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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Democracy in Latin America

Introduction, general overviews.

• Between Hybrid Regimes and Alternative Definitions of Democracy
• Electoral Corruption
• Political Behavior and Public Opinion
• Presidentialism and Its Consequences
• Constitutions, Courts, and the Rule of Law
• Political Parties and Party Systems
• Social Movements
• Business Interests and Political Inequality
• Popular Inclusion and Representation
• Democratic Innovations
• Local Democracy

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• Brazilian Foreign Policy
• Democratic Transitions in Latin America
• Democratization in Central America
• Democratization in Mexico
• Electoral Change in Latin America
• Electoral Reform in Latin America
• Governmental Responses to Political Corruption
• Indigenous Politics and Representation in Latin America
• Organized Criminal Syndicates and Governance in Mexico and Central America
• Political Institutions and the Policymaking Process in Latin America

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Democracy in Latin America by Agustín Goenaga LAST REVIEWED: 04 December 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 12 January 2022 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0189

For decades, Latin America’s troubled experience with democracy has served as a testing ground for theories on democratization and political regimes. Today, most countries in the region have established democratic institutions, and a return to full-fledged authoritarianism is unlikely. However, these regimes are often at odds with the electoral, constitutional, liberal, and representative attributes that are associated with democratic regimes. Even though elections are the only means of access to public office in most of the region, they frequently involve high levels of clientelism, harassment of the opposition, and unfair advantages for incumbents. Although the separation of powers is central to the constitutional design in most countries, a generalized tendency exists toward the concentration of power in the national executive through formal or informal mechanisms. In some countries, party systems have collapsed (e.g., Peru and Venezuela); in other countries, parties have become increasingly detached from civil society (e.g., Chile and Mexico), and, in others, social movements have transformed the party system (e.g., Bolivia). The institutional ecology of many of these countries has also become one of the most diverse in the world, as representative institutions coexist with other forms of democratic decision making, such as plebiscites, participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, national conferences, community councils, local and indigenous autonomies, town hall meetings, and constituent processes. These challenges to the liberal model of democratic governance have in many cases followed victories by left-wing parties and candidates, who have launched major efforts to overhaul their political systems. As a result, Latin America’s experience with democracy since the 1980s has thrown new light on old questions in political science, such as the relationship between institutional design and democratic stability, the performance of democratic institutions in contexts of low state capacity, or the interaction between political and economic inequalities. The region has also inspired new research agendas on the rise of ethnic-based social movements and democratic consolidation, on the electoral consequences of neoliberalism, and on the implications of direct and participatory democracy for effective governance. Most importantly, the particularities of Latin American democracies have problematized our definitions of democracy itself. This has generated new scholarly efforts to replace the democratic/authoritarian dichotomy with more fine-grained classifications of hybrid regimes, to identify multiple “varieties of democracy” or “democratic systems,” and to develop more precise measurement instruments to evaluate regime types around the world. This article offers an overview of current research on Latin American democracies. The first section presents general introductions to the topic, as well as efforts to produce normative assessments of changes in the quality of democracy in each country. The second section cites works that have drawn on the peculiarities of the Latin American experience to reconceptualize the notion of democracy itself. In the rest of the article, empirical research on specific aspects of democratic politics is organized in eight general categories: elections, separation of powers, popular participation, interest representation and political inequalities, state capacity and democratic responsiveness, new democratic institutions, local democracy, and the rise and fall of leftist governments.

