Presidential Term Limits in Latin America: c.1820–1985

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Leiv Marsteintredet
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Rule

Latin America holds a 200-year-long history of presidential constitutions. The region’s constitutional and democratic experimentation throughout history makes it an interesting laboratory to study the origins, development, and effects of presidential term limits. Based primarily on data from constitutions, this chapter provides an overview of presidential term limits in Latin America from independence until 1985. The chapter shows how term limits have varied across countries and time, and that the implementation of strict term limits often came as a reaction to prior dictatorial rules. Whereas both proponents and critics of consecutive reelection invoked arguments of democracy in their favour, the Latin American experience up until the Third Wave of Democracy shows that stable, republican, and democratic rule has only been possible under a ban on immediate presidential re-election.

scholarly journals Three Waves of Populism in Latin America

2014 ◽  
pp. 153-160
Author(s):  
O. V. Varentsova
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
The Third ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
Hugo Chavez

Contemporary political regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia led by late Hugo Châvez (now by his successor Nicolas Maduro) and Evo Morales are considered by foreign and Russian scholars as part of the third wave of populism. In the 20th century Latin America already witnessed two waves of populism which coincided with significant political transitions, namely a transition from oligarchy to mass politics accompanied by implementation of import substitution industrialization policies, and a transition from authoritarian rule to democracy during the third wave of democratization which triggered neoliberal reforms inspired by Washington Consensus. This article presents common characteristics of Latin American populist regimes that emerged in different historical periods which help identify the origins as well as distinctive features of Venezuelan and Bolivian political regimes. It is stated that the Châvez and Morales left populist regimes resemble classic populist regimes in that they rely on incendiary anti-establishment discourse. Therefore, left populist regimes are characterized by high levels of polarization as well as weak institutionalization and class or indigenous orientation. Election of left populist leaders may lead to institutional deadlock, uneven playing field and transition to competitive authoritarianism.

Party Systems in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Wills-Otero
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
The Third ◽  
Voter Preferences ◽  
Political Configuration ◽  
American Party ◽  
Over Time

Since the beginning of the third wave of democratization in the late 1970s, Latin American party systems have confronted several challenges, and they have frequently been transformed. There have been various types of changes. While some systems collapsed in the 1990s (e.g., Venezuela and Peru), others realigned (Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay), or expanded (Argentina and Mexico), or were able to become consolidated and ensure their stability over time (e.g., Brazil). What factors explain the transformations in party systems during the past three decades, and how can Latin American party systems be classified according to their attributes? In trying to answer these questions, scholars of Latin America have undertaken studies that are both theoretically and empirically rich. Their work has increased our knowledge of the party systems and representative democracies in the region. Different factors have been highlighted in order to explain the changes these systems have undergone since the third wave of democratization. Some works emphasize the importance of institutional reforms introduced by politicians or by constitutional assemblies. The questions they address are the following: What political reforms have been introduced into Latin American political systems, and what effects have they had on the party systems in different countries? The researchers do not limit their attention to reforms of electoral systems. For example, some of them also study decentralization processes and their effects on party systems. From a different perspective, other authors focus on changes in electoral preferences and their effects on the configuration of political power, exploring how regional economic, political, and social changes have affected voter preferences and the political configuration of party systems. Still others consider the crises of democratic representation in these countries, underlining the decline in the programmatic character of parties as an explanatory variable for the crises and noting that the level of institutionalization of a party system declines when parties abandon this distinctive feature and become clientelistic or personalistic instead. On the other hand, in order to describe party systems and to observe the changes they have undergone, academics have proposed a set of concepts and measurements that make it possible to identify their levels of institutionalization (i.e., stability vs. volatility), nationalization, and programmatic structuration, among other aspects. The operationalization of these concepts has provided researchers with useful data for describing, comparing, and analyzing the party systems of the region transversely over time. Understanding the transformation and characteristics of Latin American party systems over time sheds light on both the progress democratic regimes have made and the setbacks they have suffered within specific countries and in the region at large.

scholarly journals Outsiders and Executive-Legislative Conflict in Latin America

2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (03) ◽  
pp. 70-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Carreras
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The Political ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Political Skills ◽  
The Third ◽  
Logistic Regressions

