Download or read book Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America written by Jorge I. Domínguez and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After more than a century of assorted dictatorships and innumerable fiscal crises, the majority of Latin America's states are governed today by constitutional democratic regimes. Some analysts and scholars argue that Latin America weathered the 2008 fiscal crisis much better than the United States. How did this happen? Jorge I. Domínguez and Michael Shifter asked area specialists to examine the electoral and governance factors that shed light on this transformation and the region's prospects. They gather their findings in the fourth edition of Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America. This new edition is completely updated. Part I is thematic, covering issues of media, constitutionalism, the commodities boom, and fiscal management vis-à-vis governance. Part II focuses on eight important countries in the region—Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Already widely used in courses, Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America will continue to interest students of Latin American politics, democratization studies, and comparative politics as well as policymakers.

Download or read book Digital Technologies for Democratic Governance in Latin America written by Anita Breuer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to comprehensively analyse the political and societal impacts of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in a region of the Global South. It evaluates under what conditions some Latin American governments and people have succeeded in taking up the opportunities related to the spread of ICTs, while others are confronted with the pessimist scenario of increased, digitally induced social and democratic cleavages. Specifically, the book examines if and how far the spread and use of new ICT affected central aims of democratic governance such as reducing socio-economic and gender inequality; strengthening citizen participation in political decision making; increasing the transparency of legislative processes; improving administrative processes; providing free access to government data and information; and expanding independent spaces of citizen communication. The country case and cross-country explore a range of bottom-up driven initiatives to reinforce democracy in the region. The book offers researchers and students an interdisciplinary approach to these issues by linking it to established theories of media and politics, political communication, political participation, and governance. Giving voice to researchers native to the region and with direct experience of the region, it uniquely brings together contributions from political scientists, researchers in communication studies and area studies specialists who have a solid record in political activism and international development co-operation.

Download or read book Barrio Democracy in Latin America written by Eduardo Canel and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transition to democracy underway in Latin America since the 1980s has recently witnessed a resurgence of interest in experimenting with new forms of local governance emphasizing more participation by ordinary citizens. The hope is both to foster the spread of democracy and to improve equity in the distribution of resources. While participatory budgeting has been a favorite topic of many scholars studying this new phenomenon, there are many other types of ongoing experiments. In Barrio Democracy in Latin America, Eduardo Canel focuses our attention on the innovative participatory programs launched by the leftist government in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the early 1990s. Based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Canel examines how local activists in three low-income neighborhoods in that city dealt with the opportunities and challenges of implementing democratic practices and building better relationships with sympathetic city officials.

Download or read book Media and Governance in Latin America written by Ximena Orchard and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2020 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited book aims at bringing together a range of contemporary expertise that can shed light on the relationship between media pluralism in Latin America and processes of democratization and social justice. In doing so, the authors of the book provide empirically grounded theoretical insight into the extent to which questions about media pluralism--broadly understood as the striving for diverse and inclusive media spheres--are an essential part of scholarly debates on democratic governance. The rise in recent years of authoritarianism, populism and nationalism, both in fragile and stable democratic systems, makes media pluralism an intellectual and empirical cornerstone of any debate about the future of democratic governance around the world. This book--useful for students and researchers on topics such as Media, Communications, Latin American Studies and Politics--aims to make a contribution to such debate by approaching some pressing questions about the relationship of Latin American governments with media structures, journalistic practices, the communication capabilities of vulnerable populations and the expressive opportunities of the general public.

Download or read book Democracy and Security in Latin America written by Gabriel Marcella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for governments to generate the necessary capacity to address important security and institutional challenges; this volume deepens our understanding of the nature and extent of state governance in Latin America. State capacity is multidimensional, with all elements interacting to produce stable governance and security. As such, a collection of scholars and practitioners use an explicit interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the contributions of history, political science, economics, public policy, military studies, and other fields to gain a rounded understanding of the link between security and democracy. Democracy and Security in Latin America is divided in two sections: Part 1 focuses on the challenges to governance and key institutions such as police, courts, armed forces. and the prison system. Part 2 features country case studies that illustrate particularly important security challenges and various means by which the state has confronted them. Democracy and Security in Latin America should appeal not only to those seeking to learn more about the capacity of the democratic state in Latin America to effectively provide public security in times of stress, but to all those curious about the reality that a democracy must have security to function.

