Latin America's Democracies: Stagnation and Erosion

Latin America's Democracies: Stagnation and Erosion

Introduction

• From 1990 to early 2010s, Latin American democracies faced challenges related to mediocre quality, with Cuba as the only fully authoritarian regime.
• Between 1985 and 2010, democracy deepened in Brazil. However, democracy sharply declined in Venezuela after 1999.
• Recently, Latin America has contributed to the global decline of democracy, with the region's democracy being worse than it has been since the late 1980s.
• Democratic stagnation remains the most common situation, with negative changes since 2002.
• Venezuela and Nicaragua have become authoritarian regimes, joining Cuba.
• Democracy has eroded in Brazil and Mexico.
• El Salvador has devolved into a competitive authoritarian regime since the election of President Nayib Bukele in 2019.
• No country in the region has experienced meaningful democratic deepening since the Peruvian restoration of democracy in 2001.
• Ecuador recovered its mediocre level of democracy after Lenín Moreno’s 2017 presidential victory.

Democratic Stagnation

• Cases of erosion or breakdown punctuate an overall atmosphere of democratic stagnation.
• Stagnant democracies struggle with persistent democratic deficits that prevent them from becoming solidly liberal democracies.
• Many scholars have discussed executive takeovers and democratic backsliding, but few have addressed the inability of most countries in the "third wave" of democratization to move to higher-quality democracy.
• These countries stall out as low-grade democracies with major democratic deficits.
• Three reasons for democratic stagnation:
  • Powerful groups such as organized criminal networks, unreformed police forces, and interests from the old authoritarian ruling coalition.
  • Poor governance leading to dissatisfaction with democracy, paving the way for authoritarian populists.
  • "Hybrid states" that violate citizens’ rights, fail to provide citizen security and quality public services, and are captured by powerful state actors.
• Hybrid states combine bureaucratic efficiency and innovation with corruption, patrimonialism, inefficiency, and authoritarianism.
• Coercive actors, poor results, and hybrid states have weakened citizens’ commitment to democracy, setting the stage for stagnation and backsliding.

Broad Patterns

• The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project and Freedom House ratings are used to chart levels of democracy and processes of democratic deepening, stagnation, erosion, and breakdown.
• The V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index uses 67 questions, and Freedom House uses 25 questions to tap the most important characteristics of liberal democracy.
• Figure 1 shows V-Dem’s average Liberal Democracy score for the twenty Latin American countries (rescaled from 0 to 100) and Freedom House’s average score on its 0 to 100 scale for 2002 to 2021.
• Both measures show a modest decline, starting in 2007 according to Freedom House and in 2004 according to V-Dem.
• The decline is steeper when weighted scores are used because the cases of erosion include Brazil and Mexico (348 million of Latin America’s 656 million people).
• The decline has been gradual, from 58.6 in 2005 to 45.8 in 2021 in the weighted V-Dem scale.
• Figure 2 shows V-Dem’s 2021 Liberal Democracy scores (re-indexed from 0 to 100) for Latin American countries on the vertical axis and the 2002 scores on the horizontal axis.
• Figure 2 shows the prevalence of cases of democratic stagnation and erosion and the absence of cases of deepening.
• Six countries have eroded substantially (at least ten points on this scale).
• One (Dominican Republic) improved by 12.5 points, and thirteen have shown little net change (less than ten points).
• Freedom House shows similar patterns.

Categories of Regimes in Latin America (2021 V-Dem Liberal Democracy scores)

1. High-level liberal democracies:
   • Costa Rica (85)
   • Chile (77)
   • Uruguay (76)
2. Mid-level democracies:
   • Argentina (66)
   • Peru (65)
   • Panama (56)
   • Brazil (51)
3. Low-level democracies and semidemocracies:
   • Colombia (47)
   • Dominican Republic (47)
   • Ecuador (47)
   • Paraguay (43)
   • Mexico (39)
   • Bolivia (37)
   • Guatemala (32)
   • Honduras (24)
4. Competitive authoritarian regimes:
   • El Salvador (22)
   • Haiti (21)
   • Regimes where formal democratic institutions exist but incumbents abuse the state to gain an advantage.
5. Closed authoritarian regimes:
   • Cuba (8)
   • Venezuela (7)
   • Nicaragua (6)

