In considering the nature and future prospects of the current wave of democracies in Latin America, analysis has shifted from a concern with regime change, transitions, and consolidation to a focus on the quality of these democracies. To what extent, for example, do citizens participate and influence decision making? Are elections free and fair? Are there ways of ensuring government accountability? Do unelected power brokers exert undue influence?Furthering this new approach, the authors of The Quality of Democracy in Latin America provide a rich, nuanced analysis-centered on a multidimensional theoretical foundation-of democratic systems in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition parties are in the local arenas.
This series offers a comparative perspective on a critical issue - the often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics. This volume considers the case of Latin America, where evengelical Protestantism is increasingly challenging the historical Catholic hegemony.
In 2009, Ignacio Walker—scholar, politician, and one of Latin America’s leading public intellectuals—published La Democracia en América Latina. Now available in English, with a new prologue, and significantly revised and updated for an English-speaking audience, Democracy in Latin America: Between Hope and Despair contributes to the necessary and urgent task of exploring both the possibilities and difficulties of establishing a stable democracy in Latin America. Walker argues that, throughout the past century, Latin American history has been marked by the search for responses or alternatives to the crisis of oligarchic rule and the struggle to replace the oligarchic order with a democratic one. After reviewing some of the principal theories of democracy based on an analysis of the interactions of political, economic, and social factors, Walker maintains that it is primarily the actors, institutions, and public policies—not structural determinants—that create progress or regression in Latin American democracy.
This is a bold new study of the recent emergence of democracy in Latin America. Leonardo Avritzer shows that traditional theories of democratization fall short in explaining this phenomenon. Scholars have long held that the postwar stability of Western Europe reveals that restricted democracy, or "democratic elitism," is the only realistic way to guard against forces such as the mass mobilizations that toppled European democracies after World War I. Avritzer challenges this view. Drawing on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, he argues that democracy can be far more inclusive and can rely on a sphere of autonomous association and argument by citizens. He makes this argument by showing that democratic collective action has opened up a new "public space" for popular participation in Latin American politics. Unlike many theorists, Avritzer builds his case empirically. He looks at human rights movements in Argentina and Brazil, neighborhood associations in Brazil and Mexico, and election-monitoring initiatives in Mexico. Contending that such participation has not gone far enough, he proposes a way to involve citizens even more directly in policy decisions. For example, he points to experiments in "participatory budgeting" in two Brazilian cities. Ultimately, the concept of such a space beyond the reach of state administration fosters a broader view of democratic possibility, of the cultural transformation that spurred it, and of the tensions that persist, in a region where democracy is both new and different from the Old World models.
This volume describes and analyzes the proliferation of new mechanisms for participation in Latin American democracies and considers the relationship between direct participation and the consolidation of representative institutions based on more traditional electoral conceptions of democracy.
Shifting power balances in the world are shaking the foundations of the liberal international order and revealing new fault lines at the intersection of human rights and international security. Will these new global trends help or hinder the world's long struggle for human rights and democracy? The answer depends on the role of five rising democracies—India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia—as both examples and supporters of liberal ideas and practices. Ted Piccone analyzes the transitions of these five democracies as their stars rise on the international stage. While they offer important and mainly positive examples of the compatibility of political liberties, economic growth, and human development, their foreign policies swing between interest-based strategic autonomy and a principled concern for democratic progress and human rights. In a multipolar world, the fate of the liberal international order depends on how they reconcile these tendencies.
Latin American women’s movements played important roles in the democratic transitions in South America during the 1980s and in Central America during the 1990s. However, very little has been written on what has become of these movements and their agendas since the return to democracy. This timely collection examines how women’s movements have responded to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last twenty years. In these essays, leading scholar-activists focus on the various strategies women’s movements have adopted and assess their successes and failures. The book is organized around three broad topics. The first, women’s access to political power at the national level, is addressed by essays on the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile, gender quotas in Argentina and Brazil, and the responses of the women’s movement to the “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. The second topic, the use of legal strategies, is taken up in essays on women’s rights across the board in Argentina, violence against women in Brazil, and gender in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. Finally, the international impact of Latin American feminists is explored through an account of their participation in the World Social Forum, an assessment of a Chilean-led project carried out by women’s organizations in several countries to hold governments to the promises they made at international conferences in Cairo and Beijing, and an account of cross-border organizing to address femicides and domestic abuse in the Juárez-El Paso border region. Jane S. Jaquette provides the historical and political context of women’s movement activism in her introduction, and concludes the volume by engaging contemporary debates about feminism, civil society, and democracy. Contributors. Jutta Borner, Mariana Caminotti, Alina Donoso, Gioconda Espina, Jane S. Jaquette, Beatriz Kohen, Julissa Mantilla Falcón, Jutta Marx, Gabriela L. Montoya, Flávia Piovesan, Marcela Ríos Tobar, Kathleen Staudt, Teresa Valdés, Virginia Vargas
One of Latin America's leading sociologists, Manuel Antonio Garreton explores contemporary challenges to democratization in Latin America in this work originally published in Spanish in 1995. He pays particular attention to the example of Chile, analyzing the country's return to democracy and its hopes for continued prosperity following the 1973 coup that overthrew democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Garreton contends that the period of democratic crisis and authoritarian rule that characterized much of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s was symptomatic of a larger breakdown in the way society and government worked. A new era emerged in Chile at the end of the twentieth century, Garreton argues--an era that partakes of the great changes afoot in the larger world. This edition updates Garreton's analysis of developments in Chile, considering the administration of current president Ricardo Lagos. The author concludes with an exploration of future prospects for democracy in Latin America.
