Howard J. Wiarda: Post-script

This essay concludes the symposium by considering Howard J. Wiarda’s topical scholarship on grand theory, corporatism, democratization, and development, in addition to his regional scholarship, which focused on Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian politics but also touched on every other major region of the world, including U.S. politics and foreign policy making. We seek to makes sense of the tensions in Wiarda’s work, especially between his critiques of theoretical determinism and ethnocentrism on the one hand and his continual emphasis on cultural and corporatist explanations of comparative politics, on the other. We argue that he made significant contributions to the field through his service as a public intellectual, mobilization of multiple theoretical perspectives, use of inductive methods, provocative interpretations of comparative politics throughout the world, and accessibility to students and policy makers.