Since the early 2000s, academic and nonacademic publications have highlighted a puzzling aspect of Latin American democracy: its resilience despite adverse conditions and high levels of citizen dissatisfaction. Despite economic crises, popular revolts, corruption, crime, insecurity, low-quality public services, and generalized distrust against political institutions, openly authoritarian regimes have become increasingly unlikely. The works in this section examine, at a general level, the survival of democratic institutions as well as their chronic underperformance. Kingstone and Yashar 2012 is the best point of entry to the literature on Latin American politics and democracy. The other sources in this section evaluate the interaction among democratic institutions, their contexts, and their outputs. United Nations Development Programme 2004 , a report influenced by the work of Guillermo O’Donnell, is a major landmark in the study of new democracies, since it established that democratic quality could not be reduced to the presence of free and fair elections, but also involved the degree of responsiveness of the state to citizens’ demands. Mainwaring and Welna 2003 also expands O’Donnell’s insights about the multiple dimensions of political accountability and presents the first systematic discussion on the topic. Hagopian and Mainwaring 2005 explores the effects of political and social conditions on the consolidation of democratic institutions, while Payne, et al. 2007 evaluates the effects of institutions on democratic performance. Levine and Molina 2011 and Morlino 2014 adopt a more normative purpose, developing a framework to substantiate claims about lower or higher levels of democratic quality in specific countries. Finally, the index provided by Polilat is a useful source of data about changes in the quality of democracy in the region since 2002.

Hagopian, Frances, and Scott Mainwaring, eds. The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

An authoritative volume on the consolidation of democracy in the region by the mid-2000s. Through case studies, the contributors to this volume explore the conditions under which democratic institutions can survive poor governmental performance and economic adversities. The editors argue that strong links among civil society, political parties, and the state contribute to the survival of democracy even under inhospitable circumstances.

Kingstone, Peter, and Deborah J. Yashar, eds. Routledge Handbook of Latin American Politics . New York: Routledge, 2012.

A comprehensive discussion of Latin American politics and the best point of entry to the literature. Offers overviews of academic debates on political institutions, economic development, social policy, civil society, interest groups, social movements, and international relations. It includes chapters about how the study of Latin American politics has influenced research methods in comparative politics.

Levine, Daniel, and José Molina, eds. Quality of Democracy in Latin America . Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011.

A useful edited volume that evaluates the quality of democracy in terms of five dimensions: (1) elections, (2) participation, (3) responsiveness, (4) accountability, and (5) sovereignty. The book opens with two theoretical chapters about how to measure the quality of democracy, then presents country-specific chapters for Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela, and concludes with a discussion by the editors on the general trends in the region.

Mainwaring, Scott, and Christopher Welna, eds. Democratic Accountability in Latin America . New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

This volume addresses nonelectoral forms of accountability as a determinant of the quality of democracy and citizen satisfaction. The contributors develop, in detail, the concept of accountability and then analyze how the interaction between different institutions—elections, checks and balances, and oversight agencies—and civil society organizations affect democratic accountability.

Morlino, Leonardo, ed. La calidad de las democracias en América Latina: Informe para IDEA Internacional . San José, Costa Rica: IDEA Internacional, 2014.

This report offers a thorough effort to define and operationalize the concept of the “quality of democracy.” Morlino proposes procedural, substantive, and outcome-based aspects of democratic quality and evaluates them for fifteen countries to generate a highly disaggregated picture of the challenges and strengths of democracy in each case. This framework has influenced the work of the “Red de Estudios sobre la Calidad de la Democracia en América Latina.”

Payne, J. Mark, Daniel Zovatto, and Mercedes Mateo Díaz. Democracies in Development: Politics and Reform in Latin American Countries . Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 2007.

This report focused on the effects of institutional features on democratic performance, in particular electoral rules and institutional design, parties and party systems, and popular participation and public opinion. The authors argue that more democratic and efficient institutions can, over time, mitigate the negative effects of antidemocratic factors related to political culture, socioeconomic development, or international pressures.

Polilat. Índice de Desarrollo Democrático de América Latina .

The private consulting firm Polilat has created with the support of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation the Índice de Desarrollo Democrático de América Latina (IDD-LAT) as a composite index of the quality of democracy for eighteen countries, aggregating several indicators that measure: (1) respect for political and civil rights, (2) quality of government, (3) social well-being, and (4) economic performance. IDD-LAT also publishes yearly reports about the situation in the region using this approach.

United Nations Development Programme. Democracy in Latin America: Toward a Citizens’ Democracy . New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2004.

This United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report was an agenda-setting document for the evaluation of democratic performance. Based on a theoretical framework by Guillermo O’Donnell, the report goes beyond the procedural focus on elections to assess citizens’ satisfaction with their democratic governments, using new indicators on the quality of democratic institutions, interviews of elites, and large public opinion surveys.

