At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive that media freedom is on the decline, writes Karin Deutsch Karlekar, project director of Freedom House’s annual Freedom of the Press report.

After all, in a world in which news is being produced by a broader range of professionals – as well as citizen journalists and bloggers – information is flowing at faster rates than ever before. And with news being transmitted through a greater variety of mediums – including newspapers, radio, television, the internet, mobile phones, flash drives, and social media – one might expect the level of media freedom worldwide to be improving, not worsening, she writes for CNN’s Public Square.

Yet Freedom House’s annual Freedom of the Press report (excerpt below), which measures the environment journalists operate within as well as access to news and information, shows that the world’s media are often facing growing pressures in a range of political settings. An overall decline in the level of global media freedom – reversing last year’s improvement – was driven by declines in almost every region of the world. Reasons for the deterioration included the continued, increasingly sophis­ticated repression of independent journalism and new media by authoritarian regimes; the ripple effects of the European economic crisis and longer-term challenges to the financial sustainability of print media; and ongoing threats from non-state actors such as radical Islamists and organized crime groups…..RTWT:

Ongoing political turmoil produced uneven conditions for press freedom in the Middle East in 2012, with Tunisia and Libya largely retaining their gains from 2011 even as Egypt slid backward into the Not Free category. The region as a whole experienced a net decline for the year, in keeping with a broader global pattern in which the percentage of people worldwide who enjoy a free media environment fell to its lowest point in more than a decade. Among the more disturbing developments in 2012 were dramatic declines for Mali, significant deterioration in Greece, and a further tightening of controls on press freedom in Latin America, punctuated by the decline of two countries, Ecuador and Paraguay, from Partly Free to Not Free status.

While there were positive developments in Burma, the Caucasus, parts of West Africa, and elsewhere, the dominant trends were reflected in setbacks in a range of political settings.

The trend of overall decline occurred, paradoxically, in a context of increasingly diverse news sources and ever-expanding means of political communication. The growth of these new media has triggered a repressive backlash by authoritarian regimes that have carefully controlled television and other mass media and are now alert to the dangers of unfettered political commentary online. Influential powers—such as China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—have long resorted to a variety of techniques to maintain a tight grip on the media, detaining some press critics, closing down or otherwise censoring media outlets and blogs, and bringing libel or defamation suits against journalists.

Russia, which adopted additional restrictions on internet content in 2012, set a negative tone for the rest of Eurasia, where conditions remained largely grim. In China, the installation of a new Communist Party leadership did not produce any immediate relaxation of constraints on either traditional media or the internet. In fact, the Chinese regime, which boasts the world’s most intricate and elaborate system of media repression, stepped up its drive to limit both old and new sources of information through arrests and censorship.

Was Venezuela’s constitutional coup made in Havana?

“A throng of Hugo Chávez supporters flooded the streets of downtown Caracas on Thursday, as Venezuela‘s interim leaders substituted Mr. Chávez’s inauguration ceremony for a massive demonstration of support for the absent, cancer-stricken leader,” the Wall Street Journal reports:

Colette Capriles, a political analyst at Simon Bolivar University, said a certain “theology” was emerging around Mr. Chávez’s persona, with supporters forging personal ties with the president and his movement. “They are saying they are the heirs of Chávez, or the sons of Chávez,” Ms. Capriles said.

Chávez has designated foreign minister Nicolas Maduro as his political heir, but the president’s death would lead to a power struggle within the Chávista movement and may create space for the democratic opposition, say analysts:

Chávez’s charisma helped him skirt criticism about widespread government inefficiency, but Mr. Maduro’s popularity could suffer if the problem isn’t tackled, said José Rafael Mendoza, a political scientist at Venezuela’s National School of Administration and Public Finance. “That could give the opposition more time” to strengthen, Mr. Mendoza said.

The populist leader’s autocratic instincts were all too apparent on his interminable Sunday talk show.

“He once fired all the top management of the national oil company” during the show, says former Venezuelan trade minister Moises Naim. “In other instances of his show, he would nationalize a bank or the electricity company.”

Oil money allowed the regime to bankroll handouts to the poor and disguise their catastrophic mismanagement of the economy, says Naim, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy.

“That allows you to experiment, and provides you a cushion to cover your mistakes,” he says. “The ‘oil curse’ allows for sustained bad ideas to linger over time.”

Chávez also sent money to neighboring countries, often in the form of cheap energy. Some were friends of the ideological revolution, like Cuba. Others were marriages of political convenience.

“So if there are votes in organizations that come up about Venezuela,” says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C., “those countries are more likely to be influenced if get good deal on oil to vote with Venezuela as opposed to against Venezuela.”

It’s been a potent fusion of power, ideology, and economic leverage, says Shifter.

“I don’t think it necessarily has to go this way,” Shifter says. “You have Evo Morales who is a close ally of Hugo Chávez. But the Bolivian economy is much better managed than the Venezuelan economy.

Respect for the democratic process will be vital to restoring US-Venezuela ties, says the Obama administration.

But a leading democracy advocate detects Havana’s hand behind the regime’s attempt to bypass the constitution.

Chávez’s mandate “began on January 10th, 2007 and ends January 10th, 2013, and if the elected president can’t take the oath that day the Assembly’s President assumes power temporarily and calls for new elections within a maximum of 30 days,” says Carlos Ponce, general coordinator of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy.

“But for Cuba, which receives more than $10 billion a year plus other benefits from Venezuela, this is not acceptable,” he says.   

“Thanks to Hugo Chávez and his fake revolution, the Cuban dictatorial regime has been able to survive this past decade,” argues Ponce, a leading member of the World Movement for Democracy and the steering committee of the Community of Democracies.

A decrepit, debt-ridden, statist economy will form a key part of Chávez’s toxic legacy, observers suggest.

“The state is the only producer of foreign currency,” Willians Ruiz, an independent economist and government critic, told Al Jazeera. “The government realised that by manipulating the currency it could have a vast control of national economic performance… the economy ends up subjected to the interests of the régime.”

For many analysts, divisions among Venezuelans are part of the price for a change in government policies and the inception of a new socialist project.

“The country has wounds of pain in its recent history caused by the corruption, the violence that we have suffered, and now we have a country completely divided,” Ignacio Contreras, a member of the opposition Christian Democrat party (COPEI), told Al Jazeera.

According to some analysts, 2012 saw the most murders in Venezuela’s history. The Venezuelan Violence Observatory, an NGO monitoring crime, estimated that 21,692 people were murdered in 2012, yielding a rate of 73 killed per 100,000 people.

