Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America

Abstract

The demise of authoritarian rule in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay, when combined with efforts at political liberalization in Mexico and the recent election of civilian presidents in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, represents a political watershed in Latin America. This wave of regime changes in the 1980s places a number of questions on the intellectual and political agenda for the continent. Will these newly emergent and fragile democracies in South America be able to survive, especially in the context of the worst economic recession since the 1930s? Can the liberalization of authoritarian rule in Central America and the possible prospect of honest competitive elections in Mexico be transformed into genuine democratic transitions? Will previously consolidated political democracies such as Venezuela and Costa Rica be able to extend the basic principles of citizenship into economic and social realms, or will they be deconsolidated by this challenge and revert to a sole preoccupation with survivability?' Behind such questions lies a central concern expressed by Dankwart A. Rustow almost twenty years ago: What conditions make democracy possible and what conditions make it thrive?2 This article addresses Rustow's query by arguing the following. First, the manner in which theorists of comparative politics have sought to understand democracy in developing countries has changed as the once-dominant search for prerequisites of democracy has given way to a more process-oriented emphasis on contingent choice. Having undergone this evolution, theorists should now develop an interactive approach that seeks explicitly to relate structural constraints to the shaping of contingent choice. Second, it is no longer adequate to examine regime transitions writ large, that is, from the general category of authoritarian rule to that of democracy. Such broad-gauged efforts must be complemented by the identification of different types of democracy that emerge from distinctive modes of regime transition as well as an analysis of their potential political, economic, and social consequences. Before these issues and their implications for the study of Latin America can be addressed, however, a definition of democracy must be established.