Latin America's Struggle for Democracy
“Latin America’s democratic regimes are still afflicted by many shortcomings because institutions are not as strong as they should be,” Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said yesterday. Her views echo those aired in a seminar on the State of Democracy in Latin America held earlier this week at the National Endowment for Democracy.
The continent was previously central to democracy assistance in practice and to the analytical literature on democratization, noted Marc F. Plattner, of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the NED. But it shifted from highly visible and contested terrain to what Moises Naim called the lost continent, falling off the map of journalists, investors and diplomats after 9/11.
The meeting, held to mark the publication of Latin America’s Struggle for Democracy, a Journal of Democracy book, was taking place at an “extraordinary moment”, said Larry Diamond, one of the books co-editors, with Plattner and Diego Abente Brun. Some three decades after the “third wave” of democratization reached Latin America, the military remains “politically subdued”, he said, and not a single state has reverted to rule by the generals. Some 31 of 33 states were democratic, with Cuba and Venezuela the outliers, sometimes demonstrating interesting forms of political experimentation and social empowerment, as in Brazil’s participatory budgeting.
The threats to Latin American democracy no longer come from the barracks or the garrisons, but from faulty institutions and persistently high levels of poverty and inequality, said Abente Brun, deputy director of the NED’s Forum and a former Paraguayan senator.
Some countries are confronting poverty and inequality through conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, like Mexico’s Oportunidades and Brazil’s Bolsa Família, through which poor families receive small stipends on condition that their children attend school. Poverty in Mexico was halved between 1996 and 2005, and Brazil’s Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality) dropped significantly from 1995 to 2004.
The “inclusionary liberal democracies” of Chile, Brazil and Uruguay set the standard, said Abente. But too many states still suffer from institutional deficiencies. The market works, the state does not, often lacking the capacity and political will to deliver services to a new and loose constituency of grievance-driven “informals” who provide the social basis of radical populism, reflecting new patterns of social and political mobilization.
While democracy may be on the defensive elsewhere, there has been no rollback of democracy in Latin America, observed Cynthia McClintock, professor of political science at George Washington University. The continent’s Freedom House scores peaked in 2006 and have since leveled off. During the “democratic fiesta” of elections in 11 states in 2006, only in Mexico was the result disputed.
Between 1930 and 1980, 40% of governmental change in Latin America came through military coups, said Arturo Valenzuela, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies. While the “dark nights of authoritarianism” are long gone, challenges remain, in part because of conceptual confusions that accompanied democracy’s third wave.
The establishment of democracy was confused with its consolidation, neglecting the importance of Rostow’s “habituation” phase. Democratization of states with a history of dictatorship like Paraguay was conflated with re-democratization in places like Chile which enjoyed engrained democratic traditions, habits and institutions. Finally, neo-liberal programs of structural stabilization took the form of a “vulgar Marxist economic determinism”, treating institutions as a dependent variable and assuming democracy would magically emerge through market-driven economic growth.
States like Chile, Brazil and Uruguay have developed strong political institutions, a functioning democratic process and robust centrist coalitions. But many democracies are marred by paralysis and confrontational politics. Their limited capacity to deliver and address acute social problems has created openings for the majoritarian populism evident in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
Populist discourse crudely divides politics and society into a clash of The People vs. the Oligarchs, according to Ecuadoran political scientist Carlos de la Torre, a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Democracy is distorted and diluted as politics is reduced to “plebiscitary acclamation” and interests represented “or incarnated” in the figure of the leader.
“Latin America was born with a birth defect: a highly unequal initial distribution of resources that dates back to the colonial era,” Francis Fukuyama has observed. Neglecting the social dimension of democratization undermines the likelihood of successful democratic consolidation. “Oligarchic societies may be able to achieve high rates of growth for a period of time,” he argues, “but continuing inequities in distribution lead to political instability and populism, which then undermines growth.”
“If the U.S. wants to support liberal democracy around the world, it needs to start thinking seriously about a well-designed social agenda that will appeal to the poor,” argues Fukuyama, a NED board member. “If true supporters of liberal democracy and free markets are to compete successfully with the populists, they need “a social agenda that gives some hope not just to the middle-class and educated, but to those who are isolated and excluded.”
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