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In 2009, Ignacio Walker—scholar, politician, and one of Latin America’s leading public intellectuals—published La Democracia en América Latina. Now available in English, with a new prologue, and significantly revised and updated for an English-speaking audience, Democracy in Latin America: Between Hope and Despair contributes to the necessary and urgent task of exploring both the possibilities and difficulties of establishing a stable democracy in Latin America.
Walker argues that, throughout the past century, Latin American history has been marked by the search for responses or alternatives to the crisis of oligarchic rule and the struggle to replace the oligarchic order with a democratic one. After reviewing some of the principal theories of democracy based on an analysis of the interactions of political, economic, and social factors, Walker maintains that it is primarily the actors, institutions, and public policies—not structural determinants—that create progress or regression in Latin American democracy.
"There are quite a few works dealing with democracy and democratization in Latin America; however, Democracy in Latin America is unique in that Ignacio Walker takes a broad historical view, grounded on a good command of the relevant literature. The overall historical grounding of the book makes it very useful for introductory and general survey undergraduate courses on Latin America, while the detailed discussion of some of the issues (past and present) should be very good material for discussion and further research at the graduate level." —Guillermo O'Donnell (1936–2011), Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Ignacio Walker is a Chilean senior scholar of political science and a practicing politician. He is currently serving as a senator of the Republic of Chile and as president of the Christian Democratic Party.
Prologue
Introduction
1. The Search for Alternatives to Oligarchic Rule
2. Toward a New Model of Development
3. Democratic Breakdown, Transition, and Consolidation
4. Toward a New Strategy of Development
5. Democracy, Governability, and Neopopulism
6. Presidentialism and Parliamentarism
7. The New Social Question
8. Democracy of Institutions
Works Cited
Index