Download or read book Presidents and Democracy in Latin America written by Manuel Alcántara and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new textbook provides students with a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the presidents and presidential leadership in Latin America. Unlike other texts, Presidents and Democracy in Latin America integrates both political analysis and major theoretical perspectives with extensive country-specific material. Part One examines the developments in recent years in Latin American presidentialism and identifies different characteristics of society and politics which have influenced Latin American governments. The personalization of political life and of presidential government help to illustrate the character of Latin American politics, specifically on the type of political career of those who occupied the presidential office, the leadership style of these presidents and the type of government which they led. Part Two studies two presidents in each of six countries in the region which reflect the broad trends in the political and electoral life: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Each case study first provides the biographical background of the president; it outlines the political career of the president both inside and outside of a party, including at the local level; the popularity of the president at the time of the presidential election is given, as well as the mode of selection of the candidates (selection by party leaders only, by party members or by a primary). The relation of the president with the government or ministers, especially if there is a coalition government, is detailed. This textbook will be essential reading for all students of Latin American Politics and is highly recommended for those studying executive politics, political leadership, and the state of democratic governance in Latin America.

Download or read book Latin American Democracy written by Richard L. Millett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than thirty years have passed since Latin America began the arduous task of transitioning from military-led rule to democracy. In this time, more countries have moved toward the institutional bases of democracy than at any time in the region’s history. Nearly all countries have held free, competitive elections and most have had peaceful alternations in power between opposing political forces. Despite these advances, however, Latin American countries continue to face serious domestic and international challenges to the consolidation of stable democratic governance. The challenges range from weak political institutions, corruption, legacies of militarism, transnational crime, and globalization among others. In the second edition of Latin American Democracy contributors – both academics and practitioners, North Americans, Latin Americans, and Spaniards—explore and assess the state of democratic consolidation in Latin America by focusing on the specific issues and challenges confronting democratic governance in the region. This thoroughly updated revision provides new chapters on: the environment, decentralization, the economy, indigenous groups, and the role of China in the region.

Download or read book Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America written by Benjamin Goldfrank and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition parties are in the local arenas.

Download or read book Technocracy and Democracy in Latin America written by Eduardo Dargent and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised by some as islands of efficiency in a sea of unprofessional, politicized, and corrupt states, and criticized by others for removing wide areas of policy making from the democratic arena, technocrats have become prominent and controversial actors in Latin American politics. Through an in-depth analysis of economic and health policy in Colombia from 1958 to 2011 and in Peru from 1980 to 2011, Technocracy and Democracy in Latin America explains the source of these experts' power as well as the leverage they have across state policy sectors in Latin America.

Download or read book Democracy in Latin America 1760 1900 written by Carlos A. Forment and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-08-15 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carlos Forment's aim in this highly ambitious work is to write the book that Tocqueville would have written had he traveled to Latin America instead of the United States. Drawing on an astonishing level of research, Forment pored over countless newspapers, partisan pamphlets, tabloids, journals, private letters, and travelogues to show in this study how citizens of Latin America established strong democratic traditions in their countries through the practice of democracy in their everyday lives. This first volume of Democracy in Latin America considers the development of democratic life in Mexico and Peru from independence to the late 1890s. Forment traces the emergence of hundreds of political, economic, and civic associations run by citizens in both nations and shows how these organizations became models of and for democracy in the face of dictatorship and immense economic hardship. His is the first book to show the presence in Latin America of civic democracy, something that gave men and women in that region an alternative to market- and state-centered forms of life. In looking beneath institutions of government to uncover local and civil organizations in public life, Forment ultimately uncovers a tradition of edification and inculcation that shaped democratic practices in Latin America profoundly. This tradition, he reveals, was stronger in Mexico than in Peru, but its basic outlines were similar in both nations and included a unique form of what Forment calls Civic Catholicism in order to distinguish itself from civic republicanism, the dominant political model throughout the rest of the Western world.

Download or read book Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America written by Scott Mainwaring and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new theory for why political regimes emerge, and why they subsequently survive or break down. It then analyzes the emergence, survival and fall of democracies and dictatorships in Latin America since 1900. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán argue for a theoretical approach situated between long-term structural and cultural explanations and short-term explanations that look at the decisions of specific leaders. They focus on the political preferences of powerful actors - the degree to which they embrace democracy as an intrinsically desirable end and their policy radicalism - to explain regime outcomes. They also demonstrate that transnational forces and influences are crucial to understand regional waves of democratization. Based on extensive research into the political histories of all twenty Latin American countries, this book offers the first extended analysis of regime emergence, survival and failure for all of Latin America over a long period of time.