Roots of Democratic Stagnation

• Democracy requires:
  1. Free and fair elections for the legislature and executive.
  2. Nearly universal suffrage.
  3. A broad set of political and civil rights.
  4. Mechanisms of accountability to check executive power.
  5. Civilian control over the military and other armed actors.
• Democratic deepening means enhancing these characteristics.
• A notable characteristic of Latin American political regimes in this century is the prevalence of semidemocracies and low- to mid-level democracies coupled with the almost complete absence of cases of deepening.
• Twelve countries in the region are semidemocracies or have a low to middling level of democracy, including Brazil (population 216 million) and Mexico (130 million).
• Democracy of middling or worse quality is Latin America’s most common regime.
• Most of these cases can be called instances of democratic stagnation.
• This involves:
  • Limited change in the level of democracy over a sustained period.
  • A regime with substantial democratic deficits.
  • Status as a semidemocracy or a mid-level democracy.
• It does not make conceptual sense to discuss democratic stagnation of closed authoritarian regimes.
• Stagnations deserve more attention because:
  • They are prevalent.
  • They have always been the prelude to executive takeovers of democracy in this region.
• Democratic stagnation is a common pattern in Latin America and in the third wave as a whole.
• Six Latin American cases (Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru) meet stringent operational criteria for democratic stagnation.
• Three more cases (Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Mexico) come close.
• Honduras and Bolivia experienced democratic breakdowns but have recently reestablished semidemocracy.
• Democratic stagnation has occurred despite alternations in power involving different partisan programs.
• In Mexico, the right, the center right, and the center left have each ruled in turn since 2000, but with no democratic deepening.
• Mexico's GDP per capita is high enough to have built a solid democracy, but democratic deepening has not made headway.
• Democratic stagnation is not inevitable; effective policies can help democratic forces and hinder those that limit democratization, and social movements can generate pressures to deepen democracy.
• The obstacles are difficult to overcome, and the record shows relatively few clear cases of success at building robust democracies in Latin America and in the third wave more generally.

