POLITICAL DEBATES IN LATIN AMERIC AFTER DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION: DIVERGING VIEWS ON HOW TO STRENGHTEN DEMOCRATIC RULE IN THE REGION

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Buenos Aires

Taller; Workshop on Democratic Governance: Engagement, Participation, Information and Accountability; 2012

Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Taiwan Journal of Democracy

After decades of political instability and authoritarianism, Latin America has successfully inaugurated the longest period of democratic rule of its contemporary history. Paraphrasing Juan Linz, democracy became ?the only political game? in town. The closing of the period of the transitions from authoritarianism as well as that of institutional consolidation of the new regimes prompted a substantial shift of the political agenda and consequently on the regional debate on democracy. Having exorcised the threat of authoritarianism, the region turned its attention to the nature, workings, and delivery of existing democratic regimes.   A new body of literature emerged that focused on issues such as the quality of democracy, democratic deepening, and political innovation.  The common concern of those approaches was the need to close the gap between the normative promise of democracy and the social and political realities of a region marked by the persistence of great social inequalities, extended poverty, and serious institutional deficits. At the same time, there were different perspectives regarding the route that could lead to a substantially improved version of democratic rule. At this respect, three distinctive approaches dominated the post-consolidation debates: a) the literature on the quality of democracy, b) the works on democratic deepening that called for new forms of democratic governance, c) and calls to overcome the limitations of representative democracy through populism. Each perspective is built around some basic assumptions regarding what democracy is; consequently, each one is proposing a specific democratic model. In contrast to past political debates that revolve around different regime options (military authoritarianism, revolution, or democracy), today?s disagreements depart from the recognition of the legitimacy of democratic institutions. The proposals rather differ on their ways of understanding what democracy means: political struggles in contemporary Latin American are partly definitional struggles over what democracy means.  The aim of this article is to review the main tenants of each perspective to then call for the need to broaden our understanding of democratic representation.