Description:
An insightful examination of Latin America's contemporary democratic landscape and how it is marked by patterns of polarization and volatility.
Although Latin American democracies have shown considerable resilience, today they face new forms of political polarization and instability. These challenges are closely connected to the legacies of the region's "left turn," which sought to transform entrenched inequalities and social hierarchies in the early twenty-first century. Unprecedented in its scope and duration, the left turn reflected an underlying realignment of political contestation in a highly unequal region. Yet despite notable achievements in addressing social needs, leftist parties struggled to deepen democracy by empowering popular majorities, and they faced powerful elite backlashes.
Through a comparative analysis of seven South American countries, Santiago Anria and Kenneth M. Roberts trace the different origins and trajectories in power of the populist and social democratic currents that emerged within the left turn. Anria and Roberts argue that today's democratic orders face intensifying polarization and institutional fragility, even where social democratic parties made explicit efforts to build broad coalitions and temper political conflict. They show how activist networks and social movements on the left and the right triggered latent political conflicts and are now reshaping democratic competition and the terms of social inclusion in South American politics.
Brief description: Kenneth M. Roberts is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University and a faculty fellow of the Democratic Threats and Resilience Initiative at Cornell's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
Review Quotes:
"Polarization and Democracy is a brilliant, qualitative leap forward in our understanding of the relationship between the two in our turbulent times. With a clear eye, it anchors the root cause of present day polarization in an all too rarely acknowledged driver of Latin American politics: The push and pull of politics in highly unequal societies with hegemonic classes highly resistant to reform. Efforts to deepen democracy generate strong defensive reactions. The book then masterfully unpacks the dimensions of contemporary polarization and the mechanisms that drive it. In a triumph of historically grounded scholarship, it makes complex processes intelligible, setting the highest standard for the rest of us."
--Eduardo Silva author of "Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America"