Philip Oxhorn
Latin America is undoubtedly more democratic today than at any time in its modern history. As a result, we often take for granted the importance of citizen participation and civil society for politics. Yet the current interest in both is relatively recent. Civil society was only (re)discovered in the 1980s, while interest in participation more generally has been sporadic—like political democracy in the region—and has been understood from a variety of perspectives that often diverged fundamentally from the liberal democratic paradigm that predominates today. These competing perspectives on civil society and participation reflect more than passing intellectual fads; they reflect various attempts to understand the observed ebbs and flows in how Latin Americans actually related to their societies and states.
The changing levels and types of participation, not to mention how we understand them, are particularly relevant to understanding current debates about the quality of democratic governance in Latin America. While there is a greater consensus than ever before among ordinary Latin Americans that democracy is the preferred form of government, there is also growing awareness that people are not satisfied with the governments that are being elected (PNUD 2004). This gap in people’s newfound normative preference for democracy and the actual outcomes of democratic political processes raises the danger that political democracy will be seen as, at best, irrelevant to addressing the everyday priorities of Latin Americans (e.g., finding stable employment and with sufficient wages to escape poverty, protection against criminal violence, a good education for their children, a decent place to live, healthcare, and so on), or, at worst, as part of the problem (Oxhorn 2006). How politicians seek to address—or take advantage—of this popular frustration with actually existing democracies has been at the heart of political trends in the region at least since the turn of the 21st century.
In this chapter, I will argue that Latin America is at a crossroads reflected in the choice of creating more robust democratic regimes understood as responsive and accountable governments achieved through autonomous citizen participation or the consolidation of hybrid democratic regimes characterized by greater or less degrees of accountability, responsiveness and autonomous participation. At its core, this alternative juxtaposes a normative vision of democracy emphasizing its unique capacity to resolve conflict nonviolently with more instrumentalist perspectives on democracy that focus on the material quality of life and the conflicts of interests this inevitably entails given the region’s high level of socio-economic inequality. As will be discussed in what follows, this juxtaposition is not new and is reflected in the historic debates and patterns of participation. The most important change in this regard is the current strength of the democratic alternative, creating an unprecedented opportunity for creating more inclusionary democratic societies.
The chapter is divided into four sections. After discussing the context of participation in the post-WWII period, I then examine the paradoxical opportunities created for participation and civil society by the imposition of violent authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent transitions to democracy. The third section then looks at the challenges of participation and civil society after the return to democracy, with a concluding section discussing possible future paths for research.
The driving dynamic behind political participation in Latin America—and much of the world—after WWII was increasingly viewed as being determined by economic structure. For better or worse, participation in the first instance was understood in socio-economic terms, which in turn conditioned the nature of subsequent political participation. The impetus behind this view began with modernization theory and its attempt to demonstrate an intrinsic relationship between capitalist development and the emergence of secular, urban liberal democracies (Deutsch 1961).
While capitalist development did lead to rapid urbanization, few of modernization theory’s other predictions seemed to hold true for Latin America. The region as a whole stood out for lack of conformity with observed patterns from Western Europe and the United States even in modernization theory’s seminal work (Lipset 1959). The empirical reality of high levels of poverty, democratic instability and socio-economic inequality that modernization theory predicted would disappear seemed beyond doubt, generating sometimes heated debates as to why (Hirschman 1981).
Accepting the basic premises of modernization theory (the desirability of capitalist economic development and concomitant inevitability of political democracy), a number of perspectives emerged to explain the region’s exceptionalism in terms of the region’s society and culture. For some, the problem was the inability of market relations to actually penetrate—and modernize—large segments of Latin America. Based on the work of Belgian priest Roger Vekemans and the DESEAL research institute in Chile which he headed, a theory of marginality offered socio-economic policy prescriptions to foster such penetration and promote popular sector participation in the economy and politics (Vekemans et al. 1968). Alternatively, the speed with which market relations penetrated society was seen as the root cause of Latin American populism (Germani 1978). This is because the forces of modernization destroyed traditional normative structures before they could be replaced by more modern ones, leaving the masses in a virtual state of anomie that opportunistic elites could take advantage of. People were mobilized by populist elites, but without the necessary autonomy to ensure a significant level of accountability and under the terms set by the self-interested populist leadership (Oxhorn 1998). Conversely, others suggested it was the resilience of the region’s fundamentally non-Western political culture or Iberian heritage that explained why the predictions of modernization theory were inapplicable in the region (Wiarda 1982). Given this allegedly authoritarian, holistic conception of society in which conflict was absent and there is a natural hierarchy, participation essentially consisted of each person fulfilling his or her preordained role. Democratic rule was seen as being neither necessary nor desired by elites and average people alike, regardless of its implications for the penetration of capitalist markets.
