Article

Challenges Facing Democracy: Can Latin America Stay on the Democratic Road?

January 1993
Harvard International Review 16(1)

Authors:

Jennifer L McCoy

Georgia State University

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.

Article

Corruption perceptions: Confidence in elections and evaluations of clientelism

April 2021 · Governance

How does the fairness of the democratic process influence public perceptions of corruption? This article demonstrates the ways that elections can influence broader confidence in democracy. Corruption is often described as one of the most serious problems facing democracy today, and citizen confidence in democracy has implications for system support and legitimacy. What constitutes corruption, ... [Show full abstract] however, is not always obvious. We focus on the importance of citizens' feelings about electoral integrity for shaping their attitudes about corruption more broadly. Using survey data from Latin America and an experimental survey in the United States, we show that when asked to evaluate political practices as corrupt or not, people who are more confident in the fairness of their electoral process are generally less concerned about corruption, compared with people who are less confident in elections. These effects hold across a range of practices, experiences, and electoral contexts.

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Why Do States Intervene in the Elections of Others? The Role of Incumbent–Opposition Divisions

September 2020 · British Journal of Political Science

Why do states intervene in elections abroad? This article argues that outsiders intervene when the main domestic contenders for office adopt policy positions that differ from the point of view of the outside power. It refers to the split between the government's and opposition's positions as policy polarization. Polarization between domestic political forces, rather than the degree of ... [Show full abstract] unfriendliness of the government in office, attracts two types of interventions: process (for or against democracy) and candidate (for or against the government) interventions. The study uses a novel, original data set to track local contenders’ policy positions. It shows that the new policy polarization measurement outperforms a number of available alternatives when it comes to explaining process and candidate interventions. The authors use this measurement to explain the behavior of the United States as an intervener in elections from 1945 to 2012. The United States is more likely to support the opposition, and the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US opposition is facing an anti-US government. It is more likely to support the government, and undermine the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US government is facing an anti-US opposition. The article also presents the results for all interveners, confirming the results from the US case.

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Democratic Innovations Under Scrutiny

May 2020 · Brazilian Political Science Review

Wagner Romao

Is it still possible to think about innovations within the context of our battered democracies? ‘The Two Faces of Institutional Innovation: Promises and Limits of Democratic Participation in Latin America’ is a book that pursues this issue and reflects the maturity of this field of study on the topic of institutional participation and democratic innovations.

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Legalization judicially personal consumption drug doses: a challenge to democracy in Latin America?

January 2014 · Justicia Juris

Drug use in most of the world has been treated from a democratic aspect, with the challenge the participation of citizens in making decisions or contemplation of the subject by the legislature. But Colombia has been the exception since permissiveness and restriction of consumption has been developed by the courts. Is the Constitutional Court that on the occasion of his various statements has ... [Show full abstract] changed the treatment of consumption and who consumes, it should be. This reflection paper he realizes this legal problem. It was considered important to highlight the Colombian case against the other countries of Latin America. The research sought to determine whether legalization of psychoactive substances through the courts is challenging the democratic system or if instead the constitutional body empowered to intervene in this debate. To reach this goal we have identified and analyzed the regulatory treatment that has been given to the use of psychoactive substances in the major countries of Latin America.

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January 1970

William L Furlong

This study examines the political peplextities of Costa Rican democracy and the results and impacts of the recent elections on this most democratic political sys-tem in Latin America. Despite its level of democracy, Costa Rica is facing many impediments which could be exacerbated by a negative electoral campaign and by the weak presidential cadidates. The election on Frebruary 6, 1994 ended one ... [Show full abstract] of the most ignorable campaigns in the last fifty years. It was predicted that these factors would produce additional difficulties for Costa Rica. Despite these nega-tive projections, the "Tico" democratic system emerged without creating these probelmatic conditions.

