Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America

FEDERICO M. ROSSI; EDUARDO SILVA

Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America: From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation

University of Pittsburgh Press

Lugar: Pittsburgh; Año: 2018; p. 3 - 20

Neoliberalism changed the face of Latin America and left average citizens struggling to cope with changes. The popular sectors, broadly defined, were especially hard hard-hit as wages declined and unemployment and precarious employment expanded. Protracted backlash to neoliberalism in the form of popular sector protest and electoral mobilization opened space for left governments throughout Latin America (Silva 2009). Where do the popular sectors that struggled so long to create the conditions for the left turn stand today?Neoliberal reforms unquestionably caused profound transformations in the relationship of the popular sectors to the political arena. Collier and Collier (1991) argued that the national populist period (1930s to 1970s) selectively incorporated popular popular-sector actors (mainly unions) into the political sphere and that neoliberal policies sought to exclude them, especially from socioeconomic policy-making arenas. Because the neoliberal period marginalized urban and rural popular sectors, the turn to left governments raised expectations for a second wave of incorporation (Rossi 2015, 2017). And yet, although a growing literature has analyzed many aspects of left governments (Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts et al. 2009; Cameron and Hershberg 2010; Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter et al. 2010; Levitsky and Roberts 2011), we lack a systematic, comprehensive, comparative study of how the redefinition of the organized popular sectors, their political allies, and their struggles have reshaped the political arena to include their interests.Our volume analyzes this problem in five paradigmatic cases: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, following Rossi´s (2015, 2017) thesis of the second wave of incorporation in Latin America. The subject is critical for understanding the extent of change in the distribution of political power in relation to the popular sectors and their interests. This is a key issue in the study of post-neoliberalism because the emerging new developmental path in Latin America includes an expansion of the political arena.