Routledge Handbook of Latin American Politics

Peter Kingstone, Deborah J. Yashar, Peter Kingstone, Deborah J. Yashar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135280291
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Latin America has been one of the critical areas in the study of comparative politics. The region's experiments with installing and deepening democracy and promoting alternative modes of economic development have generated intriguing and enduring empirical puzzles. In turn, Latin America's challenges continue to spawn original and vital work on central questions in comparative politics: about the origins of democracy; about the relationship between state and society; about the nature of citizenship; about the balance between state and market.

The richness and diversity of the study of Latin American politics makes it hard to stay abreast of the developments in the many sub-literatures of the field. The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Politics offers an intellectually rigorous overview of the state of the field and a thoughtful guide to the direction of future scholarship. Kingstone and Yashar bring together the leading figures in the study of Latin America to present extensive empirical coverage, new original research, and a cutting-edge examination of the central areas of inquiry in the region.

PART I Democratic Governance and Political Institutions

DOI: 10.4324/9780203860267-1

1 THE ORIGINS AND DURABILITY OF DEMOCRACY¹

Gerardo L. Munck

DOI: 10.4324/9780203860267-2

The option between democracy and its alternatives has been a central axis of political conflicts in Latin America since the early twentieth century. A prelude to these conflicts was the process of state formation, which occupied the center stage of political life in the wake of the attainment of independence by Latin American countries roughly 200 years ago. But, inasmuch as the process of state formation resulted in a recognized center of political power and hence a semblance of political order, the struggle between forces in favor and opposed to subjecting political power to democratic control moved to the fore.

The history of the struggle over democracy in Latin America is relatively long and varied. The most vivid manifestations of this struggle were the waves of democratization and de-democratization, that is, fluctuations toward and away from democracy, that swept the region after World War II, and that involved a long period of harsh authoritarian rule in the 1960s and 1970s and the transitions to democracy of the 1980s and 1990s. Thereafter, a new, extremely positive phase was opened. Fears of a return to authoritarianism proved to be unwarranted and democracy gradually assumed the status of a regional norm. Indeed, an unequivocal fact of Latin American political life in the twenty-first century is that never before have so many countries in the region been democratic for so long.

It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to assume that the struggle over democracy can be taken as a settled matter. Analyses of Latin American politics in the twenty-first century can legitimately address the functioning of democracy, as has been standard in the study of the established democracies in wealthy countries. But current politics in Latin America cannot be reduced to conflicts that occur entirely within the institutional rules of democracy, as though conflicts about such rules had ceased to be relevant. Rather, as keen observers of current Latin American politics insist, the struggle over democracy continues to simmer beneath the surface and occasionally erupts into overt political conflict. In other words, the history of democracy continues to unfold.

This chapter offers an overview of the scholarship that has addressed the struggle over democracy in Latin America. The first section locates the study of Latin American politics within the broader disciplinary field of comparative politics, traces the origins of a research agenda centrally concerned with political regimes and democracy in Latin America, and identifies the key characteristics of this agenda. The second and the longest section focuses on the main explanatory theories and debates about the origins and demise of democracy understood as a type of political regime, discusses theoretical ideas and critiques, and summarizes the findings of empirical research. Finally, the third section turns to the frontiers of current research on democracy in Latin America and identifies some challenges concerning old questions tied to a minimalist definition of democracy and new questions that address other aspects of democracy.

1. A Research Agenda on Regimes and Democracy in Latin America

Latin American politics was rarely studied in comparative politics, the academic field within political science dedicated to the study of politics around the world, during the foundational period of this field in the early part of the twentieth century.² This can be seen clearly in the classic works on comparative politics of the 1920s and 1930s, such as James Bryce’s Modern Democracies 1921), Herman Finer’s Theory and Practice of Modern Government (1932) and Carl Friedrich’s Constitutional Government and Politics (1937). These texts invariably focused on the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, in some cases with side-glances to Canada and Australasia and an occasional reference to Russia. In contrast, even in the work of Bryce, one of the few established authors who had actually traveled to South America, the twenty countries of Latin America entered into the analysis briefly—receiving attention for twenty-one pages of a massive 1,117 page work (Bryce 1921: Vol. 1, Ch. 17)—and essentially as contrast cases, that is, as cases where the conditions for democracy found in the better known cases were lacking (Bryce 1921: Vol. 1, 188). Before World War II, comparative politics was a relatively parochial affair.

The status of the study of Latin American politics, and the empirical scope of comparative politics, changed considerably as a result of the new literature on modernization and dependency in the 1950s and 1960s. The modernization literature brought in Latin America, as well as Asia and Africa, to mainstream debates in comparative politics. And, in an even more significant break with prior patterns, thinking about Latin America during this period began to be shaped by authors who were based in the region—these authors were mainly sociologists, as political science was practically nonexistent in Latin America at the time³—who had a closer knowledge about Latin American politics than their U.S. counterparts, and who offered an alternative to the perspective on Latin American politics offered by the modernization literature.

The differences between modernization theory and its alternatives were quite notable.⁴ Much of the modernization literature on Latin America consisted of applications of the structural-functional framework developed by Gabriel Almond (Almond and Coleman 1960) with no prior knowledge of Latin America, or analyses that uncritically assumed, along with Seymour Lipset (1959a), a scholar who was knowledgeable about Latin America, that economic modernization unfolded in the same way, and had the same political consequences, around the world. In contrast, Gino Germani (1962) offered a conceptualization that drew attention to the specific model of politics that was associated with the process of economic development undergone by Latin American societies. And dependency theorists such as Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1969) stressed how the different location within the international economic system of Latin American countries, compared to the United States and Western Europe, led to a different pattern of development in Latin America and how this different pattern of development was associated with a different politics. In short, during the 1950s and 1960s an interesting debate took place, as Latin American authors challenged the orthodoxy of modernization theory and offered their own conceptualizations and theorizations. And this debate did much both to transform comparative politics in the United States from a parochial affair to an enterprise of global scope and to boost the study of Latin American politics.

