Democracy and Latin America

This publication examines the process of democratic transition in post-authoritarian and post-civil war countries of Latin America. Issues discussed include: a broad definition of democracy based upon the existence of a 'political society'; the need to deal with past abuses of human rights by balancing justice and reconciliation; integrating societies into global market economics; the role of civil society; the problems of achieving a sense of citizenship in many communities; and issues of ethnicity.

This important new volume collects articles that evaluate different models of democracy, challenging the realities and myths of the practice of democracy in various countries throughout the region. This is a provocative and revealing study of the critical issues in the struggle for democracy and current events in the Third World and the United States. Through the writings of leading Latin American and U.S. scholars, including James Petras, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, and Max Azicri, the book addresses such important topics as whether Washington's "model democracies" are truly democratic, and how Guatemala's civilian regime compares to Nicaragua's revolutionary democracy.

Based on fifty years' worth of data, Assessing Democracy in Latin America examines & compares the progress of Latin American countries toward democracy. The essays in this volume, all written by contributors to the Fitzgibbon Democracy Survey, focus their analyses on those factors most germane to the growth, maintenance, or failure of democratic systems. For example, in his initial chapter, Philip Kelly identifies two variables, mechanized agriculture & per-capita newspaper circulation, as the best statistical indicators of democracy in Latin America. Other contributors explore a variety of new topics such as the connection between democracy & environmental movements (Kathryn Hochstetler & Steven Mumme), political parties (John D. Martz), & social dynamics (Robert L. Peterson).

Essays addressing what type of democracy may result from the constraints and opportunities that arise from neoliberalism.

While there is much literature analyzing the politics of implementing economic reforms, very little has been written on the social and political consequences of such reforms after they have been implemented. The basic premise of this book is that the convergence of many social, economic, and political ills (such as high levels of poverty, income inequality, criminal violence, and the growth of the informal sector) in the context of unprecedented levels of political democratization in Latin America presents a paradox that needs to be explained. What Kind of Democracy? demonstrates how the myriad social problems throughout the region are intimately linked both to a new economic development model and the weaknesses of Latin American democracy.

This volume brings together prominent scholars from Canada, the United States, and Latin America representing several different disciplines to analyze ongoing processes of economic, social, and political change in the region. The contributors are Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Yoshiaki Nakano, Werner Baer, Claudio Paiva, Jorge Schvarzer, Jean-Francois Prud'homme, Juan Alberto Fuentes K., Manuel Barrera, Francisco Zapata, and Francisco Weffort.

This book examines the role of the military in the wave of democratization that has swept through Latin America in the past decade. Although much of the leading literature on the transition to democracy recognizes the importance of "hardline" and "softline" factions within the military in this process, the author takes this study one step further to investigate the motivations of the military officers themselves. Using the cases of Brazil and Bolivia, and relying on dozens of interviews with military officers, politicians, jurists, and other observers throughout Latin America, he determines that the factions' attitudes do not depend primarily on ideological commitment but on the leaders' calculation, as to the career benefits to their followers of either supporting or opposing democratization. In terms of policy making, it is important to recognize this distinction in order to help preserve the fragile democracies which are already under threat from the military once again.

Prillaman fills a significant gap in the literature on democratic consolidation and challenges the conventional wisdom about Latin American judicial reform. He has developed a coherent list of indicators to monitor whether judiciaries are improving or decaying over time, applied that framework to contemporary case studies, and concluded that prospects for democracy are bleaker than traditionally assumed.

As an expanded version of the introductory chapters to the widely used and authoritative Latin American Politics and Development, but omitting the country-by-country chapters, this entirely new book presents a concise overview of Latin American politics.

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.

Against a broader backdrop of globalization and worldwide moves toward political democracy, The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America examines the unfolding relationships among social change, equity, and the democratic representation of the poor in Latin America. Recent Latin American governments have turned away from redistributive policies; at the same time, popular political and social organizations have been generally weakened, inequality has increased, and the gap between rich and poor has grown. Hanging in the balance is the consolidation and the quality of new or would-be democracies; this volume suggests that governments must find not just short-term programmes to alleviate poverty, but long-term means to ensure the effective integration of the poor into political life. The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America bridges the intellectual chasm between, on the one hand, studies of grassroots politics, and on the other, explorations of elite politics and formal institution-building. It will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Latin American politics and society and, more generally, in the vicissitudes of democracy and citizenship in the late twentieth-century global system.