After Regime Change: Authoritarian Legacies, Political Representation, and the Democratic Future of South America

Abstract

This article focuses on the legacies of the authoritarian regimes of South America for the contemporary consolidation of democracy. In particular, it considers their lasting effects on the region's informal networks and formal institutions of political representation. It questions several assumptions made by the literature on regime transition and democratic consolidation in South America about political culture, institutional reform, and electoral realignment: taken together, these assumptions are misleading about how much and what kind of political change has occurred in Latin America as a result of authoritarian rule. To understand how the challenges of democratic consolidation have been shaped, the article proposes instead to examine how the economic policies and political strategies pursued by military regimes preserved, altered, or destroyed the clientelistic and corporatist networks of mediation between state and society prevailing at the onset of authoritarianism, as well as those constructed upon the representative base of programmatic political parties.

Decentralization's Nondemocratic Roots: Authoritarianism and Subnational Reform in Latin America

“…* This opportunity to defend acquired capacities would not have been open to subnational actors if the military had chosen simply to deconcentrate power within the central government bureaucracy. As Hagopian has argued, when Latin America redemocratized in the 1980s, its new democracies did not merely pick up where preceding democracies had left off (Hagopian 1993). One of the most important illustrations of this point from the four cases is that the simple reintroduction of subnational elections in the course of the national transition immediately infused new political meaning into the functional changes that the military governments had introduced at the subnational level.…”

Corporation-based Parties: The Present and Future of Business Politics in Latin America

“…Yet the very best research on this question-including Kitschelt et al (2010) and Roberts (2007)-has not uncovered clear evidence of such ties. Indeed, Latin Americanists have lamented the absence of new parties with new links to organizations in the region for at least 20 years now (e.g., Hagopian 1993;Mainwaring and Scully 1995). Four separate claims have underlain this lament.…”

Los partidos políticos chilenos: Cambio y estabilidad en el comportamiento electoral 1990-2000

“…A. Garretón, 1989). Pese a que recientemente Montes et al han argumentado que la visión dominante acerca que los partidos políticos chilenos son fuertes, particularmente en el electorado, es exagerada; los partidos políti-cos chilenos han sido importantes actores (aunque inestables electoralmente) del proceso políti-co. Crecientemente se ha argumentado que el rol de los partidos en la sociedad chilena habría disminuido (Hagopian, 1992) y que los partidos ya no serían los principales estructuradores del voto. De esta forma, entender cuán determinante en el voto es la adhesión de los ciudadanos a los partidos es una de las principales interrogantes de este artículo.…”