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Chart: Evaluating Latin American Democracies in 2022

The region has witnessed a mix of stability and stagnation with several big setbacks and a couple bright spots.

As we settle into the third decade of the twenty-first century, how is democracy faring in Latin America? That depends on who you ask. Per IDEA’s Global State of Democracy Report 2021, released last November, most Latin American democracies are holding steady, if not stagnating, at mid-range levels of quality. But according to Latinobarómetro’s 2021 report published the same month, there’s a growing indifference among citizens in the region toward democracy on the whole.

Half of the countries in Latin America were showing signs of erosions to their democracies at the end of 2021 per the IDEA report , but none so great as Brazil, which is experiencing the world’s steepest democratic recession . The report also underscores an uptick in attacks against the press by both governing and opposition parties, as well as heads of state, particularly in Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, and Peru.

On the flip side, the IDEA report singles out Ecuador and the Dominican Republic for making substantial improvements to their democracies since 2016. The two countries show that democracy in the region is “not only resilient but also has the potential to continue being perfected.”

According to Latinobarómetro , however, Ecuador was also the country where popular support for democracy fell the most in the region from 2010 to 2020. In 2010, about two-thirds of Latin Americans and Ecuadorans said that democracy was the most preferable form of government. Ten years later, just under half of Latin Americans—and a third of Ecuadorans—agreed. Despite overall declines, 11 countries ended the decade in 2020 with support for democracy on the upswing compared to 2018, compared to seven where it continued to trend downward.  

"We are in a global battle for hearts and minds, where decisions are being made today that will lock in relationships for the longer term," writes AS/COA's Eric Farnsworth in The National Interest . 

The Brazilian economy is improving this year. How sustainable is the trend of faster growth?

Learn about how the candidates differ when it comes to economic policy, endorsements, and coalitions.

Comparing Latin Democracies

• Diego Abente-Brun

Select your citation format:

The Quality of Democracy in Latin America . Edited by Daniel H. Levine and José E. Molina. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011. 299 pp.

W hat does it mean to speak of the “quality” of a country’s democracy, and how can this quality be measured and compared across cases? Since the early 2000s, a number of scholars have been trying to answer these questions. In mid-decade, Daniel Levine and José Molina gathered a distinguished group with the aim of systematically improving upon the existing expert literature. The group’s work focused on Latin America, but wider implications are not far to seek. The fruits of the effort are set forth in the present volume, which may safely be called an indispensable tool for all those interested in democracy’s fate, whether in Latin America or beyond.

The editors open with a pair of chapters that ask in detail what the quality of democracy is and how it can be gauged. To this they add a final chapter that attempts to draw some conclusions. In between are case-study chapters on Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Each chapter addresses the guiding questions posed by the editors, making the book a truly coherent comparative exercise. A brief review lends itself best to consideration of the general questions rather than the specific findings for each country.

About the Author

Diego Abente-Brun is deputy director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy.

View all work by Diego Abente-Brun

Levine and Molina’s curtain-raising theoretical overview is useful and much needed. They rightly insist on a crucial distinction between the quality of democracy as a political process for making decisions and the quality of the decisions and hence outcomes (as these affect security, prosperity, justice, and so on) that any given democracy actually produces.  [End Page 165]  In doing so, they resist a confusing tendency, visible since the late 1990s, to conflate these two concepts. The sad truth is that a society may be well governed from the procedural-democratic point of view, and yet be ill governed in any number of other, more substantive ways.

A second crucial point has to do with the definition of democracy. Levine and Molina insist on a procedural definition because it alone offers enough analytical precision and portability to make the exercise of comparison meaningful. Lastly, Levine and Molina define the focus of their inquiry as “the level of quality of any specific democracy” as “determined by  the extent  to which citizens can participate in an informed manner in processes of free, fair, and frequent elections; influence the making of political decisions; and hold those who govern accountable” (8, emphasis in original). The quality of democracy is thus a multidimensional continuum.

