Concerns about democratization in Latin America today center not on the threat of authoritarian regression, but on the depth, quality, fairness, and completeness of democratization thus far. Large-scale economic and social reforms, stronger and more complex civil societies, and processes of integration and globalization call for new approaches in order to understand the unfolding of democracy in the region. In this context, the contributors to this volume explore the often disjunctive aspects of Latin American democracy, providing a nuanced understanding of contemporary democratic governance.

Concerns about democratization in Latin America today center not on the threat of authoritarian regression, but on the depth, quality, fairness, and completeness of democratization thus far. Large-scale economic and social reforms, stronger and more complex civil societies, and processes of integration and globalization call for new approaches in order to understand the unfolding of democracy in the region. In this context, the contributors to this volume explore the often disjunctive aspects of Latin American democracy, providing a nuanced understanding of contemporary democratic governance.

Over the last twenty years Latin America has seen a definitive movement toward civilian rule. Significant trade, fiscal, and monetary reforms have accompanied this shift, exposing previously state-led economies to the forces of the market. Despite persistent economic and political hardships, the combination of civilian regimes and market-based strategies has proved to be remarkably resilient and still dominates the region. This book focuses on the effects of market reforms on domestic politics in Latin America. While considering civilian rule as a constant, the book examines and compares domestic political responses in six countries that embraced similar packages of reforms in the 1980s—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. The contributors focus on how ambitious measures such as liberalization, privatization, and deregulation yielded mixed results in these countries and in doing so they identify three main patterns of political economic adjustment. In Argentina and Chile, the implementation of market reforms has gone hand in hand with increasingly competitive politics. In Brazil and Mexico, market reforms helped to catalyze transitions from entrenched authoritarian rule. Finally, in Peru and Venezuela, traditional political systems have collapsed and civilian rule has been repeatedly challenged. The contributors include Carol Wise (University of Southern California), Karen L. Remmer (Duke University), Carol Graham (Brookings Institution), Stefano Pettinato (United Nations Development Programme), Consuelo Cruz (Tufts University), Juan E. Corradi (New York University), Delia M. Boylan (Chicago Public Radio), Riordan Roett (Johns Hopkins University), Martín Tanaka (Institute for Peruvian Studies, Lima), and Kenneth M. Roberts (University of New Mexico).

The late twentieth century witnessed the birth of an impressive number of new democracies in Latin America. This wave of democratization since 1978 has been by far the broadest and most durable in the history of Latin America, but many of the resulting democratic regimes also suffer from profound deficiencies. What caused democratic regimes to emerge and survive? What are their main achievements and shortcomings? This volume offers an ambitious and comprehensive overview of the unprecedented advances as well as the setbacks in the post-1978 wave of democratization. It seeks to explain the sea change from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which openly authoritarian regimes are the rare exception, and it analyzes why some countries have achieved striking gains in democratization while others have experienced erosions. The book presents general theoretical arguments about what causes and sustains democracy and analyses of nine compelling country cases.

The essays in this book analyze and explain the crisis of democratic representation in five Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In this region, disaffection with democracy, political parties, and legislatures has spread to an alarming degree. Many presidents have been forced from office, and many traditional parties have fallen by the wayside. These five countries have the potential to be negative examples in a region that has historically had strong demonstration and diffusion effects in terms of regime changes. "The Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes" addresses an important question for Latin America as well as other parts of the world: Why does representation sometimes fail to work?

This volume analyzes how enduring democracy amid longstanding inequality engendered inclusionary reform in contemporary Latin America.