Download or read book The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America written by Frances Hagopian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-06 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late twentieth century witnessed the birth of an impressive number of new democracies in Latin America. This wave of democratization since 1978 has been by far the broadest and most durable in the history of Latin America, but many of the resulting democratic regimes also suffer from profound deficiencies. What caused democratic regimes to emerge and survive? What are their main achievements and shortcomings? This volume offers an ambitious and comprehensive overview of the unprecedented advances as well as the setbacks in the post-1978 wave of democratization. It seeks to explain the sea change from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which openly authoritarian regimes are the rare exception, and it analyzes why some countries have achieved striking gains in democratization while others have experienced erosions. The book presents general theoretical arguments about what causes and sustains democracy and analyses of nine compelling country cases.

Download or read book Violent Democracies in Latin America written by Enrique Desmond Arias and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-19 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite recent political movements to establish democratic rule in Latin American countries, much of the region still suffers from pervasive violence. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization. The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America. Contributors: Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldán, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, María Clemencia Ramírez

Download or read book Deepening Democracy written by Francis Adams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-05-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adams surveys the impact of transnational organizations and NGOs on Latin American politics since 1990. The transition from military to civilian rule in Latin American countries has benefited local progressive forces, but resilient remnants favoring the past's authoritarian politics have compelled organizations like the UN, IMF, OAS, and World Bank to engage in various campaigns to deepen democratic institutions and norms. Adams argues that to understand current political transformations in the region, one must consider the existing role of external organizations. Latin America is offered as a prime example of the increased influence transnational authorities have over political decisions that had long been the exclusive prerogative of national governments. Beginning with the Latin American experience, Adams reviews the contemporary character of power and politics in the area, outlining how democratic transitions have been limited. UN human rights and reform initiatives are considered. Adams scrutinizes the work of the World Bank, the IMF, and the Inter-American Development Bank to modernize public administration, strengthen political institutions, enhance transparency and accountability, and fortify civil society. He also examines the work and impact and the Organization of American States and various global citizens groups.

Download or read book Latin America s Struggle for Democracy written by Larry Diamond and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Almost thirty years have passed since Latin America joined democracy’s global “third wave,” and not a single government has reverted to what was once the most common form of authoritarianism: military rule. Behind this laudable record, however, lurk problems that are numerous and deep, ranging from an ominous resurgence of antidemocratic and economically irresponsible populism to the fragility and unreliability of key democratic institutions. A new addition to the Journal of Democracy series, this volume ponders both the successes and the difficulties that color Latin American politics today. The book brings together recent articles from the journal and adds new and updated material. In these essays, a distinguished roster of contributors thoughtfully examines democratic problems and prospects from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. The first section assesses regionwide trends, including the forces behind the much-discussed political “turn to the left,” the travails of the presidential form of government, the challenges of integrating newly mobilized indigenous populations into politics, the need for major reform in labor markets, and the implications of rising populism for democratic institutions and governance. The second section features important case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. The final section surveys Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Contributors: Jorge G. Castañeda, Matthew R. Cleary, Catherine M. Conaghan, Javier Corrales, Consuelo Cruz, Lucía Dammert, Daniel P. Erikson, Luis Estrada, Eric Farnsworth, Steven Levitsky, Scott Mainwaring, Cynthia McClintock, Marco A. Morales, María Victoria Murillo, Michael Penfold, Alejandro Poiré, Eduardo Posada-Carbó, Christopher Sabatini, Hector E. Schamis, Andreas Schedler, Mitchell A. Seligson, Lourdes Sola, Arturo Valenzuela, Donna Lee Van Cott

Download or read book Crime and Violence in Latin America written by H. Hugo Frühling and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 2003-06-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers timely discussion by attorneys, government officials, policy analysts, and academics from the United States and Latin America of the responses of the state, civil society, and the international community to threats of violence and crime.

Download or read book The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America written by John Samuel Fitch and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book tackles the subject of the military and politics in Latin America from a broad historical perspective, drawing on literature in the field and other information based on personal interviews with officers.