Democracy in Latin America – Between Hope and Despair: Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development

In 2009, Ignacio Walker—scholar, politician, and one of Latin America’s leading public intellectuals—published La Democracia en America Latina. Now available in English, with a new prologue, and significantly revised and updated for an English-speaking audience, Democracy in Latin America: Between Hope and Despair contributes to the necessary and urgent task of exploring both the possibilities and difficulties of establishing a stable democracy in Latin America.

 

Walker argues that, throughout the past century, Latin American history has been marked by the search for responses or alternatives to the crisis of oligarchic rule and the struggle to replace the oligarchic order with a democratic one. After reviewing some of the principal theories of democracy based on an analysis of the interactions of political, economic, and social factors, Walker maintains that it is primarily the actors, institutions, and public policies—not structural determinants—that create progress or regression in Latin American democracy.          

 

Democracy in Latin America is organized by eight themes: independence and the establishment of democracy; the economic shift from exports to import substitution; democratic breakdowns, transitions, and consolidation; the double transition to democracy and trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s; institutions, democratic governability, and neopopulism; presidentialism and parliamentarism; the "new social question"; and the need for democracy of institutions. Walker systematically addresses the abundant literature on democracy in Latin America, combining a scholarly perspective with real world experience that enhances the understanding of political and economic development in the region.

 

"Ignacio Walker's Democracy in Latin America: Between Hope and Despair draws in a critical fashion on the theories and concepts of social science to make an original argument about democracy in Latin America. His is the most balanced and comprehensive treatment of the topic currently available." —Paul E. Sigmund, Princeton University

"This is a dialogue between politics and academia writes Walker in the very first line of his book. After reading it, I should add: a very fruitful dialogue, one politically passionate in its commitment to democracy and intellectually acute in its inquiry about the vicissitudes of representative government in Latin America. The dialogue revolves around a key question: Why Latin America still shows a marked ambiguity towards representative democracy? To answer this question, Walker examines critical economic and socialpolitical phenomena with two centuries of Latin American history in the backdrop. Being a well trained political scientist, a policy maker, and an active politician, a rare combination of attributes, Walker is not interested so much in the past as he is in the present and in the future. Democracy in Latin America: Between Hope and Despair is a book all people who recognize the importance of consolidating 'authentic representative democracies' in the region should read." —Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil (1995–2002)