In sharp contrast, other perspectives rejected modernization theory’s basic premises and argued that capitalist penetration was responsible for low levels of participation, high levels of inequality and democratic instability. For example, marginality theory was challenged by empirical studies that demonstrated how the so-called marginal segments of society—the poor, those working in the informal sector—were in fact intimately intertwined with the modern economy (Castells 1983; Perlman 1976). Rather than being excluded from participating in the modern sectors of the economy, these studies showed how the modern sectors of the economy were dependent on the socio-economic exclusion of the popular sectors as a source of labor that could keep production costs down and the power of organized labor in check, at the same time that this provided less expensive goods and services for workers in formal sector of the economy. More generally, dependency theory argued capitalist development undermined any possibility for meaningful participation and democracy. This was a consequence of how markets, particularly international capital, penetrated Latin American societies and economies (Cardoso and Faletto 1970; Dos Santos 1970). The only solution was therefore socialist revolution through working class and peasant mobilization.
Regardless of the theoretical debates arguing about Latin America’s exceptionalism compared to modernization theory’s portrayal of West European and U.S. development, during the postwar period participation in Latin America was severely constrained by processes of controlled inclusion (Oxhorn 1995a, 2003b). Varying and often significant levels of lower class social mobilization took place, often resulting in important popular sector gains (Collier and Collier 2002; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). But basic rights of citizenship were segmented, social rights were often granted in lieu of political rights of citizenship, and mobilization that threatened to undermine the structural pillars of the status quo was repressed with increasingly high levels of violence. Belying any alleged Iberian cultural consensus, conflict was increasingly rife throughout the region as the constraints of controlled inclusion were pushed to their limits. For the Right, Left and Center, political democracy at best was viewed in instrumental terms—a means to achieve other ends, including political power, wealth or access to state resources, and social revolution (Garretón 1989). As part of the political constraints imposed on participation, clientelism was rife in many countries as a way to restrict political participation by ensuring political loyalty in exchange for limited access to state resources (Cornelius 1975; Eckstein 1988). Populism also played a similar role, dividing societies through the top-down mobilization of the lower classes, particularly workers, in order to allow emergent elites access to political power while severely constraining the autonomous participation of the lower classes (Oxhorn 1998; Conniff 1982).
Beginning with the 1964 military coup in Brazil, the region experienced an unprecedented wave of political violence as controlled inclusion gave way to more extreme forms of political and economic exclusion—particularly for class-based associations. Freed from the shackles of controlled inclusion in the face of extreme levels of political violence and economic instability, an autonomous civil society paradoxically began to grow throughout the region as people organized in order to cope. Not surprisingly, the first organizations were often human rights groups. Costa Rica, Mexico, and Venezuela were exceptions in that the institutions of controlled inclusion proved far more resilient and they were able to avoid the severe military backlash prevalent elsewhere in the region. While the Mexican and Venezuelan regimes would experience important, albeit markedly distinct, transformations beginning in the 1990s as controlled inclusion gave way to alternative forms of interest intermediation, growth of their civil societies remained comparatively stinted.
To understand this paradox, it is necessary to clarify what “civil society” actually is. Civil society is generally defined descriptively as the organizational space outside the state, market and family. While obviously useful, this approach to understanding civil society does not address the important issue of what it actually does or why people would enter into it. It provides no criteria for understanding the kinds of groups or behaviors that are compatible with civil society, which means other criteria (a belief in a liberal civic culture is the most typical) that become controversial when applied in specific contexts outside of Western Europe and the US, including Latin America where, for example, collective rights are an important part of indigenous culture (Oxhorn 2003a). An alternative definition, while certainly not incompatible with more descriptive definitions, attempts to avoid these problems by focusing on what civil society actually does. It conceptualizes civil society as : “the social fabric formed by a multiplicity of self-constituted territorially- and functionally-based units which peacefully coexist and collectively resist subordination to the state, at the same time that they demand inclusion into national political structures” (Oxhorn 1995a, 251–52). Obviously this dual dynamic is particularly relevant under authoritarian regimes, but as will be discussed in the next section, it also highlights the challenges faced by civil society now that the region’s transitions to democracy are generally long passed.