“A broader concern is the democratic double standard that keeps rearing its head under Chávez’s rule,” according to TIME’s Tim Padgett:

After Venezuelans in 2007 rejected Chávez’s original bid to abolish presidential term limits, for example, he held another referendum in 2009 and won — even though the constitution barred him from revisiting the issue during the same term. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights recently ruled that the lack of due process Maduro decried in Paraguay can be glaring as well in Venezuela, where an arbitrary Chávez code has disqualified hundreds of opposition politicians from running for office simply because they were accused of corruption.

Defamation laws threaten to jail anyone who insults the President and government officials — despite the fact that before Chávez came to power, leftists and other dissenters were themselves often locked up for the same thing. And Judge María Lourdes Afiuni is still under house arrest (she had previously been in prison) after she angered Chávez in 2009 by releasing a corruption suspect because prosecutors had failed to bring him to trial during the time stipulated by Venezuelan law.

RTWT

Democracy, in the form of “accountable governance,” is one of the primary drivers of prosperity, according to a major new survey.

Some 27 out of the top 30 countries in Legatum Institute’s prosperity index are democracies, although India, the world’s largest democracy, fell ten places since 2009 due to a decline in the quality of governance.

The index measures global prosperity by benchmarking 142 countries in eight categories: economy, education, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, health, personal freedom, safety and security and social capital.

Social democracies dominate the top ten in the latest rankings (see below), with the Nordic states of Norway, Denmark and Sweden coming first, second and third on the index, and Australia and New Zealand ranking fourth and fifth respectively. The United States fell out of the top ten for the first time.

With the exception of Singapore (19^th), the world’s authoritarian regimes perform poorly, with China ranked at 55^th, Russia 66^th, Venezuela 80^th and Iran 102^nd.

“Now, perhaps more than any time in recent history, we need to re-examine our values and principles,” the survey suggests.

“What should be the priorities for policymakers responding to the economic crisis in its various guises? Are there insights or lessons for countries that are undergoing political and economic transitions? What are the fundamental pillars of prosperity?”

 —————————————————————————————————————————

The key drivers of prosperity are accountable governance and entrepreneurship, the survey finds. This is particularly true for the top 50 countries, whereas for developing countries, health and education play a more crucial role. The Index finds that good governance and entrepreneurship tend to go together and reinforce each other, generating a virtuous cycle.

Despite the most severe financial crisis in modern times, citizen uprisings that have toppled some of the world’s most autocratic regimes, protests and riots that have erupted around the world, global prosperity has increased across all regions of the world over the last four years.

But safety and security are decreasing, the survey reveals. This has been driven by Arab Spring countries such as Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt and by Latin American countries such as Mexico, Paraguay, and Honduras. In fact, the Latin American region is one of the worst performers for citizen safety, driven by extremely high rates of assault and theft.

Asia is still rising, with Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all ranking in the top ten for the Economy and in the top 20 overall. Further, Asia receives the second highest inflow of Foreign Direct Investment as a percentage of GDP and East Asia is the second largest exporter globally.

Asia’s Tiger Cubs are also emerging, with Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia nipping at the heels of the regional leaders. Indonesia, for example, has experienced the largest increase in prosperity, globally, since 2009, moving up 26 positions to 63rd.

The survey’s Governance sub-index assesses levels of government corruption and competition, and citizens’ confidence in the honesty of elections, the judicial system, and the military Stable and democratic governing institutions safeguard political and economic freedom and create an environment of civic participation, leading to higher levels of income and wellbeing.

Government stability and accountability benefit citizens’ wellbeing. Further relevant factors include people’s perception of how well the government addresses poverty and preserves the environment. Academic research has found that, in general, political freedom, strong institutions, and regulatory quality contribute significantly to economic growth. Effective, fair, and accountable governments increase public confidence, and, ultimately, result in higher levels of life satisfaction among citizens.

Both Costa Rica and Botswana, for example, stand above their regional neighbors in the 2012 Prosperity Index. One reason for this lies in the strength of their institutions, which have undoubtedly benefitted from advantageous historical moments where political leaders have made difficult choices to commit to developing democratic institutions.

As neighboring countries seek their own paths to prosperity, the institutional and government practices adopted by Costa Rica and Botswana, while not guaranteeing success in all other dimensions of development, strongly indicate a way forward.

First, both Costa Rica and Botswana have chosen to promote social welfare, provide for systems of public education, and secure political stability, which ultimately has led to protected property rights and rule of law enforcement. Moreover, they have pursued these policies within the political constraints of inclusive, constitutionally democratic institutions.

Second, thanks to their economic and political success, both countries have emerged as leaders in their regions, doing surprisingly well despite the unstable nature of the surrounding neighbors. Indeed, both receive high scores in the Personal Freedom and Governance sub-indices—scores which rival some high-income, developed countries.

Finally, while neighboring countries would benefit from emulating the political choices of these ‘high achievers’, this will require both the opportunities that history has afforded Costa Rica and Botswana, and a commitment to the creation of democratic and participatory institutions.

The above extract is taken from the 2012 Legatum Institute Prosperity Index.

RTWT.

Pic Credit: Bloomberg

“Each one of you should make a list of the problems that you have, and ask yourself, how many of those problems has this famous revolution solved for you?” Venezuelan opposition candidate Henrique Capriles told a recent rally.

While Hugo Chávez is trumpeting the benefits of Bolivarian 21^st Century Socialism, the opposition is making gains because “day-to-day issues are overshadowing ideological fervor,” notes one observer:

Nationalizations have weakened private enterprise and given party apparatchiks growing control over jobs. Weak law enforcement, dysfunctional courts and plentiful arms have made Venezuela more violent than some war-torn countries. Frequent blackouts are an annoying reminder of squandered oil income.

“Enough Chávistas have moved to Capriles’ side that the president faces a real chance of losing the vote,” reports suggest.

While Chávismo has lost its luster - for Venezuela’s voters, the opposition is gaining momentum by stressing interests over ideology.

“I ask: What has 21st century socialism done for Caracas?” Capriles told a rally in Caracas on Sunday – the largest the opposition has mustered in about a decade.

He said that if he has an ideology, it’s “to overcome poverty, have jobs, not have violence, invest Venezuelans’ resources here to generate opportunities.”

Chávez has nothing specific to say to voters hoping to improve their lives, says Francisco Toro.

“At times, the Comandante Presidente has seemed downright contemptuous of the concerns of everyday Venezuelans,” he notes, citing a recent Chávez speech.

“Some might be dissatisfied with our government’s failings — that the potholes didn’t get fixed, that electricity is out and water isn’t running, that they don’t have a job and they haven’t gotten their house. That may be true in many cases … but that’s not what’s at stake. What’s really at stake is the life of the fatherland!”

“And so the role reversal is almost complete,” writes Toro, who blogs about Venezuelan politics at CaracasChronicles.com: “a president who came to power as a tireless crusader for the poor now seems downright bored of dealing with their problems, while an opposition long dismissed as an embittered reactionary clique comes to embody the people’s aspirations.”

