scholarly journals ¿Is Democracy in Latin America not liberal and is liberalism not democratic?

Democracias ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Andrés Gómez Polanco
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Illiberal Democracy ◽  
Democratic Liberalism ◽  
Controversial Concept

Latin American democracy has been a controversial concept due to its different interpretations by scholars and political actors. Some authors emphasize its illiberal character and other ones its elitist notion. This essay will argue that democracy, in the region, has been a symbiosis between non-democratic liberalism and illiberal democracy. Therefore, the feasibility of this democracy with adjectives has been channelized by populist phenomenon.

The Sovereign and its Shadow: Constituent Assembly and Indigenous Movement in Ecuador

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT ANDOLINA
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
Institutional Politics ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
Indigenous Movement ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Constitutive Principles

A crucial development in current Latin American politics is the growing involvement of indigenous movements in democracies grappling with the challenges of regime consolidation. This article examines how Ecuador's indigenous movement consecrated new rights and national constitutive principles in the 1997–8 constitutional assembly. It argues that the indigenous movement defined the legitimacy and purpose of the assembly through an ideological struggle with other political actors, in turn shaping the context and content of constitutional reforms in Ecuador. The article concludes that softening the boundary between ‘cultural politics’ and ‘institutional politics’ is necessary in order to understand the impact of social movements in Latin America.

scholarly journals Populism Revived:Donald Trump and the Latin American Leftist Populists

2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 733-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos de la Torre
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Community ◽  
First Century ◽  
European Politics ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Right Wing Populism ◽  
Hugo Chavez ◽  
Juan Peron

The twenty-first century could well become known as the populist century. No longer confined to Latin America or to the margins of European politics, populism has spread to Africa, Asia, and, with Donald Trump's election, to the cradle of liberal democracy. Even though it is uncertain what impact Trump's populism will have on American democracy, it is worth learning from Latin America, where populists have been in power from the 1930s and 1940s to the present. Even as Latin American populists like Juan Perón and Hugo Chávez included the poor and the nonwhite in the political community, they moved toward authoritarianism by undermining democracy from within. Are the foundations of American democracy and the institutions of civil society strong enough to resist US president Donald Trump's right-wing populism?

Doing Courts Justice? Studying Judicial Politics in Latin America

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Kapiszewski ◽  
Matthew M. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Judicial Politics ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Collective Effort ◽  
Key Questions

The past decade has brought an unprecedented boom in the study of courts as political actors in Latin America. We examine the extraordinary diversity of academic research on judicial politics in the region, identifying the key questions, findings, and theoretical debates in the literature, highlighting important conceptual disjunctions, and critiquing the research methods scholars of judicial politics in Latin America have employed in their work. We close by suggesting new avenues of inquiry to help advance the collective effort to understand the roles courts play in Latin American politics.

Popular Religions and the Building of Democracy in Latin America: Saving the Tocquevillian Parallel

1999 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Ireland
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Latin American ◽  
North American ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Religious Factor ◽  
Afro Brazilian

Do Latin America’s popular religions contribute to the formation of citizens and the development of civil society—the infrastructure of democracy—in ways that parallel the operation of the religious factor in the development of North American democracy as perceived by Tocqueville? Examining evidence prompting both negative and positive responses, this essay argues that Catholicism, Pentecostalism, and Afro-Brazilian Spiritism all contain tendencies that contribute to the development of pluralist democracy in the Latin American republics.

The Political Economy of Policy Volatility in Latin America

2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Statistical Tests ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Resource Rents ◽  
Natural Resource Rents

AbstractWhy are some Latin American states plagued by persistent policy volatility while the policies of others remain relatively stable? This article explores the political economy of natural resource rents and policy volatility across Latin America. It argues that, all else equal, resource rents will create incentives for political leaders, which will result in repeated episodes of policy volatility. This effect, however, will depend on the structure of political institutions. Where political institutions fail to provide a forum for intertemporal exchange among political actors, natural resource rents will result in increased levels of policy volatility. Alternatively, where political institutions facilitate agreement among actors, resource rents will be conducive to policy stability. This argument is tested on a measure of policy volatility for 18 Latin American economies between 1993 and 2008. The statistical tests provide support for the argument.

scholarly journals Democracia y autoritarismo en América Latina: en busca de la década pérdida (1995-2005)

2009 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Chinchón Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
The Future ◽  
America Latina