It is important to note that the descriptive definition of civil society tends to create a false dichotomy between the state and civil society by implying that each has its own sphere of activity independent of the other. This problem is particularly acute in Latin America, where controlled inclusion meant that civil society was generally subordinated by the state in order to control social mobilization. The dual dynamic stressed here avoids this by highlighting how civil society cannot be understood apart from its relationship to the state. Under authoritarian regimes, as well as democratic regimes associated with controlled inclusion, that relationship was antagonistic. More generally, a complete separation between civil society and the state—something that in practice does not exist in Western Europe or even the more liberal United States—would mean political marginalization. In contrast, the ideal adopted here is one in which both the state and civil society work together to realize a public priorities as determined by democratic processes, what Peter Evans (1997) refers to as “state-society synergy.” Rather than shun relations with the state, civil society’s relationship with it needs to be understood in terms of the autonomy of civil society organizations to define and defend their interests in competition with other actors, including the state. It was this autonomy that controlled inclusion deliberately attempted to undermine.
The timing for this resurgence of civil society under authoritarian regimes was particularly propitious as a result of important changes in the Catholic Church. Following the important Vatican II reforms of the mid-1960s intended to reverse declining Church membership resulting from the growing secularization of “modern” West European societies, progressive elements within the Latin American national church structures began to assert a new social activism through the practice of liberation theology (Levine and Mainwaring 1989; Levine 1986). Among other things, liberation theology stressed the structural causes of poverty and the role that everyone, particularly the poor, had to play through collective organization in promoting social change. Its primary instrument, Christian Base Communities (CEBs or Comunidades Eclesiales de Base) were, despite their religious foundations and direct ties to the Church, pioneers in the development of an autonomous civil society. Not only were the CEBs concerned with directly addressing the needs of their communities, the skills many learned through participation in CEBs were often translated into a variety of other organizational experiences that helped enrich the social fabric in many cities throughout the region.
It is important to emphasize, however, that the Church’s contribution to the strengthening of civil society during this period was not limited to the practitioners of liberation theology. Given the unprecedented levels of repression in a number of countries, including Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, and Uruguay, even moderate elements within the traditional church began to assume a new role as “social critic” by publically opposing government repression and other policies (the Catholic Church in Argentina is the most notable exception). Often somewhat reluctantly, especially after the elevation of John Paul II to the papacy, the Church frequently assumed an increasingly political role by seeking to mediate conflict, defend human rights and generally shelter a variety of civil society organizations other than CEBs from state repression.
This unique confluence of a fundamentally repressive environment, the spread of liberation theology and the enabling role for civil society that the Church began to play led to an extraordinary growth in autonomous civil society organizational activity throughout Latin America (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Eckstein 1989). Such organizations covered a wide gambit, including human rights groups, organizations of the victims of repression, community self-help organizations of various kinds, women’s organizations and, to a lesser extent compared to the late 1990s and later, indigenous groups and environmental organizations, to name but a few. While the extent of such mobilization is impossible to quantify and should not be exaggerated, its importance lies in the impact it had on the communities in which it emerged and subsequent struggles for democracy and respect for basic human rights.
This growth in civil society organizational activity was intrinsically intertwined with a new respect for the importance of democracy as an end in itself rather than a means toward other ends. If democracy is seen only as a means to achieve other ends, participation in civil society organizations also lacks any intrinsic value. Indeed, traditional political parties, particularly those on the Left, viewed such organizations with suspicion, and frequently attempted to co-opt them in order to increase their political power. The relevance of political participation in this sense is directly related to how people view political democracy; the importance of participation per se increases as does the perception of democracy as a good, or even the best, form of government.
Various factors accounted for this change, including the unparalleled harshness of repression in the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of a reformed Catholic Church. For the Left, in particular, there was a new appreciation of the benefits of the basic rights associated with political democracy, even before the end of the Cold War. At the grassroots level, this implied involvement in collective organizations that addressed an array of pressing needs. Looking at national politics, it meant a commitment to replacing dictatorships with political democracy. If anything, for many people political democracy became almost a panacea as key issues concerning the fundamental contours of the post-authoritarian democracies were left unresolved in deference to holding free and competitive elections. This belief that democracy was the best form of government was essential for creating the perception that participating in civil society organizations, and particularly in mobilizations demanding a democratic transition, was essential for resolving people’s most pressing needs, despite the closed nature of the state and the often great personal risks that such participation entailed.
