for comments on earlier drafts.In the current debate on redemocratization in Latin America, the focus is squarely on political variables proper, that is, on the political process as shaped by political institutions and leadership. Political choices by major actors, particularly the adoption of explicit or implicit political pacts designed to ensure the transition, are accorded primary importance. In fact, the most influential work on the topic has argued that the high indeterminacy of the process of transition makes the use of conventional social science categories and approaches, such as class, sectors, institutions, and macroeconomic and world systemic structures inadequate for its analysis (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986:4).Whereas this focus is certainly appropriate for the immediate transition period, the other important question, namely consolidation of democratic regimes in the medium and longer run, draws attention to underlying structural conditions favorable to such an endeavor. Analyses of the process of transition in a given country "freeze" the structural context; there is generally little structural change over the relatively short periods of transition. Furthermore, analyses comparing processes of transition in the late seventies and the eighties keep the world economic and political context constant, and they tend to take structure in the individual countries as a given.Taking a longer historical view, though, and asking under what conditions democracies were established and consolidated in Latin America in the past and are likely to be consolidated in the future moves structural variables back into the center of attention. 1 Yet, with the exception of Therborn's (1979) attempt, there is no theoretically well grounded, comparative historical structural treatment of the emergence and decline of (nearly) democratic forms of rule which covers all the South American countries. 1 There are attempts to explain the trajectory of democracy in Latin America in cultural terms, emphasizing the "distinct tradition" (e.g. Wiarda 1980Wiarda , 1982 rooted in the colonial past, and implying that the question why democracy has not become the norm is intellectually inappropriate and ethnocentric. However, if one discards somewhat parochial Latin American views and adopts a wider perspective which includes the Third World in general, the South American experience becomes important, as its democratic record is much stronger than in the rest of the Third World. From a general world wide perspective, both the tendencies to and difficulties with democracy in South America can be explained in structural rather than cultural terms.
2The following analysis provides such a treatment and demonstrates that structural factors have considerable explanatory power for the trajectory of democracy in South America. The nature of a country's integration into the world market (enclaves versus nationally controlled export sectors), the labor requirements of agriculture, the degree of subsidiary industrialization generated by the expor...
