Suchergebnisse

Every five years a survey of this sort is attempted with the goal of reflecting the "democratic weathervane" of Latin American politics. Since Russell Fitzgibbon launched the experiment in 1945, regular attempts have been made to tap the minds of expert panelists in a reputational evaluation of which countries are the most and least democratic. Many Latin American nations claim that political democracy is their goal (my understanding of democracy in theory and practice is alluded to in the notes below), although they choose to reach it via contrasting routes. Blatant dictatorships often use the plebiscite as a means of demonstrating that they enjoy popular approval and acclaim, and single-party "democracies" regularly give the appearance of popular support via controlled elections. Latin Americans may feel that North Americans have an excess baggage of ego and ethnocentricity in pretending to evaluate democracy to the south according to our criteria; that is probably a just reaction. But the Latin Americans do boast constitutional structures and theoretic pronouncements patterned after ours. They have also accepted considerable North American assistance and financial largesse in the alleged quest for the democratic "good life." And Latin American scholars frequently evaluate the status of political democracy in the so-called Anglo-American parliamentary states. Evaluating democracy is thus a two-way street, and the enterprise may yield mutual rewards and pitfalls.

As practiced contemporaneously in most of Latin America, political democracy is more accurately elite governance, with many of the thornier authoritarian trappings cloaked behind an often transparent facade of "popular suffrage" and "parliamentary government." Democracy, as a normative basis for the "good life," is difficult to describe and conceptualize, especially when one assumes that the democratic prototype is to be discovered somewhere within that caldron of slippery political variables known as the Anglo-American model. I do not assume in this report that the nations of Latin America should be trying to move in the direction of the Anglo-American model (assuming we can describe, more or less generically, the constituent parts of that model). Nevertheless, I would be remiss in not stating the general outlines of what I understand political democracy to mean as related to the quinquennial survey of scholarly images to be reported herein.