If Chávez is defeated in Sunday’s election, it will set a historic precedent of a kind, says historian Enrique Krauze.

“The only case of an authoritarian leftist regime democratically overturned was that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990,” he notes.

“But the difficulties then weren’t as great as those involved in the Venezuelan process, for the very reason that the Sandinista government — already in decline at the end of the 1980s — wasn’t democratic, nor did it pretend to be.”

Unlike his hero Fidel Castro of Cuba, the Sandinistas or the old dictators such as Paraguay’s Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia or Venezuela’s Juan Vicente Gomez, Chávez has “astutely used democracy to do away with democracy,” writes Krauze, author of “Mexico: A Biography of Power” and of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.”

While the Capriles campaign has been “brave and conciliatory,” by contrast, Chávez has “vilified him incessantly with crude insults and has committed the sacrilege of calling him a Nazi, knowing that Capriles’s great-grandparents were exterminated by the Nazis.”

Whether the campaign ends in violence or a highly-charged transition, Venezuelan democrats and civil society have a clear strategic priority, says Krauze:

They must restore true meaning to what has become a corrupted democracy. …. Chávez may triumph, but it will be a hollow victory, and after his eventual death, divisions within his group as well as internal and international pressures may pave the way for a return to full democracy. Such a development would have the additional effect of precipitating the Cuban transition, drawing us nearer to the emergence — unprecedented in history — of an entirely democratic Latin America.

Hudson Institute’s Center for Latin American Studies—in conjunction with the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis—cordially invites you to…

Elections in Venezuela: What’s Next?

After nearly 14 years in power, the reign of Hugo Chávez may be at an end. Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles has been polling head-to-head with Chávez and stands a good chance of becoming Venezuela’s next leader, if he wins the October 7 elections. This political transformation could send ripples through all of Latin America, and would have long-reaching ramifications in the region.

What does this election mean for the future of Venezuela? What could cause this political transformation, and how would a regime change affect the dynamic of Venezuela and Latin America as a whole?

Hudson’s Center for Latin American Studies will hold a timely and important analysis of the Venezuelan election, and what it could mean for U.S. policymakers.

The discussion will feature a distinguished panel of experts on Venezuela including:

Keynote Speaker: Patrick Duddy is the last U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, he served from 2007 until 2010. In September of 2008, he was declared persona non grata by President Hugo Chávez and expelled from the country. That designation was rescinded in June 2009, and Ambassador Duddy returned to Venezuela to continue his post and duties. He is currently a Visiting Senior Lecturer at Duke University.

Anibal Romero is Professor of Political Theory at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, Venezuela, and has published various books and articles on Venezuelan politics and President Hugo Chávez.

Jon B. Perdue is the Director of Latin America Programs at the Fund for American Studies in Washington. His articles on Latin America and U.S. security issues have been widely published in Latin America and the United States, and his latest book is The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism (Potomac, 2012).

Antonio José de la Cruz is an energy specialist who has worked for many years with Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). He is currently working as a consultant.

Jaime Daremblum, Senior Fellow and Director of Hudson Center for Latin American Studies, will moderate.

October 17, 2012, 12:00 – 2:00 PM – Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters Lunch will be served.      

Three decades after the fall of Latin America’s military dictatorships, democracy in the region is again under threat.

“This time, the strongmen are populist elected leaders, who — under a veneer of constitutionality — concentrate power in their own hands, marginalize opponents and use public resources to stack electoral races in their favor,” writes Global Post’s Simeon Tegel.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega (above, with former Honduras President Manuel Zelaya, second from left) fit the description.

“They have a strong personality and a bullying style,” says Jose Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch’s Latin America director. “They go after critics, opponents and others who get in the way of their political agenda, whether it is the judiciary, the media or civil society.”

“And the practice is to use the whole power of the state,” he added. “There’s no torture or killing but the name of the game is intimidation and, in some cases, closing down criticism and opposition.”

Elected authoritarians “have learned to use democratic instruments in a way that is not democratic,” says Daniel Montalvo, a politics professor at Quito’s San Francisco University, citing Correa’s referendum to overhaul Ecuador’s judiciary.

“[The referendum] is a very democratic tool but its use has been to legitimize a situation where there is no separation of powers,” Montalvo said.

Analysts have observed deterioration in the quality of democratic governance in the region – and not only in authoritarian populist regimes.

The countries that have retreated from records of relatively impressive democratic performance can be lumped into three categories, says Freedom House analyst Arch Puddington:

1. 1.   Countries governed by regimes of what Jorge Castaneda called the “irresponsible left.” Venezuela under Hugo Chávez is front and center here, followed by Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and, to a lesser degree, Argentina.
2. 2.   Countries where criminal violence, often driven by drug-trafficking rivalries, has spiraled so completely out of control as to have weakened press freedom, rule of law, and other democratic indicators. Drug-related violence has also retarded the growth of democratic institutions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic.
3. 3.   Countries that have experienced less-than-democratic leadership upheavals. The main examples are Honduras, which has yet to fully recover from the 2009 coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya from office, and Paraguay, where President Fernando Lugo was ousted in an impeachment process that lasted barely 24 hours.

“The process of democratization has stagnated, reached a peak or may well be backsliding as a whole in the region,” says Peter Smith, a Latin America expert at the University of California, San Diego.

Yet, without elected leaders being held accountable for their actions, citizens’ demands are unlikely to ever be fully met, said Cesar Ricaurte, of Quito-based journalism nonprofit Fundamedios, which has been targeted by Correa for its criticism of his assaults on press freedom.

“The region needs to build strong democratic institutions, not personality cults around messianic strongmen,” Ricaurte added. “That is the only way we are going to transform and eradicate poverty.”

Fundamedios is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

The recent backlash against democracy assistance in Russia, Egypt and elsewhere “should prompt Americans to craft new strategies, rather than leading to a retreat,” says a Washington-based observer.

USAID’s expulsion from Russia is also a consequence of President Vladimir Putin’s conviction that the country is engaged in a war of ideas, resorting to Soviet-era propaganda “to suppress the modernized liberals of today,” a leading analyst writes from Moscow.

Presiding over a recent meeting on “patriotic education” in the southern region of Krasnodar, Putin “set the tone by saying that spiritual values, necessary to ‘consolidate the nation,’ were a highly contested realm, and a target of ‘information confrontation,’” writes Masha Lipman.

“This confrontation, he said, was ‘one of the forms of competitive struggle … just as the struggle for mineral resources.’”

The Kremlin’s line is echoed by a prominent pro-Putin commentator who highlights the national security background of certain USAID personnel to suggest that its programs were designed to undermine Russian stability and sovereignty.