Thin Transitions, Potent Authoritarians

• One factor behind stagnations is the power of actors that limit democracy.
• The wave of democratization that began in Latin America in 1978 and ended around 2001 touched every country in the region except Cuba, but it was shallow.
• Powerful actors—including subnational authoritarian actors, unreformed police forces, and authoritarian successor parties—kept it that way.
• Mexico’s national-level transition in 2000 came when the conservative National Action Party (PAN) won the presidency with candidate Vicente Fox.
• Democratization had to be negotiated between opposition parties and the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
• Until 2016, the PRI always ruled at least half of Mexico’s 32 states, and in nine of them no other party had ever been in power from 1929 to 2016.
• In most states where it governed, the PRI never changed its authoritarian ways.
• The old authoritarian PRI shaped Mexico’s new democracy more than this democracy transformed the PRI.
• Most PRI-governed states remained islands of subnational authoritarianism despite democratic competition at the national level.
• The influence of these subnational authoritarian regimes on national politics persists.
• The PRI returned to the presidency in 2012 and governed at the national level again until 2018.
• During this period, the party’s collusion with organized crime reached new heights.
• The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), comes from the PRI’s authoritarian timber.
• As PRD mayor of Mexico City in the early 2000s, he rejected judicial rulings he did not like, and his administration was rocked by a high-profile corruption scandal.
• He lost the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections, claiming fraud had robbed him of victory.
• Mexicans’ confidence in their electoral system predictably suffered as a result of AMLO’s charges.
• As president, he has had an illiberal governing style, railing against democratic checks and balances and savaging his critics.
• In most Mexican states, key power centers—the police, the judiciary, the state electoral authorities—have eluded reform.
• Citizens’ rights are de facto highly uneven.
• Police abuses of poor people’s rights are widespread and sometimes dire.
• The lack of police reform in a context of increasing drug-cartel violence has led to widening corruption and excessive uses of force by police agencies.
• In Brazil in 2020, police committed 6,416 homicides; almost four-fifths of the victims were black.
• In the United Kingdom (population 67 million) during the same year, there were five such killings.
• In countries such as Mexico, where the military has assumed a major role in fighting organized crime, troops have become major rights violators.
• Every Latin American country has seen forces from authoritarian times stay on as potent political actors.
• Since 2000, authoritarian successor parties have ruled in Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Paraguay.
• The electoral success of authoritarian successor parties makes them less likely to seek democracy’s overthrow but also gives them leverage against democratizing reforms.
• There are new actors given to blocking further democratization as well.
• Venezuela since 1998, Bolivia since 2005, and Ecuador since 2006 have seen new authoritarian forces emerge on the left, while Brazil since 2018 and El Salvador since 2019 have seen them coming from the right.
• In some countries, including Brazil, Evangelical churches have also been key parts of the coalition that favors democratic rollbacks.
• Transnational criminal organizations are not new actors in Latin America, but their political power has expanded greatly.
• In parts of Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, they have devastated democracy at the local level, with consequences for national politics.
• Coercing candidates and voters, undermining the rule of law, and systematically violating citizens’ rights and liberties, they sometimes also spark the formation of right-wing private militias to fight them.
• These too can readily turn into criminal gangs.
• In countries including Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, individuals who collude with criminal organizations and right-wing militias are no longer content to corrupt the police, prosecutors, and judges, but now run for office.
• Such potent democracy-limiting actors can sentence countries to thin democratization and lower-grade democracy.
• The United States, the Organization of American States, and other international actors can discourage outright coups, but are less able to promote deepening democracy.
• Thinking about democratization-averse actors can be useful for framing a strategy of democratic deepening.
• Democratic governments have not crafted conscious strategies for deepening democracy.

Governing Poorly

• A second factor has been disappointing governance.
• The average performance in most areas of central concern to citizens has been mediocre or worse.
• The Table shows Latin American countries’ average economic-growth rates since 1997, the Gini index of income inequality, the homicide rate, the Worldwide Governance Indicator for control of corruption, and the World Rule of Law Index.
• While there is wide variance across the region on these key indicators of governance success, the median country fares poorly.
• Most economies have grown at a sluggish rate over the last generation; the record of the three largest economies, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, is dismal.
• Latin America is perhaps the world’s most violent and economically unequal region.
• In many countries, public security has been a huge problem.
• In 2022, El Salvador had the world’s highest homicide rate.
• The nine most dangerous cities in the world and twelve of the most dangerous thirteen are in Latin America.
• Only three Latin American countries rank among the world’s top fifty in the World Rule of Law Index: Uruguay (25th), Costa Rica (31st), and Chile (32nd), and only one other, Argentina (56th), is in the top seventy-five.

Table—Indicators of Governance in Latin America

Notes:

• GDP per capita growth measured in constant 2015 US dollars for 1997–2021.
• For Cuba, growth is calculated for 1997–2020 because the WDI did not show data for 2021.
• Homicide rate reports the number of intentional homicides per 100,000 people in 2020 for most countries. For Bolivia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, data are from 2019; for Haiti and Peru, from 2018; Venezuela, from 2017; Cuba, from 2016.
• Gini index data are from 2020 for most countries; for El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama, data are from 2019; Guatemala and Nicaragua, from 2014; Haiti, from 2012; Venezuela, from 2006.

Sources: World Development Indicators for per capita GDP growth (indicator: NY.GDP.PCAP.KD), homicide rate (VC.IHR.PSRC.P5), and Gini index (SI.POV.GINI), https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators; Worldwide Governance Indicators for control of corruption, https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi.