Did the growth of civil society organizations actually make a difference? For respect for basic human rights in general, and the status of women in particular, there is little doubt that social movement organizational activity contributed positively to important changes in Latin American attitudes affecting society and politics, even if much remains to be accomplished. Their impact on actual transitions to democracy, however, remains more ambiguous.
As O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986) emphasize in their influential comparative study of recent democratic transitions, elites played a central role in negotiating the democratic “rules of the game” that would usher in elections and a new democratic regime. More controversially, they concluded that the demobilization of civil society and the channeling of participation exclusively into elections was necessary in order to prevent an rightwing backlash, even if the result reinforced the tendency to leave basic issues relating to the post-authoritarian democratic regime unresolved. As the elections approached, non-electoral mobilizations were discouraged by increasingly ascendant political parties and community organizers were instructed to limit their activities to getting out the vote, reinforcing the notion that political participation would be limited to regularly held elections. Surprisingly, O’Donnell and Schmitter’s conclusion was harshly criticized both from a more conservative democratic perspective that stressed the inherently democratic legitimacy of the elites who were involved in the bargaining (Levine 1988), and the more radical Left because of O’Donnell and Schmitter’s alleged support for the consolidation of an intrinsically authoritarian form of “democracy” that deliberately excluded the popular sectors from any meaningful participation (MacEwan 1988).
Regardless of who is “right” on a normative level, there seems little doubt that recent democratic transitions have been characterized by their conservative, very limited nature apart from the institution of relatively free and fair elections. A more relevant criticism from the perspective of civil society and participation is that O’Donnell and Schmitter down-played the importance of civil society for achieving any meaningful transition (Oxhorn 1995b; Waylen 1994). This is because O’Donnell and Schmitter focused on elite bargaining. For them, the transition process began with elite divisions and ended with elite agreement. At best, civil society reacted to prior elite decisions and, in particular, divisions, at the same time that their demobilization leading up to the actual elections was seen as unproblematic. Yet the actual dynamic of civil society organizational activity has more to do with the dislocations caused by the very imposition of authoritarian rule—long before people could even imagine any kind of regime change—and other factors unrelated to elite interactions, such as the new role assumed by the Catholic Church. The possibility that social mobilization demanding a democratic transition emerged independently of elite divisions and in at least some cases actually was a cause of such divisions when elites disagreed on an appropriate response is discarded a priori because their analysis begins with the emergence of such elite fissures. Perhaps even more importantly, O’Donnell and Schmitter’s focus on elite interactions implied that the demobilization of civil society was unproblematic, both for the transition and subsequent democratic regime.
With the actual transitions to freely elected governments now complete in every country in the region, with the exception of Cuba, the region continues to confront the flipside of the paradox of civil society under authoritarian regimes: the challenge of effectively reengaging citizens after successful transitions to political democracy (Oxhorn 2006). There may be literally tens of thousands of civil society organizations in the region, yet civil society remains fragmented, with organizations often competing with one another for available resources. Popular sector organizations, in particular, often remain small, atomized and dependent on external (state and/or non-governmental agencies) largesse. It is often unclear who such organizations actually represent, especially given the exponential growth of NGOs since the early 1990s. Organized labor, traditionally a primary representative of the popular sectors, has seen its political influence wane. This reflects the fact that labor movements generally are more fragmented and represent smaller fractions of the economically active population than in earlier periods, due to large informal sectors, changes in industrial structures following the implementation of market-oriented or neoliberal reforms, and changes in national labor laws. At the same time, these changes in organized labor have created new problems of representation as labor leaders often seek to preserve their own positions and prerogatives, increasing the distance between them and their rank and file members at that same time that organized labor increasingly competes with other civil society organizations for access to political power and resources.