Other states should follow Russia’s precedent, says Veronika Krasheninnikova, Director General of the Moscow-based Institute for Foreign Policy Research and Initiatives.

Russia’s closure of USAID operations is “an excellent example for any other country where USAID operatives still work on ‘winning hearts and minds’ of the local population.”

It is significant that the Kremlin backlash against democracy assistance directly preceded the anniversary of the Putin-Medvedev ‘job swap’ that sparked the last year’s emergence of a vibrant new opposition, observers suggest.

“There are no longer any checks and balances,” according to opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Russia is suffering from “governance paralysis” since former President Dmitri Medvedev no longer serves to constrain his mentor. By endorsing Putin’s return, the ruling elite made the “most erroneous choice of the past 15 years,” analyst Vladislav Inozemtsev wrote in the mass-circulation Moskovsky Komsomolets.

Russia, had “followed in the footsteps of Spain, Paraguay and the Philippines where only the death or deposition of a ruler would abruptly ‘break off’ a historic epoch.”

“Power is not just a certain person but a system, and right now we are watching how the system is destroying itself,” he said.

By expelling USAID, Putin “has effectively laid to rest the reset policy with the United States” and revealed the Kremlin’s strategic priorities, writes Konstantin von Eggert, a commentator and host at radio Kommersant FM. 

“Priority number one for Putin and his entourage is keeping his regime firmly in power and preventing development of the so-called Orange Scenario, along the lines of the peaceful 2004 revolution in Ukraine, which is widely perceived in Moscow to have been a Western plot to change the pro-Moscow regime there,” he argues. “If reaching this goal means giving the Americans (or the Europeans, for that matter) a little bit of a hard time, then so be it.”

Putin will also have been emboldened by the relatively muted response to USAID’s expulsion from Washington and the democratic West that may adversely affect the morale of Russian democrats, some observers contend.

“Western silence shows Russian civil society organizations that they cannot rely on Western support,” says Anna Borshchevskaya, an assistant director at the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council, undermining faith in democratic values and traditions, and setting a precedent for other authoritarian regimes.

This represents a potential lost opportunity, she suggests, since the “sustained protests in Russia show that Russians themselves increasingly wish to see a democratic and peaceful Russia that respects its citizens.”

Washington is asking for a “dignified” end to USAID’s programs after the Russian authorities insisted on an Oct. 1 deadline. 

“We are in negotiations with the Russian government about the timing,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow. “We would like to do this in an orderly and dignified way. We think it will take at least a year and by next summer we’ll be able to phase out all of our grants and all of our employees.”

McFaul’s insights in his earlier career as an academic help explain why USAID’s “has stunned aid workers, infuriated American diplomats and left many nonprofit groups on the brink of collapse,” the New York Times reports:

[USAID's eviction] .. marks the end of an extraordinary collaboration between the two former cold war enemies, one that was unimpeded, at least initially, by the suspicion that often shadows foreign aid, in part because such programs have historically in many places provided cover for intelligence activities.

“In the fall of 1991 and early in 1992, the door for Western engagement and influence in remaking the Russian economy and polity was wide open,” Michael A. McFaul, the American ambassador, and his co-author, James M. Goldgeier, wrote in “Power and Purpose,” a 2003 history of American policy after the cold war. “Issues of sovereignty that often emerge as major sources of tension between donors and recipients in other countries were simply not an issue.”

They are now.

USAID rejects claims that its operations were politically-driven or designed to foment regime change, and stresses that Russian citizens will be the principal casualties of the move.

“We have always been doing this from the American people to the Russian people,” said Paige Alexander, the agency’s assistant administrator for Europe and Eurasia. “And that’s who is losing out.”

The Kremlin’s claims were also undermined by revelations that United Russia, the pro-Putin ruling party, took part in USAID-funded programs of the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).

The Kremlin’s attempt to portray both USAID’s programs and the recent upswing in anti-government protests as the result of Western meddling is not registering with Russian citizens, says a leading pollster.

“In the wake of the Russian presidential vote this past spring, a Pew Global Attitudes survey found that 58 percent of Russians believed the election protests were home-grown, rather than the result of Western governments attempting to destabilize Russia,” writes James Bell,  Pew’s director of international survey research, in a New York Times symposium, Should the U.S. Be a Political Player in Russia?:

Only 25 percent thought foreign powers were behind the protests. Moreover, 56 percent supported the protests for free elections, and fully 64 percent agreed that attending demonstrations gave people like themselves an opportunity to express their opinion……Despite his broad popularity, Putin’s publicized suspicions about Western intentions appear to have had little impact on Russian views of the United States. In the spring, 52 percent expressed a favorable opinion of America, essentially unchanged from the previous year. At the same time, though, Russians were very negative about political exports from the United States — just 26 percent said they liked American ideas about democracy.

The government’s attempt to portray the opposition as an instrument of foreign powers “points to a tragic flaw in the current regime,” says a prominent observer.

“Not only do the Kremlin’s policy makers see the world through siege-mentality, cold-war-era glasses, they are also very poorly informed,” writes Masha Gessen, the author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. “I was involved in the protest organizing efforts from December through June, and I can say with certainty that the bulk of the money came from private donors inside Russia — and many of those were members of Putin’s own elite.”

“No one has apparently reported to the top the simple truth that U.S. money has little or nothing to do with the protests while the very people on whom Putin relies for much of his authority have been secretly funding the demonstrations,” she writes in The New York Times symposium.

“Which is not to say that U.S. funding has nothing to do with the Russian opposition,” says Gessen, who writes for The Times’ Latitude blog:

One of the organizations that have relied on money from the Agency for International Development is Golos, one of two groups that played a key role in documenting the election fraud that inspired the protests. It stands to reason that it is easier to find private funding for street demonstrations that are immediate and visible than for long-term projects that involve sociological research and statistical analysis — which describes what Golos did. If the organization is unable to find funding to fill in the void left by the A.I.D.’s departure, this will not make the protest movement less numerous — but it will make it less informed.

The recent backlash against democracy assistance in Russia, Egypt and elsewhere “should prompt Americans to craft new strategies, rather than leading to a retreat,” writes Brian Katulis.

It is necessary to “adapt to the complexities of 21st-century geopolitics rather than using methods better suited for previous waves of democratic transitions,” says Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based center-left think-tank.

“The U.S. government’s overlapping bureaucracies working on democracy, governance and human rights are often too slow in response to fast moving transitions — and their efforts are sometimes not synchronized with the other parts of the U.S. government, including the Pentagon,” he argues:

U.S. diplomats and other government officials also need to eventually get out of the business of direct funding of these efforts and focus on what they do best — diplomacy. ….[T]he very visible direct U.S. funding of Egyptian civil society organizations created a nationalist backlash there this year — leading to court trials and unhinged conspiracy theories accusing civil society activists of being spies trying to undermine Egypt. To avoid this, it would be more effective to channel support through multilateral organizations and groups like the National Endowment for Democracy instead of direct U.S. government funding.