• High-profile corruption scandals such as the Mensal~ao, Lava Jato (Car Wash), and Odebrecht affairs have plagued Latin America.
• The Worldwide Governance Indicator for control of corruption is based on a wide range of expert and citizen surveys.
• Seventeen of the twenty countries have below-average scores (Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica are the exceptions).
• Scandals have drained the legitimacy of establishment parties and created space for illiberal populists such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
• The leftist Workers’ Party (PT) governed Brazil from 2003 under President Lula da Silva.
• It became dogged by scandal after the mensal~ao scheme broke in 2005.
• The Car Wash investigation began in 2014, the same year that the PT’s poor economic management helped trigger a bruising recession.
• The party suffered large setbacks in the 2016 municipal elections, and the number of Brazilians identifying as PT supporters plunged.
• The conservative establishment was also deeply tarnished by scandals.
• After it impeached Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, in 2016 and took the reins, it proved unable neither to fix the economy nor to hide its own corruption.
• In the 2018 presidential election, voters turned against all establishment options and chose Bolsonaro.
• He too, meanwhile, has come under suspicion of corrupt dealings.
• Latin America’s governance agenda was already freighted with difficulty when the pandemic hit in early 2020.
• The global commodities boom that had kicked off near the start of the century had begun to peter out around 2012.
• The boom decade had been good for most Latin American countries.
• Their economies grew, poverty fell, and inequalities long thought intractable began to shrink.
• The decade since 2012 has seen halts or reversals of these positive trends.
• Pandemic-related dislocations sent production and employment plunging, set levels of schooling back, and worsened poverty and inequality.
• In 2020, the region suffered its greatest economic contraction since modern record-keeping began 120 years ago.
• Latin American democracies and semidemocracies had long seemed surprisingly resilient in the face of mediocre governance records, but citizens eventually tired of poor performance.
• Voters’ quest for something different enabled Hugo Chávez to win in Venezuela in 1998, and subsequent illiberal presidents to win in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua in the 2000s.
• The democratic erosion in El Salvador since 2019 is hard to imagine without the mediocre or worse results that the country had long endured under both right- and left-wing governments.

Hybrid States, Stagnant Democracies

• Hybrid states combine pockets of efficiency and democracy-respecting behavior with other, usually much larger pockets of inefficiency and authoritarian behavior.
• Modern states are asked to do a lot:
  • internal policing and national defense
  • education and infrastructure
  • health care and housing
  • pensions and unemployment insurance
• In democracies, the judicial system is charged with upholding citizen rights, and the judiciary and other state agencies are primarily responsible for horizontal accountability.
• Most Latin American states perform these tasks unevenly at best.
• Three decades ago, O’Donnell noted that Latin American countries tended to be divided internally into “blue zones” and “brown zones”.
• Much has changed since O’Donnell wrote, but the hybrid character of most Latin American states remains.
• States have grown and social spending has risen.
• Between 1990 and 2020, taxes as a share of GDP increased by 40 percent across Latin America and the Caribbean, going from 15.6 to 21.9 percent.
• State agencies in some countries have pioneered important innovations such as conditional cash transfers and participatory budgeting, but many bureaucracies remain quagmires of inefficiency and corruption.
• In some countries, the police, judges and prosecutors, and state agents collude with criminal groups.
• Across most of Latin America, poor state quality and capacity work against democratic deepening.
• If not outright corrupt, police and prosecutors may be weak and incompetent.
• Chronic offenses go unpunished, driving citizens to fury, or perhaps just political apathy and cynicism.
• Higher social spending has not, by and large, produced commensurate improvements in human well-being.
• Under democracy, far more Latin Americans go to school, but the quality of public education remains poor.
• Even countries with good public-health systems, such as Brazil, were not up to the task of managing the covid pandemic.
• All this has helped to discredit establishment parties and open the way for populist outsiders.
• In Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, the state tends to function well.
• These countries have low homicide rates and good scores on the Worldwide Governance Indicator for Control of Corruption and the World Rule of Law Index.
• These three are the region’s exceptions, separated from the rest of Latin America by a considerable gap in state performance and quality.

