Week 6: Transitions to Democracy in the Post-Cold War Era

This week’s readings focused on transitions to democracy in Latin America in the post-Cold War Era. The authors of each piece analyze these transitions to democracy during this specific time period through interesting perspectives. Mainwaring and Perez-Linan argue that while many believe that economically developed countries are more likely to be democratic, economically developed democracies in Latin America during the period of 1946 to 1977 were actually more vulnerable to regime breakdowns. Bolivia, Ecuador, and El Salvador, countries with significantly low GDPs, have remained democratic or semidemocratic and there has been only one regime breakdown in the region: Peru in 1992. Wealthier countries, ironically, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico were marked by authoritarian rule for a longer period of time. I enjoyed reading this piece because I was able to connect the arguments the authors made to our class discussions about endogenous versus exogenous democratization. It seems that the authors are claiming that neither endogenous nor exogenous democratization played a significant role in the democratization of Latin America during this time period. They argue that Latin America was able to democratize because of the changed regional political environment and because of decreasing polarization and a stronger commitment of political elites to democracy. However, it is also important to note that since 1992, democratization in the region has been at a bit of an impasse. International actors were able to prevent coups and electoral fraud, but cannot improve the quality of democracy. Poor economic growth has greatly limited structural transformations that otherwise would have been favorable to democracy. Lastly, the performance of democratic and semidemocratic governments has been poor, and so people have grown to have issues with democratic legitimacy and antiparty opponents have gained popularity.

I found Wood’s piece to be extremely interesting because he compared the democratization of two unlikely countries: El Salvador and South Africa. In both countries, mobilization by the economically and socially marginalized is what caused each government to democratize. El Salvador and South Africa are extremely unique on a global scale because in most countries, the socioeconomically marginalized did not have an important seat at the table with regard to discussing democratization. The sustained mobilization of these classes transformed the interests of economic elites, forcing the state to become pressured into compromising with the insurgents. It had never occurred to me to compare the stories of democratization of these two particular countries, so reading this piece was interesting to me and Wood did an effective job in explaining the importance of the “Insurgent Path to Democracy”.

Lastly, Magaloni discusses the important case of Mexico’s one-party dominant system. I did not know much about Mexico’s political situation during this time period, so I found this article to be quite informative. The Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institutcional was one of the most resilient political parties of all time: it was in power for seventy uninterrupted years. Mexico, unlike most Latin American countries, took twenty years to democratize because the party was so dominant. Magaloni analyzes why this is so and concludes that the PRI was relatively immune to elite splitting, dominated electoral institutions, and had massive electoral support. Magaloni also tied into his piece the argument for endogenous democratization and institutional change. He argues that institutions such as the IFE in the case of Mexico are extremely important in the establishment of democracy but only if actual political forces back them up. The IFE became important in Mexico only because the PRI allowed it to be so. The PRI did so because it expected to win future elections and it wanted to deter the opposition from contesting the legitimacy of elections.

I greatly enjoyed this week’s readings because they analyzed democratization in Latin America during this time period in very new and different ways. I also liked that I was able to tie in concepts that we learned in class into these readings to allow me to further understand the authors’ arguments.