Finally, nongovernmental organizations need to step up their efforts to garner private donors and build stronger collaborative efforts with partners in these countries. These people-to-people networks can serve as shock absorbers during rocky periods of relations between governments. RTWT

USAID’s spending on democracy and governance programs in Russia increased from 41 percent of its budget in 2004 to 72 percent in 2007, even though there is “scant evidence that this promotes a viable civil society,” writes Nicolai N. Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island.

“Analysts have observed that the typical N.G.O. rarely survives beyond the initial grant period, and throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, direct foreign assistance had led to weaker ties between civic institutions and society and greater dependence on foreign support,” he argues:

In 2006 the Russian government moved to change this dynamic. That year it held the first national grant competition for N.G.O. projects and distributed $15 million. By 2011 more than $350 million annually was being disbursed for N.G.O. projects in fields as varied as the environment, historical and cultural preservation, welfare assistance, and human rights. This amount now dwarfs total U.S. government assistance to Russia.

Criticism that the Kremlin is primarily motivated to establish tame, regime-friendly GONGOs is “off the mark,” Petro asserts:

In a careful review of N.G.O. studies, Debra Javeline and Sarah Lindemann-Komarova show that there is little evidence of co-optation by the government — even anti-government N.G.O.s, like the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Committee of Soldier’s Mothers, can receive funding. They also found little substance to claims that the government limits what recipients can do with the money or that new legislation has intensified difficulties for N.G.O.s. Indeed, only 2.9 percent of N.G.O. leaders say that pressure from the government is the primary problem for their organization.

“Civil society can flourish only if it is domestically oriented, locally funded and motivated by patriotic sentiments. Dependence on foreign funding undermines each of these objectives,” he concludes. “Even worse, it isolates democracy advocates from their most important constituency, the citizens to whom they should be appealing for support.”

To the contrary, Katulis asserts, foreign-funded democracy assistance plays a valuable role in facilitating home-grown change.

“Investments in civil organizations can pay off substantially,” he writes. “A study examining 67 different political transitions over three decades found that nonviolent civic forces from inside countries produced the most pressure that led to sustainable democratic transitions.”

Closing USAID’s programs in Russia “may deal little more than a short-term setback, at least for the groups that have become political foes of the Kremlin; many of them have other sources of financing,” the Times reports.

“Some groups, including Golos, already receive American aid through channels other than the agency, including the National Endowment for Democracy, a private group that receives financing from Congress,” it notes.

Putin’s attempt to portray USAID’s ejection and the opposition movement’s emergence as manifestations of a new ideological Cold War have led him to rely on appeals to chauvinism and Soviet-style negativity towards Western liberalism, argues Lipman, an analyst with the Moscow-based Carnegie Center.  

“But when it comes to defining the positive, the Soviet experience is not much help. The very pillar of Soviet ideological righteousness—Marxism-Leninism—has been dead for a few decades,” she writes in The New Yorker:

So, while mixing in some things Soviet, Putin and his government tend to improvise and garnish them with other ingredients. The result is an ideological fusion, hardly functional and at times truly bizarre. At the meeting in Krasnodar, Putin called for “fully using the best experience of education and enlightenment that existed in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.” In fact, the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union was built on the annihilation of and subsequent incessant condemnation of Imperial Russia. But Putin appears determined to reconcile the ancien régime with its Bolshevik conqueror (or rather, the latter’s heirs of the nineteen-seventies) and use this tool to suppress the modernized liberals of today.

“Putin’s attempt to define post-Communist Russia’s set of values may be doomed; the ingredients he’s using are stale and discordant and will hardly work to consolidate his nation or help Russia’s development,” Lipman concludes.

“What it can do, however, is unleash all kinds of ugly forces who have their own ideas about patriotic duty.”

The Kremlin’s Americaphobia not only threatens to spark Russophobia in the West, but exposes the fact that Russia “has not yet dealt with adequately reinventing itself as a post-superpower,” says Richard Lourie,?author of?The Autobiography of?Joseph Stalin and?Sakharov: A?Biography.

“Still in flux,’ Russia has five different strategic “choices, possibilities or ways of being,’ he writes in the Moscow Times:

1. It could conceivably make an attempt to create a 21st century of tsarist or Soviet imperial might. It could seize control of Belarus, its Sudetenland. If it got away with that, it could set its sights on eastern and southern Ukraine, which are heavily Russian, then go on to ‘liberate” parts of northern Kazakhstan. This is exceedingly unlikely but not impossible.
2. It can throw in its lot with Europe and the United States in an alliance against China in the coming “resource wars.”
3. On the contrary, Russia could throw in its lot with China. Both countries suffer from a similar strain of Americaphobia, fearful of containment and contamination by nongovernmental organizations. The Chinese worry that radar installations in Japan to be deployed against a North Korean nuclear threat are actually directed against them. The Russians think the same about the anti-missile sites directed against Iran in Poland. Russia has the largest amount of fallow arable land in the world, and China has 1.3 billion people to feed. Agricultural cooperation has already begun in Russia’s under-populated eastern territories. ?
4. Russia can continue on the path of accelerated repression taken since Putin’s inauguration in May. This will result in alienation, brain drain and capital flight. That, coupled with a failure to diversify the economy, will lead to social collapse around the middle of the century, unless postponed by an Arctic oil bonanza.
5. The most hopeful possibility is that Russia will go its own way and find the strength within its rich and resilient culture to fashion a new society that is prosperous and more just and democratic. Some see the recent flurry of volunteer organizations as the first signs of Russia generating a civil society from the bottom up. A grassroots revival is especially important in a society that has known change only from the top down, from violent revolution or from the chaos that follows on collapse.

“Russia’s friends in the West — and it may have more that it sometimes thinks — must do what they can to prevent the Kremlin’s current paranoid style from producing negative foreign policy consequences in the real world,” Lourie concludes.

Latin America was one of the success stories from the wave of democratic development that accompanied the waning of the Cold War, writes Arch Puddington.*

A region notable for violent insurgencies, military juntas, oligarchies, and caudillo rule underwent a transformation that left practically every country with a freely elected government and a civic environment in which liberties were respected. The lone holdout was Cuba, with its inflexible and increasingly anachronistic Communist dictatorship. But over the past decade governments’ commitment to democratic standards has wavered, in some cases considerably.