There are a number of reasons for this lack of citizenship engagement, including the loss of an unambiguous “enemy” to mobilize against, the longer term consequences of the demobilization of civil society during the transition as people adopted a view that political participation was limited to voting in periodic elections, lingering fears of destabilizing the democratic regime and the Church’s withdrawal from politics in favor of elected civilian officials. There also was an inevitable level of exhaustion after the arduous task of mobilizing in a repressive environment. Yet the region’s democracies are no longer really “new” (Mexico was the last country to experience a democratic transition in 2000), suggesting that other factors not directly linked to the transition process are at play. In particular, a new mode of interest intermediation has replaced controlled inclusion: neopluralism (Oxhorn 2006).
Neopluralism is closely associated with neoliberal or market-oriented economic policies, yet it is not reducible to any specific set of economic policies or correlated with any particular level of economic liberalization. The latter form part of the temporal context within which neopluralism emerges. Economic criteria for political and social inclusion replace the political criteria of social control and loyalty intrinsic to controlled inclusion. It is “pluralist” because through democratic elections, neopluralism reaffirms the normative belief that the best balance of interests and values within a given polity is produced by some form (however limited) of free competition among individuals in the rational pursuit of their self interest. Ultimate political authority is essentially decided upon through a free political market of votes. Individual freedom is valued above all, and this requires respect for private property and (ideally, at least) the rule of law.
The marked authoritarianism of neopluralism distinguishes it from the more traditional pluralist model associated with democracy in the United States. It is this close association of authoritarianism with a normative belief in the value of competitive elections that is unique to the current period and defines neopluralism. While it is important that the people who govern are elected, once elected, they have few checks on their power. Elected leaders frequently bypass and deliberately undermine representative democratic institutions, and in this sense neopluralism has become the structural foundation for what O’Donnell (1994) characterizes as delegative democracy. Dominant economic interests, as well as unelected power holders such as the military, exercise control over key state decisions.
More generally, the logic of neopluralism permeates entire political systems in a variety of ways. Market-based incentives come to play a defining role in collective action. An individual’s personal economic resources largely determine the extent and nature of her political and social inclusion. For example, one’s economic resources directly affect the quality of education and health care a person enjoys. A de facto marketization of the rule of law means that even the legal protections a person has access to are determined by economic resources (Brinks 2008). The poor (who are the primary victims of crime) lack access to basic legal structures, yet that they are targeted by repressive police practices designed to deal with rising levels of criminal violence in many countries. People with greater economic resources can escape both the consequences of such crime by purchasing various forms of private security, at the same time that the crimes they commit enjoy high levels of impunity. Greater reliance on markets also has created greater economic insecurity as well. In the large informal sector employment rights are virtually nonexistent, while economic security is further compounded as the distinction between formal sector and informal sector employment blurs through the establishment of free trade zones and other changes in labor legislation.
The negative impact that neopluralism has on the ability of civil society to organize itself is compounded by state reforms. Just as the state is assigned a minimal role in ensuring the smooth functioning of the market in the economic realm, the state largely abdicates its role in providing incentives for collective action. The public and private goods formally available at the state level to those mobilized in earlier periods, as well as the coercive incentives for the hierarchical organization of economic interests under state corporatism, no longer exist or have been significantly reduced. Group identities and collective interests lose any intrinsic value for mobilizing civil society under neopluralism, yet these are a primary potential source of power for subaltern groups. State-civil society synergy becomes all but impossible as the state is generally unwilling and unable to work with civil society, and because neopluralism privileges the economic resources less privileged groups lack.
In this context, a kind of vicious cycle can set in regarding participation, especially among the popular sectors. If the principal dynamics affecting one’s socio-economic status are determined outside of democratic processes, the opportunity costs of devoting time and energy to civil society organizations only increase. Just as many people did not participate in civil society during authoritarian rule, even more may abstain from participating after the return of some semblance of normalcy under democratic governments. In other words, why bother participating after political repression is largely curtailed given the pressing day-today demands of trying to make ends meet and the limited potential that such participation will result in any meaningful change?
Despite a general problem of a regional lack of citizen participation, there are also important exceptions. As already noted, human rights and women’s movements that emerged under periods of authoritarian rule continue to influence state policies in positive ways, even if much remains to be done and the actual movements themselves have often waned. Although civil society in general may have been weakened, there are numerous specific examples of how civil society organizations have attempted to address people’s most pressing needs, with varying levels of success (Dagnino, Rivera, and Panfichi. 2006; Avritzer 2002). Indigenous movements, in particular, have gained an unprecedented level of political influence since the 1990s, often in reaction to neoliberal state reforms, in part because of the way such reforms have negatively affected their previous collective entitlements (Yashar 2005). Indeed, there have been a variety of civil society reactions to neoliberal reforms, although their ultimate impact remains ambiguous (Burdick, Osborn, and Roberts 2009). To a certain extent, women and indigenous people have been more successful given high levels of international solidarity and a clearer sense of the specific alternatives they propose, although this is often clearer in the case of gender equality than for indigenous movements which frequently face challenges posed by the existence of multiple indigenous communities within the same country.
