Democratic Vitality in Latin America

By Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). At CDDRL, he is also one of the principal investigators in the programs on Arab Reform and Democracy and on Liberation Technology. He is also founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and a Senior Consultant to the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion. At Stanford University, Diamond is the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service and also professor by courtesy of political science and sociology. He teaches courses on comparative democratic development and post- conflict democracy building, and advises many Stanford students. Diamond has edited or co-edited some 36 books on democracy, including the recent titles Democratization in Africa, How People View Democracy, How East Asians View Democracy, Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan, and Assessing the Quality of Democracy. Among his other published works are, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He also edited the 1989-90 series Democracy in Developing Countries, with Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset.

For the past decade, the world has experienced a mild but persistent recession of freedom and democracy. More countries have been declining, rather than gaining, in political rights and civil liberties, reversing a 15-year post-Cold War trend. Levels of political polarization have been increasing, more democracies have been breaking down, there has been growing pressure on Internet freedom and civil society, and emerging-market democracies worldwide have found it difficult to overcome entrenched corruption and build a rule of law.

Latin America has not been immune from these trends. The region continues to enjoy a period of unprecedented democratic vitality, with more countries experiencing longer runs of democracy than at any other time in their histories. Moreover, until recently, a number of Latin American democracies – such as Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru – were able to use the income from rising commodity export revenues to reduce poverty and inequality, with the aid of social policies like conditional cash transfer programs. In the region’s largest country – and one of its most unequal – millions of Brazilians were lifted out of absolute poverty under Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

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