The dominant recent story has been the steady decline of a critical mass of countries in the region, a process that has accelerated over the past five years. The countries that have retreated from records of relatively impressive democratic performance can be lumped into three categories:

1. Countries governed by regimes of what Jorge Castaneda called the “irresponsible left.”  Venezuela under Hugo Chávez is front and center here, followed by Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and, to a lesser degree, Argentina.
2. Countries where criminal violence, often driven by drug-trafficking rivalries, has spiraled so completely out of control as to have weakened press freedom, rule of law, and other democratic indicators. Drug-related violence has also retarded the growth of democratic institutions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic.
3. Countries that have experienced less-than-democratic leadership upheavals. The main examples are Honduras, which has yet to fully recover from the 2009 coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya from office, and Paraguay, where President Fernando Lugo was ousted in an impeachment process that lasted barely 24 hours.

As we see from the following graph, the region’s average aggregate score in Freedom in the World has registered declines in each year between 2007 and 2011, with substantial downgrades in 2007 and 2009. Five countries are largely responsible for the overall regional slippage: Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

The record of decline, as set forth by the subcategory trends, provides a revealing picture of the strategy of governments that are either tolerating the erosion of democratic institutions or—more disturbingly—deliberately undermining freedom in order to marginalize potential sources of political opposition. Thus:

1. The decline in freedom of association reflects the growing determination of autocratic-leaning leaders to neuter civil society organizations, especially those with political or quasi-political agendas. …
2. While opposition political parties have often contributed to their own decline, aggressive actions meant to tilt the field in the regime’s favor represent a threat to electoral competitiveness in a number of Latin American societies.
3. The press has become a principal target of left-populist leaders, notably in Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Their tactics include a great expansion of state-controlled media, the use of punitive libel laws to silence critics, the abuse of licensing powers to threaten or shut down critical media, and the introduction of antimonopoly laws that force opposition press owners to surrender control of outlets.

Democracy, while under pressure, remains the norm in Latin America. But there is much to deplore in those countries where the “irresponsible left” prevails. Equally disturbing is Hugo Chávez’s integration of the military into the everyday functioning of government, a dangerous move given Latin America’s history of military dictatorship.

Freedom in Latin America is wavering, not in deep decline. But the wavering should concern us all, and especially those who recall a time when the region was synonymous with state violence, political extremism, and injustice.

*Vice President for Research at Freedom House. This is an extract from a longer post at FH’s Freedom at Issue blog. 

Paraguayan democracy has taken a giant step backward since its Congress impeached President Fernando Lugo in June, plunging the country into political turmoil and diplomatic isolation, write Lucas Arce  and Gustavo Setrini. Coming only nine months before the next scheduled presidential election, this crisis erupted from political party elites’ short-sighted and brutish competition for public resources, not to mention their disdain for democracy.

Two factors – in addition to Lugo’s strategic missteps and the shifting alliances within the government coalition – explain why Paraguay’s leaders have driven their country off this cliff. First, Paraguay’s deeply clientelistic political system has been unable to accommodate new entrants. Its two major political forces, the Colorados and the Liberals, operate as rival political machines, mobilizing electoral support by distributing public employment, contracts, and cash.

Competition between the two parties is simply a contest for access to public resources, devoid of ideological debate about the best use of those resources, or about the state’s role in the economy and society. The Colorados dominated this winner-take-all game during six decades of one-party rule, but lost their political monopoly in 2008, when the Liberals, in exchange for the vice-presidential nomination, backed a leftist coalition supporting Lugo.

The Colorado Party’s defeat reintroduced political competition and brought about Paraguay’s first-ever democratic change of government. But, in addition to bringing the Liberals to power, democratization granted the left its first foothold within the Paraguayan state and its first opportunity to build its own political machine – a deeply threatening prospect for both traditional parties.

Second, Paraguay’s political elite, regardless of party affiliation, are committed to preserving the country’s unequal land distribution and frustrating the development of politically autonomous peasant organizations. It is no coincidence that a land conflict provided the fodder for the trumped-up impeachment charges against Lugo.

Lugo’s government pursued moderate economic and social policies, but did not propose any meaningful land reform. Nonetheless, Liberals and Colorados in Congress used the violence in Curuguaty to justify Lugo’s impeachment, arguing that he had failed to maintain social order and portraying him as a dangerous radical intent on fomenting a rural insurgency.

Thus, two concerns have driven the actions of the Liberal and Colorado elite since Lugo’s inauguration, ultimately leading them to collaborate in the impeachment plot. First, each party wishes to reassert monopolistic control over the state rather than accept that democratic competition and alternation of power now constitute permanent elements of Paraguay’s political regime. Second, they have sought to prevent the left from using its new access to public resources to build an electoral base that would appeal to groups that fall outside traditional clientelist networks.

Among the largest of these politically excluded groups are landless peasants, who demand land reform and rural development policies. But urban youth and educated professionals, too, are larger in number and more politically active than ever before – a change reflected in the sudden rise and surprising success of “occupy” protest movements demanding an end to patronage politics. If the left could build an electoral base by directing public resources to these groups, competition would become a permanent feature of Paraguayan politics, and public-sector modernization and land reform would be on the table, cutting to the heart of elite political power.

Rather than accept a more pluralistic political regime, both the Colorados and Liberals flagrantly disregarded their responsibilities as democratically elected representatives, and are gambling with Paraguay’s economic and political stability at the expense of its citizens. The Liberals’ behavior seems especially myopic: in ousting Lugo, they ruptured the only political coalition capable of defeating the Colorados.

Lucas Arce and Gustavo Setrini are researchers at the Centro de Análisis y Difusión de la Economía Paraguaya (CADEP). This is an extract from a longer article published by Project Syndicate and reproduced with permission.

Whether you call it a parliamentary coup, a constitutional coup, or a “golpeachment,” the lightning quick removal of Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo (left)  is spurring fierce debate over the fragility of Latin America’s democratic institutions and underscoring “bitter resentments over land ownership, poverty and staggering inequality.”

Lugo said today that he is planning to return to power and reverse what he called a break with democracy:

Lugo has created a parallel Cabinet, attacking the legitimacy of the government that replaced him, and told reporters he would plead his case on the international stage at this week’s summit of the Mercosur trade bloc in Mendoza, Argentina, as well as challenging the new leaders over Paraguay’s role in a broader alliance of South American nations.

But the former Catholic bishop appears to “lack the kind of mass political movement at home that could pressure the new regime to restore him to power,” reports suggest.

“I’m not sure that there’s a groundswell of support for him,” said Peter Lambert, a specialist in Paraguayan politics at the UK’s University of Bath.

In removing Lugo, Paraguay’s Congress may have acted according to the letter of the law, but violated its spirit, he told the Wall Street Journal.

“If you apply the criteria of ‘poor performance’ to Europe, most of the presidents would be impeached today,” he said.