These exceptions highlight the importance of neopluralism’s association with political democracy. It opens up possibilities for participation that offer the promise of transforming neopluralism into more democratic modes of interest intermediation. Unlike the historical alternatives, political democracy retains its normative valuation, which means that political participation at least retains its potential relevance for addressing the challenges people face in their everyday lives.
More fundamentally, neopluralism’s association with political democracy also reflects the co-existence of two contradictory ideals of citizenship, one based on participatory practices aimed at achieving state-society synergy, and another associated with neopluralism’s economic criteria for social and political inclusion. This is what Dagnino (2005) cogently refers to as a “perverse confluence.” Although both citizenship ideals are based on the same concepts, including participation and civil society, they offer radically different visions of what those concepts entail. Like a pendulum, the quality, if not continued existence, of political democracy in the region will be determined by how this contradiction is resolved.
State decentralization and the various participatory institutions associated with it epitomize this “perverse confluence” better than any other recent trend in state reform. From the perspective of neopluralism, decentralization is an effective mechanism for shrinking the central state by hiving off important functions, particularly basic service delivery, including education and healthcare. Local and, to a lesser extent, regional governments typically assume these responsibilities, although international financial institutions like the World Bank and many national reformers often consider privatization of services like the provision of water, electricity and telecommunications as part of decentralizing state reform packages. The latter point underscores the market principles that guide the kind of decentralization of associated with neopluralism. The recipients of services are viewed as consumers, who chose between the alternatives available to them (supply). “Responsiveness” reflects market-based efficiency criteria, including competition, and proximity to those who make use of the services is viewed as superior to centralized administration. There is little concern for non-market considerations, absolute price levels of the services being provided, or competing priorities. Consumer participation is seen as an important source of information to make these de facto local markets function, but it is generally limited to the implementation of policies made by experts and/or politicians.
This contrasts sharply with an alternative that is compatible with achieving state-society synergy. While market criteria and technical expertise can play an important role, any such role is conditioned by negotiations between civil society actors and local state officials. The institutions associated with this alternative therefore provide non-market participatory mechanisms for priority-setting and service delivery. Responsiveness is directly to the citizenry and not indirectly to consumers through the market, with civil society playing a crucial role in holding officials accountable for their actions (Smulovitz and Peruzotti 2000).
The experience of participatory budgeting offers a good illustration of the potential and limits of participation under neopluralism. Participatory budgeting was first implemented in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and has since been replicated in various forms and with the support of international financial institutions throughout the world. Porto Alegre was one of the most, if not the most, successful examples of how the process of participatory budgeting can approach an ideal of state-society synergy. After nearly failing in its early years due to low and declining levels of participation, the process and institutions of civil society were reformed through negotiations between the local government and civil society representatives. The result was a marked growth in participation and the organization of civil society over a number of years (Baiocchi 2002; Wampler and Avritzer 2004). Participation was seen as relevant to meeting pressing needs, even though the level of funds administered amounted to just over $200 per capita and was limited largely to municipal capital expenditures. Other experiments were often far less successful, due to a lack of political will, the inability of local civil society to assume the challenge, and/or poor institutional design that limited the actual power delegated to civil society actors. Even in Porto Alegre, participation began to decline when the Workers Party, which had instituted the reforms, was voted out of office 2005 and the new administration reduced its scope.
Democracy is more robust than it has ever been in Latin America. Democratic regimes have survived crises that, in the past, would have likely led to their overthrow, such as the literal collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001. Most recently, the 2009 Latinobarómetro regional public opinion survey showed significant increases in both respondents’ preferences for democratic governance and their satisfaction with their actual governments, in the midst of the global economic downturn. While this is unambiguously positive, it should not lead to an intellectual or political sense of complacence. The frustrations associated with neopluralism’s authoritarian and exclusionary qualities could lead to popular support for new leaders attempting to capitalize on such frustrations, or rightwing backlashes to popular mobilization that appears to threaten their fundamental interests. Latin American societies remain the most unequal in the world and, as the 2009 coup in Honduras reminds us, social polarization and political crisis can resurge with dramatic consequences. Economic and political crises in the region are still too frequent, and the region’s history suggests numerous threats to democracy can emerge in such contexts. The still sizeable minority who, according to Latinobarómetro opinion surveys, say they could opt for authoritarian regimes if circumstances seem to warrant it should not be forgotten.