In operational terms, Levine and Molina posit that democratic quality can be measured along five dimensions: electoral decisions, participation, accountability, responsiveness, and sovereignty. Using these, the editors construct a general “Index of Quality of Democracy” (33). The Index uses data from 2005 or the nearest preceding year for which data were available and lists the seventeen Latin American countries that were considered “electoral democracies” by Freedom House that year. The Index consists of figures running along a 0-to-100 scale (with 100 representing a perfect score) to indicate how well each country did along each of the five dimensions of democratic quality.

According to the Index, Uruguay is the region’s highest-quality procedural democracy with an average score of 71.9, followed by Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico clustering together in the low 60s. Guatemala sits at the bottom with a score of 44.6, well below the 17-country average of 57.3. Eight countries—the five already mentioned plus Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil—rank above that average. The remaining nine countries rank below.

The Index shows not only how the various countries rank, but also the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. For example, most countries do well in terms of electoral decisions and sovereignty, especially insofar as the latter can be gauged by the degree of civilian control over the military (no small consideration in a region with a long history of military coups). Participation (average score, 48.5) is a weak spot, which is surprising given the apparent strength of various social movements across Latin America.

The worst deficit, however, appears in the area of accountability. The average score on this measure is an abysmal 28.6, by far the lowest on any of the five dimensions of democratic quality. Each country’s lowest individual score, moreover, is found in this category, indicating a serious across-the-board democratic deficit. Levine and Molina explain this by noting how the region’s many young democracies, anxious to consolidate  [End Page 166]  and show that they can govern, have bolstered presidential powers even to the point of creating what Guillermo O’Donnell calls “delegative democracies.” The problem is acute, but one wonders how well the obvious solution—strengthening legislatures—will work given the drift toward factionalism and exaggerated pork-barrel politics that is evident in so many of these bodies today.

As persuasive as the volume generally is, some elements of its analytical framework are open to question. In a highly original move, Levine and Molina use the degree to which a country is sovereign as one of the indicators of the quality of its democracy. They gauge sovereignty in part by examining a country’s level of foreign indebtedness. But is such indebtedness really a dimension of the political process, or is it rather a policy outcome that sheds light not on a democracy’s quality, but on its performance?

Another indicator of sovereignty is the degree to which civilian officials control the military. Granted, civilian supremacy is vital to democracy. But if we include it, why not also bring in measures of “stateness” such as governmental control over the national territory, an effective bureaucracy, and significant regulatory capabilities? After all, are these not just as important as civilian supremacy when it comes to determining whether citizens can “influence the making of political decisions”? As Claudio Holzner notes in his chapter on Mexico, “Many of the weaknesses of democratic rule in Mexico do not have their origin in faulty rules of the game, but in institutional weaknesses within the Mexican state that make the implementation of those rules inconsistent, unpredictable, and, in some cases, nonexistent” (106).

The inclusion of Transparency International’s well-known Corruption Perception Index as a measure of horizontal accountability makes sense—corruption plainly affects the ability of institutions to control each other. Yet should not other signs of horizontal accountability or its lack (the presence or absence of effective national comptroller’s or ombudsman’s offices, for instance) be included too? As for vertical accountability, one chosen indicator is the average length of terms in elected office, but as this generally falls within a narrow range of four or five years one wonders how much difference it makes.

A perhaps more serious problem is the failure to include an indicator of the  effective  rule of law. It is one thing to have an  estado de derecho  (a formally law-based state, which every democracy must be), but quite another to live under the true  imperio de la ley  in which equal laws are equally applied as a general occurrence. How can citizens influence political decisions or hold those in positions of power accountable if the laws are applied according to who the plaintiff is? Perhaps one could take a position akin to Holzner’s and see uneven law enforcement as a general symptom of state weakness, but most observers would agree that the enforcement problem is to a large extent linked  [End Page 167]  to corruption, influence peddling, and pervasive bias against the poor and disadvantaged.

