The focus of this paper will be revolutions as a Third World phenomena. It will try to analyse what are the conditions and challenges faced by Third World states; and what are the functions that those states perform, or fail to perform. In other words, what are the conditions likely to lead to a revolution within Third World nation-states? / Of course, every Third World state possesses its particular circumstances and, therefore, different factors will influence the occurrence of a revolution in each case. It would be presumptuous of me to attempt to address all of these issues which have been raised. My task is indeed more modest. Since it is very unlikely to elaborate a single theory that will fit all cases, this paper will rather consider a theoretical framework and assess its applicability and its explanatory potential of one Third World revolution, the Nicaraguan revolution. / What this paper will also do is to examine what happens when a successful revolution has taken place. How is the new regime constructed? How is the power of the revolutionary government employed? Can we assess the relative success of a revolution? / The use of a single case study, Nicaragua, can be explained by the richness of this particular example. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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Understanding how change occurs in lesser developed countries, particularly in Latin America has been the subject of a prolonged theoretical academic debate. That debate has emphasized economics more that politics in general and predictability over unpredictability in the Latin American region. This paper challenges these approaches. Explaining change requires an examination of the politics of public policy as much as its economic dimensions. Second, change in the Latin American region may be less predictable than it appears. Scholars maintain that change in Latin America occurs when contending elites negotiate it. Their power comes from the various resources they possess. Change, therefore, is not expected to occur as a function of regime change per se. This paper considers the treatment of education policy in Nicaragua during the regimes of the dynastic authoritarianism of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1967-1979), the revolutionary governments of the Sandinistas (1979-1990), and the democratic-centrist government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (1990-1996). The central research question is: When regimes change, do policies change? The methodology defines the independent variable as the regime and education policy as the dependent variable. It posits three hypotheses. The right-wing regime of Somoza was expected to restrict both the qualitative aspects and the financing of education; (2) the left-wing regimes of the Sandinistas were hypothesized to have expanded both; and (3) the democratic-centrist regime of Chamorro was expected to have both expanded and restricted certain aspects of education policy. Several chapters describe these regimes' expansive or restrictive education strategies. A comparative analysis of these 26 years demonstrates several variables' effect over time. An OLS regression and a times series analysis specifies the relationship between regime change and percent of GDP each regime devoted to education. Both the statistical and qualitative findings of this study confirm the hypotheses. The study reveals that, as regimes changed, education strategies and policies changed. Such findings challenge some current thought about political behavior with respect to Latin American development in particular and development theory in general.

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Women have been part of modern revolutions since the American Revolution against Great Britain. Most descriptions and analyses of revolution relegate women to a supporting role, or make no mention of women's involvement at all. This work differs from prior efforts in that it will explore one possible explanation for the successes of three revolutions based upon the levels of women's support for those revolutions. An analysis of the three cases (Ireland, Russia, and Nicaragua) suggests a series of hypotheses about women's participation in revolution and its importance to revolutions' success.