“This is politically motivated. And that’s why a number of governments are coming out saying this is unconstitutional and we won’t recognize it, because the law has obviously been twisted.”

Tiny, landlocked Paraguay has long been known as a haven for smugglers of everything from weapons to cigarettes to electronics, and has a history of convulsive, two-fisted politics. The country was ruled for more than 30 years starting in 1954 by military officer Alfredo Stroessner, until he was ousted by a coup in 1989. The return to democracy that began in the 1990s hasn’t been smooth, due to weak institutions and strains between landowning elites and peasants, who often speak the indigenous language Guarani rather than Spanish.

During nearly two decades of democracy, Paraguay has been riven by coup plots, the 1999 assassination of the vice president, a scandal involving a president who allegedly drove a stolen car and two prior impeachment crises.

When Mr. Lugo was elected in 2008, there were hopes that he would modernize Paraguay’s economy and combat economic inequality the same way that the pragmatic leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had changed neighboring Brazil. But Mr. Lugo found himself embroiled in personal scandals and outmaneuvered by the long-time power brokers in Paraguay.

Lugo is a victim of his failure to deliver on election promises and to develop a constituency of support, says observers.

“In this era of globalization, it appears that even impeachment proceedings, which should be measured and deliberate given what is at stake, have become accelerated,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research institute. “The Congress may have acted in accordance with the Constitution, but this is a setback for democracy nonetheless.”

“Lugo was always an improbable agent of change,” said Riordan Roett, a Latin America specialist at Johns Hopkins University, and he had “little real political support among the traditional elites—both Paraguayan and Brazilian land owners.”

He even grew increasingly detached from the ruling coalition’s leading party, the Authentic Radical Liberal Party, which formally abandoned the president following a  recent land protest, said Javier Corrales, a political scientist at Amherst College.

“Lugo became what I call, a ‘president without party’—which occurs when the ruling party switches over to the opposition,” Corrales said.

The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, a legal arm of the Organization on American States, describing Lugo’s ouster as a “parody of justice.”

“The process in which Lugo was removed may not have looked fair, but it was entirely legal,” said Alberto Poletti, a professor of constitutional law at Columbia University in Paraguay.

In some ways, the way in which Mr. Lugo, 61, was ousted says a great deal about Paraguay itself. His election in 2008 ended six decades of one-party rule, the first time in the country’s history that a president from one party peacefully transferred power to another. Allowing him to finish a five-year term, however, proved to be a bridge too far.

Mr. Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop who won initial popularity as an advocate for Paraguay’s peasants, always faced resistance from the country’s deeply conservative political establishment. Moreover, Paraguay’s Constitution incorporates vigorous checks on executive power, reflecting distrust of strong leaders after the long dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.

The president needs cooperation from Congress for key decisions, including naming members of the Supreme Court and directors of the big hydroelectric dams, Itaipú and Yacyretá. For practical purposes, Mr. Lugo was hobbled throughout much of his presidency, emasculated by legislators and eviscerated in the country’s media.

His inability to resolve Paraguay’s disparity in landholdings, among the nation’s most pressing social issues, was exemplified in a clash this month between the police and squatters that left 17 dead. Mr. Lugo’s opponents in Congress used that violence as a pretext to accuse him of malfeasance, leading to an impeachment vote in the Chamber of Deputies and his trial in the Senate.

“What exactly happened during the ill-fated June 15 operation to remove squatters from a sprawling farm owned by Blas Riquelme, a wealthy businessman, former senator and Lugo opponent, remains unclear,” AFP reports:

We do know that six police officers and 11 landless peasant farmers died, and that Lugo, a 61-year-old former Roman Catholic priest, was removed from office just eight days later after his political enemies united to oust him.

The replacement of Lugo — seen as a “champion of the poor” when he ended more than six decades of Colorado Party rule in 2008 — has left many Paraguayan farmers fearing their miserable lot is only going to get worse.

While the process may have been legal, it was ethically questionable, observers suggest.

“The institutions have been used exactly for something which they were not designed,” said Adolfo Salgueiro, a professor of international law in Venezuela.

“It looks terrible throughout the region,” said analyst Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think-tank. “(Lugo’s ouster) doesn’t look like a deliberative process, and what it looks like is that a president can be removed simply for being unpopular, or making unpopular decisions.”

“The new government is going to be pretty isolated for the whole time that it’s in power,” Isacson said. “For Paraguay’s neighbours and trade partners, I think there’s probably not great cost involved in isolating the country for a year or more, and then re-recognizing whatever government is elected next year.”

Lugo’s electoral victory, ending six decades of Colorado Party rule, marked the twelfth time since the beginning of the third wave of democratization that a hegemonic-party regime was transformed into a fully competitive one,” Paraguayan analyst Diego Abente-Brun wrote in the Journal of Democracy.

“I want to resist until we regain power because here there was a parliamentary coup,” Lugo said Monday. “I call on people from the countryside, the youth and all citizens to resist until we are back in the office we unfairly had to leave.”

Congress booted Lugo out of office in fast-track proceedings last week triggered by a clash between police and landless protesters in which 17 people died. The Senate found him guilty of poor performance of his duties, a clause in the constitution that leaves wide room for congressional interpretation. Franco was tapped to serve out the remainder of Lugo’s term, until August 2013.

So far, local support of Lugo has been restrained. A few thousand people have demonstrated outside Congress last week and over the weekend, many in the capital turned out for a long-running protest where people took turns denouncing the ouster into an open microphone.

The most strenuous reaction has come from Paraguay’s neighbors, many of whom also have long histories of unstable democracy.

A resolution of the standoff must be consistent with respect for democratic principles, constitutionalism and adherence to international conventions, including the Inter-American Democratic Charter, said regional democracy and civil society groups.

Paraguayan political parties, government and civic organizations should act “within a framework of full respect for the constitutional order and the principles of peaceful resolution of disputes,” said the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy, a platform comprising 450 organizations advancing democracy, social cohesion and human rights composed of over 450 organizations.

The network is an official member of the Civil Society Forum of the Organization of American States (OAS) and Regional Chapter of the World Movement for Democracy (WMD).

Social inclusion was in the “forefront” of the US agenda for the recent Summit of the Americas, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently, citing issues affecting people of African descent, indigenous peoples, women and youth at the forefront of our preparations.

Some of Latin America’s economic success stories have also witnessed marked improvements in social inclusiveness. In Peru, for instance, where the absolute poverty rate has been cut from 53 percent to 31 percent over the past 10 years, the government of President Ollanta Humala (right) has created a Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion “to supervise, coordinate and maintain the integrity” of anti-poverty measures, writes Enrique Krauze, the author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.”

From analysts to multilateral banks to Humala, social inclusion “has become the term du jour,” according to a new analysis in Americas Quarterly, which notes that the term “includes elements of political participation, social rights, civil liberties, and equal access—across race, ethnicity and gender—to social services and labor markets.”