The Illiberal Wave

• The combination of hybrid states, poor governance records, and criminal networks and entrenched actors opposed to democratic deepening has kept most of Latin America democratically stagnant.
• With this stagnation has come declining citizen commitment to democracy, as Figure 3 shows.
• The trend bears a resemblance to the democracy trends in Figure 1.
• Democratic breakdowns via executive takeovers and deep erosions of democracy require one more ingredient: illiberal presidents who purposefully undermine democracy.
• Absent illiberal presidents, democracy in the region has not deepened, but nor has it sharply eroded.
• Most Latin American semidemocracies and democracies avoided breakdowns and erosions in the 1980s and 1990s, the first two decades of the third wave.
• Over time, however, Latin American voters tired of political systems that failed to give them what they needed and wanted.
• In large numbers, they turned against establishment parties and in many countries voted for populists who promised to govern for the people and against the establishment.
• Hugo Chávez’s election in Venezuela in 1998 marked the beginning of the left turn in Latin American politics.
• The leftist tide included some presidents who fought to deepen democracy during the century’s first decade (Ricardo Lagos in Chile, for example, and in important respects Lula in Brazil), but it also included illiberal populists who led a new wave of democratic erosions and breakdowns, including Chávez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Ortega in Nicaragua.
• The cresting of this tide roughly coincided with the end of the commodities boom, but hostility to the establishment did not vanish.
• On the contrary, as economic growth and social progress slowed, the populist temptation sharpened.
• Most party systems in the region continue to be marked by high electoral volatility, high distrust, and low partisan attachment, ideal conditions for populist challengers seeking to overtake established parties.
• The election of the authoritarian right-winger Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and of the center-left populist AMLO in Mexico, both in 2018, reinvigorated the populist wave.
• They had been preceded by the right-wing populist Jimmy Morales in Guatemala (2016–20) and followed by Nayib Bukele in El Salvador in 2019, who rapidly captured the courts after his party’s landslide victory in the congressional elections of 2021, and by leftist Pedro Castillo in Peru in 2021.
• Suspicion of the establishment and widespread citizen frustration with poor governance have fueled explosive social protests in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the last few years.
• There are now left-of-center presidents in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru.
• Thus another left turn is well under way, but amid governing conditions far more difficult than during the commodity boom.
• The international political environment today is less favorable for democracy than in the first decades of the third wave, given China’s greater involvement in the region and a more equivocal U.S. posture.
• The parlous state of most Latin American economies today adds to the difficulties of building deeper democracies, though it also adds to the difficulty of consolidating authoritarian regimes.

The Toughest Years Since 1990

• Although Latin America is still living in a more democratic time than it enjoyed before the late 1970s, these are the toughest times for democracy the region has seen since about 1990.
• Stagnation with deep democratic deficits is widespread, and since the current century began, nearly all cases of marked change in the level of democracy have involved erosion or breakdown.
• Democracy has eroded in Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico.
• El Salvador has devolved into competitive authoritarianism, while Nicaragua and Venezuela have joined Cuba in the full-blown, highly repressive authoritarian camp.
• Three factors have contributed to the widespread pattern of democratic stagnations and have increased the incidence of democratic erosion and collapse:
  1. Older authoritarian actors block democratic deepening while newer authoritarian actors, especially organized crime and right-wing militias, often radically undermine democratic rights.
  2. In many countries, mediocre or worse government performance leaves angry citizens surveying their discontents in the areas of economic growth, inequality, public security, corruption control, and other salient issues, and paves the way for illiberal presidents to attack democracy.
  3. The inefficient, authoritarian, and often corrupt agencies within hybrid states have directly limited democratic deepening and fueled citizens’ discontent.
• Democratic stagnation facilitates the rise of illiberal presidents who rail against the system.
• These illiberal presidents sometimes succeed in dismantling democracy, and they sometimes fail.
• When they fail, the political regime has reverted to the familiar status of semidemocracy, or perhaps a mid-performing democracy at best.
• How to break out of this rut and build democracies that function better and show more respect for citizens’ rights is one of the great challenges facing Latin America today.