New Voices in the Study of Democracy in Latin America

Latin American Program New Voices in the Study of Democracy in Latin America Latin American Program Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20004 Tel (202) 691-4030 Fax (202) 691-4076 Guillermo O’Donnell, www.wilsoncenter.org/lap Joseph S. Tulchin, and Augusto Varas, eds. with Adam Stubits New Voices in Studies in the Study of Democracy in Latin America Guillermo O’Donnell, Joseph S. Tulchin, and Augusto Varas, eds. with Adam Stubits New Voices in Studies in the Study of Democracy in Latin America Guillermo O’Donnell, Joseph S. Tulchin, and Augusto Varas, eds. with Adam Stubits The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, established by Congress in 1968 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., is the living, national memorial to President Wilson. The Center is a nonpartisan institution of advanced research, supported by public and private funds, engaged in the study of national and world affairs. The Center establishes and maintains a neutral forum for free, open, and informed dialogue. The Center’s mission is to commemorate the ideals and concerns of Woodrow Wilson by providing a link between the world of ideas and the world of policy, by bringing a broad spectrum of individuals together to discuss important public policy issues, by serving to bridge cultures and viewpoints, and by seeking to find common ground. Conclusions or opinions expressed in Center publications and programs are those of the authors and speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center staff, fellows, trustees, advisory groups, or any individuals or organizations that provide financial support to the Center. The Center is the publisher of The Wilson Quarterly and home of Woodrow Wilson Center Press, dialogue radio and television, and the monthly newsletter “Centerpoint.” For more information about the Center’s activities and publications, please visit us on the web at www.wilsoncenter.org. Lee H. Hamilton, President and Director Board of Trustees Joseph B. Gildenhorn, Chair David A. Metzner, Vice Chair Public members: James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress; Bruce Cole, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities; Michael O. Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services; Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State; G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education; Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States; Tami Longaberger, designated appointee of the President from within the federal government Private citizen members: Robin Cook, Donald E. Garcia, Bruce S. Gelb, Sander R. Gerber, Charles L. Glazer, Susan Hutchison, Ignacio E. Sanchez Acknowledgments We would like to thank Latin American Program director Cynthia Arnson for her support in organizing the competitions upon which this publication is based. We are also grateful to former Latin American Program assistant Kelly Albinak for her organizational support and to Sheree Adams, Angela Granum and Smith Monson for their copy-editing assistance. Finally, we thank the Ford Foundation for its financial support of this endeavor. Adam Stubits October 2008 Contents 1 Introduction Guillermo O’Donnell, Joseph S. Tulchin, and Augusto Varas 7 Analyzing Legislative Success in Latin America: The Case of Democratic Argentina Eduardo Alemán and Ernesto Calvo 39 Political Determinants of Legislative Budgetary Oversight: Party System Competitiveness and Party Cohesion in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico Alejandro Bonvecchi 79 The New Role of Subnational Governments in the Federal Policy Process: The Case of Democratic Mexico Laura Flamand 119 Segmented Professionalismin Argentine Political Parties Alberto Föhrig 153 A Lost Battle? Building Programmatic Party- Voter Linkages in Contemporary Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of Chile and Uruguay Juan Pablo Luna vii 221 Participação e reforma do Estado: Sobre a arquitetura da participação em São Paulo, Brasil Luciana Ferreira Tatagiba 273 Gender Within Ethnicity: Human Rights and Identity Politics in Ecuador Manuela Lavina Picq 309 Afro-Peruvians in a Mestizo Nation: The Politics of Recognition, Cultural Citizenship, and Racial Democracy in Peru Tanya Golash Boza 337 The Institutional Design of Multiculturalism in Nicaragua: Effects on Indigenous and Afro- descendant Collective Identities and Political Attitudes Juliet Hooker viii Introduction Studies in Democracy Guillermo O’Donnell, Joseph S. Tulchin, and Augusto Varas Since the transition to democracy in the majority of the countries of Latin America at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the study of politics in the region has gone through a series of shifts in its focus and pri- orities. The transitions to democracy were anticipated by a body of literature anchored by the multivolume publication edited by Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, bringing to a wide audience the results of several conferences held in the 1980s at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The “transitologists,” as Schmitter referred to himself and his colleagues, began with the comparison of Latin America and southern Europe. A few years later, they spurred a series of studies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the outset, democracy was the necessary and inevitable anti- authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes were seen as abnormal. Democracy was considered the normal and preferred mode of political organization. In this sense, the end of the Cold War reinforced the normative assumptions of the transitologists. Francis Fukuyama exaggerated this association in his volume The End of History, by putting liberal democracy into an Hegelian evolutionary line that consigned Communism—and by extension other modes of authoritarianism—to the dustbin of history. O’Donnell and his colleagues had not intended such a leap of faith. They wanted to see a polity in which the state would not terrorize its citizens and in which citizens would have the right to express their views as to who should govern them and how they should be governed. That the transitions occurred more or less at the same time as the end of the Cold War served to strengthen and extend the impact of the transitions literature. However, the triumphalist notion that the West had “won” the Cold War led to a perversion of the transition argument that would cause students of democracy great disquiet throughout the 1990s. Many conservatives jumped on Fukuyama’s linkage of liberal democracy to liberal capitalism and literally 2 | GUILLERMO O’Donnell, JOSEPH S. TULCHIN, AND AUGUSTO VARAS took over policy making in such multilateral institutions as the World Bank and the regional development banks, as well as the U.S. Treasury and the European Central Banks to insist that borrowing countries, including those recently emerging from authoritarianism should adopt a panoply of market reforms known familiarly as the “Washington Consensus.” The imposition of the Washington Consensus did not improve the wellbe- ing of the Latin American masses and in some countries it was forced through by coercive means. As recognized some years later, “in economic growth, poverty reduction, income distribution, and social conditions the results were discouraging.” In addition it had two nefarious effects on democracy in Latin America. First, it legitimized private sector activity—any activity—at a time when the state in most countries was weakened and vulnerable and unable to play the minimum Schumpeterian balancing or regulatory role that truly liberal capitalists took for granted in the more developed countries. In the developed countries, the impulse to state intervention was re-named Democratic Socialism, signifying both the embrace of democracy and the demise of authoritarian modes of socialist organization. In the most developed countries of Europe, the welfare state was tempered but never discarded. In contrast, the weakness of the state was the prominent feature of democracy in Latin America throughout the 1990s. Even in cases of rapid economic growth during the decade, there was an imbalance between the political and economic spheres not frequently expe- rienced in the more developed countries that had formulated the panaceas of the Washington Consensus. Even at the time, several observers warned that the initial reforms—freer trade, balanced budgets, fiscal discipline and the like— would have to be complemented by other reforms, such as strengthening the judiciary and creating regulatory agencies, and creating safety nets for the most vulnerable in order for the elements of the Washington Consensus to have their positive effect. The second negative result of the Washington Consensus, linked closely to the first, is that rapid market opening produced sudden increases in income inequality, and this in the region already the most unequal in the world. As these inequalities increased and cried out for a response, the state was incapable of an effective answer. Promoters of the Washington Consensus argued that over time, the benefits of growth would trickle down to the poor. As a consequence of the Washington Consensus, both democracy and globalization became unpopular and spurred mass movements in the region, a blend of populism and nationalism that was anti-democratic. In countries like Bolivia and Ecuador, massive mobili- zations against oligarchic orders, with the presence of some important indigenous movements, challenge the existing formal democratic state. INTRODUCTION | 3 The notion that the

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