Launching a new ‘social inclusion index’ to compare states across the region and monitor their progress over time, using data from 11 countries across 15 variables, this extract indicates how the policy journal aims to assess not only indicators of economic growth but trends in substantive political liberties and popular perceptions of change:

Social inclusion is the concept that a citizen has the ability to participate in the basic political, economic and social functioning of his or her society. It includes not just economic empowerment, but also access to basic social services, access to infrastructure (physical and institutional), access to the formal labor market, civil and political participation and voice, and the absence of legally sanctioned discrimination based on race, ethnicity or gender.

States have the capacity (and responsibility) to directly or indirectly affect these conditions. For this reason we have organized the index into: Inputs to Social Inclusion (the political environment, economic conditions, state policies, and access to services that promote social inclusion) and Outputs of Social Inclusion (the economic, political and policy outcomes that result from policies, rights and economic conditions that lead to social inclusion over the long term).

That Chile and Uruguay rank the highest in social inclusion is no surprise. The ranking, however, obscures the differences among the countries. Despite coming in third, Brazil’s aggregate score of 51.4 is far below Chile’s (71.9) and Uruguay’s (71.2). Ecuador, in fourth place, was boosted by above-average scores in GDP growth and secondary-school enrollment, though, as mentioned earlier, the latter numbers have been questioned. Mexico’s appearance in the middle of the pack is consistent with its performance across the variables, with one important exception— living on more than $4 per day, which is high even taking into account gender and race.

How the Countries Rank

In Bolivia, with a general score of 39.0, generally high levels of secondary school enrollment are undercut by differences by gender and race. Inequality of access for Indigenous and Afro-Bolivians occurs across education, percent earning more than $4 per day, access to adequate housing, and access to a formal job.

Recent years of economic growth have significantly reduced poverty, as the percent living on more than $4 per day and percent with access to formal jobs show. Brazil (51.4) is also a leader in percent GDP spent on social programs— and the results can be seen in access to education and adequate housing, though disparity by race and ethnicity remains.

Consistently high rankings across almost all indicators demonstrate that Chile (71.9) has harnessed its economic strength and democracy to ensure better quality of life for most citizens. While a small minority in Chile, the difference by race in access to adequate housing stands out—as does the low level of civil society participation.

Colombia’s GDP growth since 2000 marks it as one of the strongest performers (41.8). Some, though, have questioned the validity of the WB household data. The low rates of enrollment in secondary school, those living on more than $4 per day and percent with access to a formal job are unexpectedly low.

Some have also questioned the validity of the household data for Ecuador (43.8).

What’s striking is that despite the country’s level of polarization, the country’s rate of economic growth remains high, as does the sense of personal empowerment.

In Guatemala (7.5) evere inequalities by race and ethnicity remain stark in the outputs and the inputs. Percent of GDP spent on social programs remains among the region’s lowest. Indigenous and Afro-Guatemalans lag far behind in enrollment in secondary school, income per capita, access to housing and to formal jobs.

The recession in the U.S. has contributed to a low rate of GDP growth in Mexico (39). Still, poverty levels remain relatively low—though ethnic/race-based differences remain. Greatest challenge: moving more people to formal employment. Good news: high levels of GDP spent on social programs and access to education.

In Nicaragua (10.3), levels of poverty remain some of the highest in the region, and the country’s input scores indicate why. GDP growth remains low, as do the country’s levels of school enrollment and political and civil rights.

High general rates of enrollment in secondary school are undermined by the disparity by ethnicity. This disparity holds across poverty levels, access to adequate housing and access to a formal job. Can Paraguay (21.2) convert its level of economic growth, civil society participation and sense of empowerment into more expansive, effective social programs?

The contrast between the country’s rate of economic growth and investment in social programs could not be starker. Despite this, Peru (43.8) remains strong in all the inputs—educational access, political and civil rights and civil society participation, as well as in income per capita—increasing the chance that the other indicators will improve over time.

GDP growth in a developed economy such as the United States (43.3) will not reach the rates of its developing neighbors, though the economic recession certainly hurt levels of social inclusion overall. And while political and civil rights remain high, the extremely low popular sense of government responsiveness is noteworthy.

In Uruguay (71.2), a deep commitment to social justice is reflected in its social spending, but the sustainability of its efforts lies in its rates of economic growth, poverty levels and high levels of political and civil rights. The one outlier? As in Chile, civil society participation—a sign of contentment or disengagement?

We scored each of the 11 countries relatively for all 15 indicators (Inputs and Outputs), giving each country a score of 1.11 and then converting the totals into a 0.100 scale. All variables were weighted equally. Below is how each country ranks relative to the others in those totals. To the right below we show how the countries ranked in each of the 15 variables (or, in the case of the U.S., in the 7 variables for which we had data). It is within the individual variables that some real surprises occur: Chile lands at 10 in civil society participation, and Bolivia scores well in the areas in which Chile scored poorly – civil society participation and government responsiveness. The latter should give hope for the future, the former perhaps some concern about the need for political renovation in Chile. (For how we calculated the variables and the rankings visit www.americasquarterly.org/social-inclusion-index.)

If we can define social inclusion, presumably we can also measure it, or at least some components of it. There are a number of evolving and sophisticated efforts currently under way to measure elements of social inclusion. One of these is the World Bank’s excellent Human Opportunity Index that measures circumstances affecting access to goods and services (education and housing). Yet social inclusion also contains an element of political voice and freedom that is often lacking in more economic measures.

Here we present the results of measuring multiple dimensions of social inclusion from a series of private and public meetings held with economists, sociologists, representatives of multilateral banks, and political scientists.

Does it include everything? Does it strive for consensus?

No and no. For this, the first cut, the point is to begin a debate on the concrete dimensions of social inclusion, how to measure it and where countries rank. Every two years, we will revisit this index to track changes in social inclusion. We will also refine it over time, adjusting, combining and perhaps adding new variables and countries as relevant data become available.

For each of the 15 variables below, we scored all 11 countries on a relative scale that we then combined and converted to 0–100 (with 100 representing the highest a country could score if it were to outperform its hemispheric neighbors in all 15 variables). We also developed a scale that included the U.S., based on 7 of the variables for which we have data. With the exception of the U.S., the 15-variable relative score is noted for each country card in the lower right corner.

(The U.S. score is based only on its performance regionally in the 7 indicators.) The lower a country’s overall score, the lower its ranking. On page 122 we rank the 11 countries for which we have data in our Social Inclusion Index, overall and by variable. For more on the methodology we used to calculate the scores and rank the countries, and the data sources we consulted, please visit www.americasquarterly.org/social-inclusion-index