From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of
Ethnic Politics, Donna Lee Van Cott, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004,pp. 300.During the 1980s and 90s the English literature on Latin American
politics in the Anglo North American and Anglo European academic worlds
roughly evolved from works centrally concerned—and discursively
interconnected—with various models of transitions to democracy to
the necessary processes that the new electoral democracies had to undergo
and the policies they needed to implement to advance in the process of
consolidation of democracy. For scholars who essentially viewed these
processes either as largely completed in institutional terms or on their
way to institutional maturity and stability, the focus of scholarly
attention then shifted to more subtle questions of democratic quality.
Donna Lee Van Cott's From Movements to Parties in Latin America:
The Evolution of Ethnic Politics is a work that not only fits into
the category of works fundamentally concerned with the issues and
challenges associated with either the consolidation of democracy
literature or the quality of democracy literature, but it is also a work
that helps to develop the literature by highlighting a central variable of
Latin American culture and politics, namely, indigenous ethnic movements
and politics.
Daniel H. LEVINE y José E. MOLINA (eds.). «The Quality of Democracy in Latin America». Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2011. 299 pp. ISBN: 978-1-58826- 786-3.
