Replacing old elites with the new

On their (promotional) blog, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nations Fail, recently featured the impacts of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution on Bolivian inequality, trying to explain why Bolivia remains poor. During the revolution, the political party Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) overthrew the exploitative colonial institutions, leading to lower inequality in the next few years. However, not long after, inequality rose to pre-revolution levels just before the 1970s (as shown below).

Experts suggest that this occurred because the MNR, touting to be champions of the Bolivians, actually internalized the broken ways of the past and simply established themselves as the new elite. Land was managed and allocated by the MNR, but in the process the locals had to resort to the old patron-client relations which they were brought up with. The figure below shows that the simple agragian structure of the past was supplanted by a more complex hierarchy that was still characterized by strong influences of clientism and patronage. 

So instead of transforming Bolivian society into an inclusive one, society regressed to the ways of the old. A clear example of how institutions (comprising rules, habits, and customs), once established and maintained for long times, can be hard to break in an instant.