Democracy, latin america - Essay Example

Marta Lagos, in her article “Between Stability and Crisis in Latin America”, presents important statistics regarding the status of liberal democracies in one of the world’s most politically chaotic regions. Her article progresses from the most general statistics (public opinions on democracy) and slowly moves to the most specific elements of societies: interpersonal trust. In this summary, I want to recapitulate her findings by operating in the opposite direction—moving from the lowest level of organization to the most complex—in order to explain the reasoning behind the broader findings.

Lagos notes that, “…low levels of trust in other people constitute a defining feature of Latin American political culture” (Lagos, pg. 142). Latin Americans are characterized by a chronic passivity, where they develop the naive expectation that their problems will be solved by someone else, turning to the state, and democracy, to do so. The statistics show that as individuals move away from institutions such as political parties and government, and toward more domestic issues like television or church, levels of trust increase.

These low levels, although not new, are relatively low compared to other regions of the world, and make it almost impossible for the liberalization which democracy entails. Lagos concludes: “…declining levels of interpersonal trust thus constitute an important barrier to… the development of a civil society…” (Lagos, pg. 144).Right now, the support for democracy in Latin America resides at about 62%, which masks wide differentials between countries like Brazil which have moved progressively farther to the Left.

Lagos reports there has been a sharp decline in support for liberal democracy, which has been motivated almost exclusively by economic and political failures in certain countries. Although 62% of Latin Americans favor democracy, “only 37 percent of the public are satisfied with the way that democracy works” (Lagos, pg. 141). Thus, the situation in the region is that the public perception of democracy remains mixed, and the initial short-lived enthusiasm about democratic change has faded through the years.

The lack of public trust in institutions and public perceptions about failures in democratic countries has fueled this ambivalence toward the form of government.In their paper “Democratization Backwards: The Problem of Third-Wave Democracies”, Richard Rose and Doh Chull Shin propose a distinction between “first-wave” and “third-wave” democracies, the latter being developmentally challenged versions of the former. Because third-wave countries introduced elections before elements which are essential for liberal democracy, they are “incomplete” (Rose and Shin, pg 332): “While free elections are necessary, they are not sufficient for democratization”, and “in many third-wave democracies [what is missing is] basic institutions of the modern state” (Rose and Shin, pg 332), which include rule of law, civil society, accountability, and so on.

Rose and Shin continue to suggest three methods in which countries can remedy this: complete democratization, repudiating free elections, or fall into a low-level equilibrium trap in which the inadequacies of elites are matched by low popular demands and expectations. There is no guarantee that any “third-wave” democracy will remedy this by any means, or move away from their status as an incapacitated democracy.As a paradigm case of a third-wave democracy, the authors cite Russia, which introduced competitive elections before implementing the necessary conditions for a “modern state”.

Their discussion on the “price” of a broken-back democracy has immediate relevance to the situation in Latin America, where many “third-wave” improperly developed democracies still exist. The authors note that a modern market economy presupposes the modern state—and the fundamental resources of a market economy, including capital, property, contracts, and so on—can only be secured by a rule of law. Thus, the backward democracy is economically hindered in its development. Another likely consequence of backward democratization is so-called “idiotization” wherein citizens forget about, or consciously reject, their obligations as citizens, and thus collapse the system at the lowest level of organization.

The situation was measured in 1998 by Transparency International, which classified 81 of 191 world nations as enjoying basic civil liberties and individual rights, 57 as partially so, and 53 as not free (Rose and Shin, pg 332).