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This essay documents a tendency toward democratic decline in Latin America in the last two decades. We note, however, that the modal regional pattern is not decline but democratic stagnation. We conceptualize democratic stagnation as a situation in which democracies have important and persistent democratic deficits. Three factors have contributed to the widespread pattern of stagnation in Latin America: powerful actors that block democratic deepening; poor governing results that fuel dissatisfaction and pave the way for authoritarian populists; and "hybrid states" that violate citizens' rights, fail to provide security and quality public services, and are captured by powerful interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We contribute to the extensive literature on international influences on democratization and democratic breakdowns by conceptualizing hegemonic mechanisms of regime change and assessing them empirically. Our findings are based on a multi-methods approach and highlight the varying importance of hegemonic influences in post-1945 Latin America. We argue that US support for democratization was consistent in the wave of transitions to democracy that began in Latin America in 1978 and that it was decisive in many of these transitions. While past work has attributed responsibility to the US for the waves of democratic breakdowns from 1948 to 1956 and 1964 to 1976, an examination of the 27 breakdowns from 1945 to 2010 gives reason to doubt this interpretation. Future research could use these conceptual and methodological tools to explore the role of other powers in waves of democracy and authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the mixed democratization trends in Latin America as of January 2015. Topics discussed include democracy's erosion in Venezuela and Ecuador, its feebleness in Guatemala, and Haiti, and its robustness in Brazil and Chile, and the qualities of free elections, universal suffrage, civil and political rights' protection, and non-influence in government policies by armed sectors that a democracy must have. Also mentioned are the low-quality democracies in the poorer countries.

During the third wave of democratization, all Latin American countries except Cuba have had competitive political regimes, but the quality or level of democracy has varied significantly across countries and over time. One of the best predictors of this variance across countries and time is each country's experience with competitive politics before 1978. Even controlling for a wide range of other explanations, countries with more democratic heritages before 1978 have higher levels of democracy in the contemporary period. This finding, in turn, raises another question: what accounts for the effects of past levels of democracy on the post-1978 period? A hybrid fixed-effects model shows that democratic trajectories are institutionalized through political parties and judicial institutions. Countries that had institutionalized parties under democracy and supreme court justices who served under democracy in the pre-1978 period have been more able to build high-level democracy in the contemporary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that analyzes why democracies survive or break down. The authors categorize the political regimes in Latin America as democratic, semidemocratic or authoritarian. They provide insights from the work of Argentine political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell including the seminal book "Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism." They challenge one core idea in the book which viewed democratic breakdowns through a structural lens.

The study of Latin American politics has always generated great new research questions, and within Latin America, no country-s experience has generated more interesting questions than Venezuela since the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. Contemporary Venezuela raises fascinating questions about the collapse of a highly institutionalized party system and the erosion or breakdown of what had been the third-oldest democracy outside of the advanced industrial democracies. What accounts for these stunning developments? What can we learn from them? These issues go to the core of important developments in Latin American politics, and they are major issues for comparative political scientists beyond Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses democratization in Latin America between 1978 and 2008. Governance is framed in terms of the ability of elected officials to design policies that improve a country's political, social, and economic positions. The qualities of democracy in Latin America is distinguished from governance, and defined in terms of the levels of accountability, rule of law and minority protection as defined by quantitative measurements conducted by Freedom House. Problems relating to developing trust in government, infrastructure development, and taxation are considered. The influence of populism, political history and economic factors including oil prices on the success of governance is considered.

Several influential scholars have argued that organized labor is a consistent champion of democracy and that consequently strong labor movements make democratic outcomes more likely. Evidence from Latin America calls this argument into question. Organized labor has frequently supported nondemocratic regimes. In a comparative analysis of nine countries in Latin America, variation in labor support for democracy after 1945 hinged on two factors, the nature of their partisan alliances and the perceived regime alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the relationship between modernization and democracy in Latin America from 1945 to 1996 is analyzed on the basis of quantitative data. Three arguments are made. First, it is shown that the level of development had a modest impact on the likelihood of democracy in Latin America from 1945 to 1996. Democracy in Latin America has survived in the face of a low level of development, and it has faltered despite moderately high per capita income. Second, it is shown that per capita income is a markedly worse predictor of democracy in Latin America than in other countries with the same income range or in the world as a whole. A distinctive, nonlinear, functional shape is identified for this relationship in Latin America. Third, some potential explanations for this Latin American exceptionalism are addressed. No existing structural explanation suffices, however; this issue merits further exploration in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties and party systems exhibit widely varying degrees of nationalization, that is the extent to which a party receives similar levels of electoral support throughout the country. The level of party nationalization has a prominent effect on such important factors as the survival of democracy, the types of issues that dominate political competition, legislative behaviour and public policy. In spite of its importance, party nationalization has been neglected in the comparative politics literature. Our article makes two contributions. First, it provides a measure of party and party system nationalization, based on the Gini coefficient, that is superior for comparative analysis to those employed to date. Second, it utilizes these measures to analyse nationalization in 17 democracies in the Americas, the first time nationalization has been examined empirically outside the advanced industrial democracies. The measure underscores the widely varying degrees in nationalization across party systems, within party systems over time, across parties within countries and within parties over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about how political regimes should generally be classified, and how Latin American regimes should be classified for the 1945-99 period. We make five general claims about regime classification. First, regime classification should rest on sound concepts and definitions. Second, it should be based on explicit and sensible coding and aggregation rules. Third, it necessarily involves some subjective judgments. Fourth, the debate about dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy creates a false dilemma. Neither democratic theory, nor coding requirements, nor the reality underlying democratic practice compel either a dichotomous or a continuous approach in all cases. Fifth, dichotomous measures of democracy fail to capture intermediate regime types, obscuring variation that is essential for studying political regimes. This general discussion provides the grounding for our trichotomous ordinal scale, which codes regimes as democratic, semi-democratic or authoritarian in nineteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 1999. Our trichotomous classification achieves greater differentiation than dichotomous classifications and yet avoids the need for massive information that a very fine-grained measure would require. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the surprising resilience of Latin America's elected governments in the post-1978 period. Distinction of `elected governments' with `democracies'; Historical overview of Latin America's third wave of democratization; Effect of poor economic performance on an elected government's capacity to survive; Parliamentarism versus presidentialism; Shortcomings of democratic practice in most countries in Latin America.