onto network topology: in Brazil, effects are presence-driven and state-capacity-heavy (large station premia in literacy, sanitation, and life expectancy, with steep near-grid penalties); in Argentina, effects are proximity-driven and market-access-heavy (higher income, population, and road density near trunks and junctions, with flat social gradients after early equalization). The policy implication follows directly: where networks were sparse and presence does the work (Brazil), reconnection of off-grid interiors paired with service delivery offers the highest return; where networks were dense and proximity/position matters (Argentina), bottleneck relief and junction upgrades dominate. More broadly, changing outcomes requires working with—and, where necessary, reforming—the political rules that chose the map in the first place.