The real takeoff in the study of Latin American politics, which firmly established it as part of comparative politics, occurred in the 1970s however, in large part spurred by the work of the Argentine and Yale-trained political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell (1973) on the breakdown of democracy in South America. O’Donnell’s work triggered a lively exchange between U.S. authors who studied Latin America and Latin American authors (Collier 1979),⁵ setting an example of scholarly collaboration between North and South that transformed the way knowledge about Latin American politics was produced. Moreover, O’Donnell’s work and the discussion about it was seminal in that it gave impetus to a new research agenda focused on Latin American political regimes and democracy that has been sustained over the past four decades.

This agenda of research has been wide ranging and has been fueled by the contributions of a large number of scholars. Thus, it is hard to characterize. But, as a point of entry into this research agenda, three features deserve highlighting.⁶ First, this research agenda has been firmly driven by a concern with understanding Latin American politics in its own terms and has been driven in large part by the desire to make sense of the evolving turns of Latin American politics. In broad strokes, this agenda has centered on the problem of the breakdown of democracy during the 1970s, the transition to democracy in the 1980s, the consolidation of democracy in the 1990s, and the quality of democracy in the 2000s. In other words, the central motivation for this research agenda has been the desire to understand Latin American political realities and the main forms that the democratic question has assumed in the past decades.

Second, even though scholars working on this agenda have shown an ongoing concern with matters of conceptualization and engaged in conceptual debates—these matters are particularly salient in current research on the quality of democracy—they have also managed to develop considerable agreement on many basic conceptual issues. Specifically, rather than take the macro dimensions of politics as a constant and focusing only on variations within a given political regime or within democracies, as in common in much research in the field of comparative politics, these scholars share an interest in variations at a macro level related to the political regimes and the democraticness of Latin American countries. Moreover, they have largely converged on a conceptualization of political regimes in terms of the procedures regulating access to the highest political offices in a country and of democracy as, at the very least, a type of regime characterized by mass suffrage and electoral contestation (Dahl 1971; Mazzuca 2007).

Third, this agenda has placed a heavy emphasis on explanatory theories and has sought to develop theory in an avowedly cosmopolitan fashion, that is, through a dialogue with existing theories on other regions of the world, especially the United States and Europe. Indeed, in this regard, it is important to recall that the community of scholars who have contributed to this agenda have been Latin Americanists from Latin America, the United States and Europe; but also broad comparativists who have worked more on other countries (e.g., the United States in the case of Lipset; European countries in the case of Alain Touraine, Juan Linz, and Philippe Schmitter) or who have addressed Latin America within the context of broad cross-national studies (e.g., Adam Przeworski). This has been a distinctive and very positive characteristic of this literature.

In sum, important steps have been taken in the study of Latin American politics over the past forty years. A real agenda of research on political regimes and democracy, shared by a distinguished set of scholars, has taken shape. The political realities of Latin America, or at least some aspects of politics of great normative concern, have been studied in a systematic manner. And, as discussed next, a rich debate has flourished regarding how to explain the varied experience of Latin American countries with democracy and other political regimes.

2. Explanatory Theories and Debates

The main explanatory theories and debates in the literature on regimes and democracy in Latin America have focused on the two closely related yet distinct questions: (1) What are the conditions for a transition from some form of authoritarianism to democracy? and (2) What are the factors that account for the durability or endurance of democracy? And, it is important to note that real debates about these two questions have been enabled by the widely shared view that, even though the definition of democracy remains the subject of much discussion, democracy is at least a type of regime in which access to the highest political offices in a country is characterized by mass suffrage and electoral contestation. Indeed, the consensus developed about the basic concept of democracy has served the key purpose of providing the conceptual anchor for fertile debates about explanatory theories among a diverse range of authors.

It is no simple matter to offer a comprehensive evaluation of explanatory debates about democracy. Explanations vary in terms of their goal, some purporting to offer an answer to both the question of the origins and the endurance of democracy, others focusing on only one of these questions. Explanations vary in terms of their parsimony, some highlighting the impact of a single variable, while others invoke multiple variables; and in terms of their clarity, that is, whether hypotheses are specified with precision. Finally, the explanations vary in terms of extent to which they have been subject to rigorous testing. Nonetheless, this fairly wide ranging and somewhat disparate body of literature has advanced discernable lines of research and generated fruitful debates that can be summarized under five headings: (1) the economic modernization thesis, (2) the civic culture thesis, (3) theories of capitalist development and class, (4) critical juncture models, and (5) political-institutional theories.⁷

2.1. The Economic Modernization Thesis

A standard point of reference in research on regimes and democracy in Latin America has been the modernization thesis that economic development, understood as practically synonymous with an increase in a country’s level of income, enhances both (1) the prospects of a transition to democracy and (2) the endurance of democracy (Lipset 1959a). Different reasons have been posited regarding why economic development was expec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Democratic Governance and Political Institutions
• PART II Development
• PART III Actors/Social Groups
• PART IV International Concerns
• PART V Theories/Methods
• PART VI Critical Reflections on the State of the Field
• Index