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Malestar con la representación democrática en América Latina

December 2017 · Política y Gobierno

Though there is a wide literature on the crisis of representation in Latin America, less is known about the political processes that precede the aforementioned crisis which translates into the feeling of malaise with democratic representation. Here we operationalize malaise as a combination of political disaffection, distrust with political institutions and government disapproval. We conclude ... [Show full abstract] that the malaise with democracy is not a systematic outcome of either the quality of democracy or the human development index. Rather, it is associated to inequality. At the individual level, malaise is more intense among the youth and in the lower-income segments of the population.

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January 1970

Alberto Francisco Ruano

During the 90's, with democratization in Latin America, processes of judicial reform took place with the intention to secure the independence and autonomy of the judicial power facing others representative powers of the State. The implemented constitutional design- based on a system of counterbalances- corresponded to an exogenous model of division of power that, not necessarily, responded to ... [Show full abstract] endogenous conditions of the Latin American nations, in particular. The present article analyzes this confrontation between European and American models of division of power and the concrete application in the particular case of Latin American nations.

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The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law

July 1997 · American Political Science Association

Barry R. Weingast

This paper develops a game-theoretic approach to the problem of political officials' respect for political and economic rights of citizens. It models the policing of rights as a coordination problem among citizens, but one with asymmetries difficult to resolve in a decentralized manner. The paper shows that democratic stability depends on a self-enforcing equilibrium: It must be in the interests ... [Show full abstract] of political officials to respect democracy's limits on their behavior. The concept of self-enforcing limits on the state illuminates a diverse set of problems and thus serves as a potential basis for integrating the literature. The framework is applied to a range of topics, such as democratic stability, plural societies, and elite pacts. The paper also applies its lessons to the case of the Glorious Revolution in seventeenth-century England.

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Enhancing political representation in Lebanese confessionalism: Toward a randomly selected senate in...

July 2021 · Domes: digest of Middle East studies

Simon Badran

Under the current confessional system, representative democracy in Lebanon suffers from a double crisis. At the institutional level, the prolonged presidential and cabinet vacancies combined with the slowness of the governmental machine reveal a considerable efficiency deficit. At the structural level, the current electoral representative system increasingly supports the organization of an ... [Show full abstract] oligarchic Lebanese regime where the concentration of power in a small number of people serves to benefit the interests of the confessional political elite. In this paper, I consider the establishment of a randomly selected senate as an alternative political answer to the crisis facing representative democracy in Lebanon. I identify the structural and political inadequacies of one of the dominant proposed resolutions, the “referendum solution,” to deal with the current representative crisis. I argue that the introduction of sortition in Lebanese political procedures could be considered an evolution toward further deliberative democratization of the system.

Book

A concise history of Brazil, second edition

January 2014

The second edition of A Concise History of Brazil offers a sweeping yet accessible history of Latin America's largest country. Boris Fausto examines Brazil's history from the arrival of the Portuguese in the New World through the long and sometimes rocky transition from independence in 1822 to democracy in the twentieth century. In a completely new chapter, his son Sergio Fausto, a prominent ... [Show full abstract] political scientist, brings the history up to the present, focusing on Brazil's increasing global economic importance as well as its continued democratic development and the challenges the country faces to meet the higher expectations of its people.

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The EU democracy policy in Latin America: narrative and funding

October 2024 · Frontiers in Political Science

Democracy is a central concern in the EU narrative toward Latin America; still, the allocation of funds does not follow this narrative closely, resulting in a chronic lack of support for local CSOs. The allocated funds face misappropriation by local authorities and the indirect support of low- and non-democratic regimes, reflected in the affected countries’ drop in indices that measure Social ... [Show full abstract] Progress and Democracy. This situation is further aggravated by prioritizing projects that reflect EU-centered agendas and skew the critical aid needed for democracy resilience building. As a response, we bring forward recommendations for the EU to bridge the gap between its democracy policy narrative and execution in Latin America, focusing on the particular needs of the region’s democratic agents.

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Democratic Culture and Governance: Latin America on the Threshold of the Third Millennium; Social De...

February 2000 · Hispanic American Historical Review

Rosario Espinal

Last Updated: 22 Oct 2024

Challenges Facing Democracy: Can Latin America Stay on the Democratic Road?

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