Finally, readers may want to take the fine print of some of these rankings with a grain of salt. As noted, Costa Rica (63.4), Chile (63.2), Argentina (62.7), and Mexico (61.3) have nearly identical above-average scores. With regard to the first two this seems quite plausible, but the close proximity to them of Argentina and Mexico is bound to raise eyebrows. Argentina, according to a recent UNDP and OAS study, saw a whopping 382 uses of presidential-decree powers between 2002 and 2007, while Chilean chief executives went the better part of a decade (2000 to 2007) without using such powers once. (In Costa Rica, any presidential decree requires legislative approval within a set period, while in Mexico decrees can only be used for commercial matters and must be approved by Congress in the annual budget law.) Although the compiling of indices may be a necessary task, anomalies such as these underline what a conceptually risky enterprise it remains.

Even taking all the foregoing cautions into account, one may conclude that Levine and Molina have produced a fine piece of scholarship. The theoretical chapters are solid and useful, the country chapters illuminating, and the Index an indispensable tool for comparative analysis and the development of a research agenda that, so far as I know, stands as the only one of its kind. Students of democracy, as well as those active in democratic political life, may regard this conceptually elegant and empirically rigorous volume as essential reading. Both audiences will find it a valuable source of information, debate, and guidance. As Gerardo Munck has said, Levine, Molina, and their contributors have authored a tome that “moves the debate forward,” and indeed substantially so.

Further Reading

Volume 25, Issue 1

The Legacies of 1989: The Transformative Power of Europe Revisited

• Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Improving governance in the EU’s new member states remains a huge challenge for the European project. Why has the EU succeeded in promoting democracy among its postcommunist members but failed in promoting…

Volume 5, Issue 3

Latin America’s Critical Elections: Brazil at an Impasse

• Bolívar Lamounier

Volume 1, Issue 3

Three Paradoxes of Democracy

• Larry Diamond

While democracy is the most admired form of government, maintaining it requires contending with its contradictions.

• Harvard Business School →
• Faculty & Research →

Democracy: A Case Study

• Format: Print
• Find it at Harvard

About The Author

David A. Moss

More from the author.

• Faculty Research

The U.S. Secession Crisis as a Breakdown of Democracy

• February 2016 (Revised July 2017)

An Australian Ballot for California?

• February 2016 (Revised April 2017)

James Madison, the 'Federal Negative,' and the Making of the U.S. Constitution

• The U.S. Secession Crisis as a Breakdown of Democracy  By: David Moss and Dean Grodzins
• An Australian Ballot for California?  By: David Moss, Marc Campasano and Dean Grodzins
• James Madison, the 'Federal Negative,' and the Making of the U.S. Constitution  By: David Moss and Marc Campasano

• Politics & Social Sciences
• Politics & Government

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Readings in Latin American Politics: Challenges to Democratization 1st Edition

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cengage Learning; 1st edition (February 3, 2005)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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Democracy in America

Alexis de toqueville, everything you need for every book you read..

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Democracy in America: Introduction

Democracy in america: plot summary, democracy in america: detailed summary & analysis, democracy in america: themes, democracy in america: quotes, democracy in america: characters, democracy in america: symbols, democracy in america: theme wheel, brief biography of alexis de toqueville.

Historical Context of Democracy in America

Other books related to democracy in america.

• Full Title: Democracy in America
• When Written: 1831-1840  
• Where Written: France
• When Published: 1835 (Part I); 1840 (Part II)
• Genre: Political writing
• Setting: Though writing from his native country of France, Tocqueville’s text primarily draws on his experiences traveling through the United States.
• Point of View: The book is a work of political argumentation, but Tocqueville often explicitly invokes a first-person perspective, citing his own personal experiences in America.

Extra Credit for Democracy in America

In Real Time Between 1997 and 1998, the television network C-SPAN created 65 hours of live programming by traveling along Tocqueville’s route in America, timing the trip to coincide exactly with the days of his trip and the places he saw along the way.

Teenage Angst Although Tocqueville praises religion in America for its ability to keep order and authority, he himself lost his Catholic faith as a teenager as a result of reading the many books of the French Enlightenment that he came across in his father’s library.

Megan Sharp

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