Democracy and Autocracy: The Ups and Downs of Regimes Across the Region

During the last two decades of the 20^th
century, Latin America experienced the longest and deepest wave of
democratization
in the region’s history. Surprisingly, throughout the first twenty
years of the 21^st
century, the aftermath of this shift has been followed not only by
the challenges of democratic consolidation, but also by worrying
instances of democratic erosion and other more severe cases of
blatant autocratization.
How did Latin American countries democratize? And why have they
proven to be relatively vulnerable to autocratic reversals? In this
chapter I take stock of the regime change dynamics across Latin
America, highlighting the key analytical tools and arguments that
have been used to understand them. By discussing the structural,
agentic, international, and institutional factors that have driven
democratic variation across the region, I focus on the determinants
of regime outcomes in Latin American countries. As such, I show that
the conventional wisdom puts economic and political elites as the
main drivers of regime change, and that as a consequence, the
resulting low-intensity, elite-biased democracies have remained
susceptible to reversals and breakdown. While other entries in the
volume discuss issues of representation, corruption, and gender, I
conclude this chapter by centring my attention in a different,
recently highlighted challenge faced by Latin America: the uneven
territorial spread of democracy within
countries across the region.

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Javier Perez Sandoval – Departmental Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

Abstract | Bio