While the kinds of democracy associated with neopluralism are far from perfect, there are also regime alternatives that fall short of the explicit suspension of democratic rule, yet sharply constrain the potential for self-transformation that exists under neopluralism today. Historically, populism in its various variants has been the most prominent alternative (Oxhorn 1998; Roberts 1994; Weyland 2001). Yet populism’s plebiscitarian nature, with the direct relationship it seeks to establish between populist leaders and their followers, is antithetical to both an autonomous civil society and state-society synergy. In societies like those found in most of Latin America, material interests and concerns can quickly displace the normative preference for democracy among the region’s people, undermining the perceived importance of participation in the process as democracy again takes on an instrumental connotation. This is the crossroads confronting civil society in Latin America.
To understand which path Latin America is likely to take at this particular crossroads, research should be carried out in several related areas. First, research needs to be carried out to better understand the potential role that civil society can play in working with the state to address the most pressing concerns of Latin Americans. Opinion surveys consistently suggest that these concerns include curtailing the threat of crime and criminal violence, economic insecurity and low-paying employment, as well as the quality of education for children, among others. If civil society can make a meaningful contribution to addressing these issues, participation in civil society becomes directly relevant to citizens, particularly the poor. More generally, research should focus, both comparatively and historically, on the more general factors that influence the decision by Latin Americans to participate in civil society organizations, building on the work found in studies like that by Collier and Handlin (2009). This research begins to examine why and how people participate politically in the current period, as well as the nature this participation’s links to the state. It also finds that the middle classes tend to make the most of the opportunities for participation in civil society democratic regimes potentially open up. More research is needed in order to understand why the poor tend to participate less and what kind of institutional structures are needed to increase their participation. We also need to better understand how such participation can retain its autonomy from the state, avoiding the pitfalls of cooptation that were so prevalent in the not too distant past. Historical research that seeks to directly compare today’s levels and forms of participation among the poor with earlier experiences might also provide useful insights for making participation more effective today and for avoiding its pitfalls in previous periods.
But to ensure that such participation is effective—and therefore that it remains relevant—more research needs to be carried out in terms of the kinds of participatory institutions that are most likely to realize state-society synergy. As the Porto Alegre experience demonstrates, political will is essential, but institutions need also need to be designed to be more robust and permanent, so that the scope and nature of participation does not fall victim to more short term political cycles. Given the myriad of decentralization programs and the wide variety of participatory experiments they have entailed, researchers are only beginning to systematically investigate which ones work over time and why.
Related to this, more work needs to be done on the kinds of decision-making authority that should be decentralized to local and regional governments. Conversely, we really do not know how to manage the tension between local authority and the need for national policies that ensure that some regions do not benefit more from decentralization than others, due to their greater resources or other factors. Lastly, little if any work has been done in Latin America that examines how civil society can play a more effective role in the decision-making processes that remain at the central level.
Finally, what can be done if civil society itself is not up to the task of engaging with the state in the pursuit of public goals? During the period of authoritarian rule, the Catholic Church often played a vital role in helping civil society assume greater levels of agency. What other actors might fill this role and how? In the more established democracies of Western Europe, Canada, and even the United States, states have played this role (Skocpol 1996). While the history of state-society relations would imply a real danger in trying to implement such policies given the state’s tendency to try to co-opt civil society, the same was largely true of the Latin American Catholic Church until a variety of factors converged in the 1960s and led to an often dramatic change. Research should be conducted that tries to understand the factors that allow states to nurture civil society while respecting its autonomy, both comparatively with more established democracies and historically.
Ultimately, Latin America’s current political crossroads represents a challenge as well as an opportunity. The unparalleled space for political innovations that go beyond that relatively free and fair elections provide needs to be taken advantage of to broaden the inclusive qualities of democracy in order to help alleviate the region’s high level of inequality. Research can play a vital role in helping political actors make the most of today’s crossroads and avoid the pitfalls of the past.
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