RESUMEN: Los últimos datos ofrecidos por el «Latinobarómetro» permiten volver a reflexionar sobre un tema clave como es la compleja relación entre democracia y autoritarismo en América Latina. Con este trabajo se pretende realizar una lectura crítica de estos datos, presentando una línea de análisis que permita evaluar el desarrollo de la democracia en la región durante el último decenio (1995-2005), sin renunciar a aventurar algunas hipótesis sobre el devenir futuro de la democracia en el subcontinente americano.ABSTRACT: The last results gotten from «Latinobarómetro» allow as thinking again about a key issue like the complex link between democracy and authoritarism in Latin America. This paper will try to make a critical review about this data, presenting an analysis to evaluate the development of democracy in this region during the last ten years (1995-2005). Some hypothesis about the future in the Latin American democracy will be offered also.

scholarly journals Women’s Political Activism and Civic Engagement in Latin America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany Barnes ◽  
Victoria Beall ◽  
Gregory Saxton ◽  
Dakota Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Women's Representation ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Latin American Region ◽  
The Many

Under the authoritarian regimes that dominated the 1950s to the 1980s, during the regional wave of democratization, and as citizens of new democracies, women have been instrumental political actors in many facets of politics in the Latin American region. Due to the many ways women are involved in politics, academic studies of the role of gender in contentious politics are equally varied, encompassing disciplines such as political science, sociology, and anthropology. Women engage in politics both inside and outside the state in many different ways. In this bibliography, we are focused on women’s political activism outside the state and women’s engagement as citizens. Whereas the study of women’s representation in government focuses on women as elites, this bibliography focuses on political activism from non-state actors, such as social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), opinion leaders, and grassroots leaders, as well as political engagement in terms of citizens’ participation. For more information on women in formal political roles, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Women’s Representation in Governmental Office in Latin America.

Democracy without Rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-184
Author(s):  
Horace A. Bartilow
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
National Security ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Illiberal Democracy ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
National Security State ◽  
Recipient Government ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
Regime Transitions

This chapter is motivated by the following question: What explains the determinants of illiberal democracies in Latin America and the prevalence of regime transitions from liberal to illiberal governance? The chapter argues that counternarcotic aid is the financial and diplomatic mechanism through which the corporatist drug enforcement regime has replicated essential features of the U.S. national security state in aid-recipient countries in Latin America for the purpose of fighting the drug war. The replication of the national security state and thereby the creation of a drug war national security state undermines the process of democratization and, in the process, produces illiberal regimes in the region. The drug-war-induced national security state explains not only the emergence of illiberal democracy in the region but also regressive regime transitions from liberal to illiberal governance. Probabilistic econometric models are used to analyze data for 19 Latin American countries covering the period 1978 to 2011. The findings show that U.S. counternarcotic aid increases, by 56 percent, the probability that a recipient government will be an illiberal democracy. And the risk of a liberal democratic government receiving aid and reverting to illiberal democracy increases by 44 percent.

Contribution to a Historical-Structuralist Understanding of Latin American Democracy

2020 ◽  
pp. 089692052094035
Author(s):  
Eduardo Enríquez Arévalo
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
The World ◽  
Structuralist View ◽  
Democratic Systems

Mainstream views for the study of democracy and of democracy in Latin America tend to center around a restricted model of democratic systems, which decides to ignore the wider social environment in which they exist. This article seeks to contribute toward a more sociological understanding of democracy and democratization in Latin America and the world. It does that through a review of structuralist and neo-structuralist theories of democracy and of Latin American democracy, which is put in dialogue and confrontation with mainstream political science views of democracy and more recent critical views of really existing democracy. From that exercise the article proposes what it calls a historical-structuralist view of Latin American democracy based on looking at the interaction of social structures, political institutions, and sociopolitical actors, to understand its democratic systems as determined by the possession or lack of sociopolitical power through resources within the inequalities of capitalist and global structures.

Migration vs. development? The case of poverty and inequality in Mexico

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agustín Escobar Latapi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Opportunity Cost ◽  
Inequality Index ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
And Migration

Although the migration – development nexus is widely recognized as a complex one, it is generally thought that there is a relationship between poverty and emigration, and that remittances lessen inequality. On the basis of Latin American and Mexican data, this chapter intends to show that for Mexico, the exchange of migrants for remittances is among the lowest in Latin America, that extreme poor Mexicans don't migrate although the moderately poor do, that remittances have a small, non-significant impact on the most widely used inequality index of all households and a very large one on the inequality index of remittance-receiving households, and finally that, to Mexican households, the opportunity cost of international migration is higher than remittance income. In summary, there is a relationship between poverty and migration (and vice versa), but this relationship is far from linear, and in some respects may be a perverse one for Mexico and for Mexican households.

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