AbstractOne of the most significant developments in Latin American democracies since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization is the rise to power of political outsiders. However, the study of the political consequences of this phenomenon has been neglected. This article begins to fill that gap by examining whether the rise of outsiders in the region increases the level of executive-legislative confrontation. Using an original database of political outsiders in Latin America, it reports a series of logistic regressions showing that the risk of executive-legislative conflict significantly increases when the president is an outsider. The likelihood of institutional paralysis increases when an independent gets elected, due to the legislative body's lack of support for the president and the outsider's lack of political skills. The risk of an executive's attempted dissolution of Congress is also much higher when the president is an outsider.

Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America after the Third Wave

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belén Fernández Milmanda
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Influence Strategies ◽  
Equal Distribution ◽  
Land Inequality ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Rich

The historical role of landed elites as obstacles to democratic consolidation in Latin America has been widely studied. Four decades after the onset of the third wave, however, the issue of how these elites have adapted to the new democratic context remains unexplored. The question of why these elites who supported military coups each time a government threatened their interests have mostly played by the democratic rulebook during the past four decades still needs to be answered. Important structural and political transformations took place in Latin America during the last half of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century that affected agrarian elites’ incentives and capacity to organize politically. The first change was urbanization, which undermined agrarian elites’ capacity to mobilize the votes of the rural poor in favor of their political representatives. The second was an increase in the importance of agricultural exports as a source of foreign exchange and revenue for Latin American countries thanks to the commodity boom of the 2000s. The third change was the arrival to power of left-wing parties with redistributive agendas, threatening agrarian elites’ interests in the region with the highest land inequality in the world. However, the fact that these governments relied on revenues from agriculture to fund their policy agendas created tension between the leftists’ ideological preferences for a more equal distribution of land and their fiscal needs. Dominant theories in political science suggest that democratization should lead to redistribution from the rich to the poor, as democracies represent the preferences of a wider spectrum of citizens than nondemocracies. Landowners, given the fixed nature of their assets, should be easy targets for increased taxation or expropriation. However, these theories understate landowners’ capacity to organize politically and use democratic institutions to their advantage. In fact, if we look at contemporary Latin America, we see that four decades of democracy have not changed the region’s extremely high land inequality. Agrarian elites in Latin America have deployed a variety of political influence strategies to protect themselves from redistribution. In some cases, such as Chile and El Salvador, they have built conservative parties to represent their interests in Congress. In others, like Brazil, they have invested in multiparty representation through a congressional caucus. Lastly, in other countries such as Argentina and Bolivia, agrarian elites have not been able to organize their electoral representation and instead have protected their interests from outside the policymaking arena through protests.

Video Speech in Latin America

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Chanan
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. In rehearsing the history of video in Latin America, this chapter focuses on the social rather than the individual, on video as a collective medium where audio and visual are placed in a new relationship of equal simultaneity, and thus where video functions more as a form of collective speech than individual expression. In the Latin American experience, which built on the radical film movement of the preceding decades, community activists became aficionados of video, often under the most inimical circumstances, but by exploiting video’s potential for alternative, small scale, low profile, subcultural uses. Using examples from Chile in the 1980s, indigenous video in countries like Brazil and Bolivia, and the movement of video activism in Argentina in the early 2000s known ascine piquetero, the chapter sketches a concept of video speech as a form of audiovisual utterance answering to the socialized conditions of its production, in a dialogical relationship with its audience.

Thinking about Current Vatican Policy in Central and East Europe and the Utility of the ‘Brazilian Paradigm’

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Della Cava
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
East Europe ◽  
American Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Church

This text is a preliminary assessment of the potential for comparative and ‘trans-systemic’ study of the current role of the Roman Catholic Church in Central and East Europe. For observers of Vatican policy in world affairs, there is every reason to believe that the Church, now engaged in rapidly rebuilding its own institutions in Central and East Europe, will play a decisive part in shaping the future societies of the region in the coming decade, just as it did in Brazil and the rest of Latin America in the immediate post-war era. In fact, the recent history of the Church in Latin America, but above all Brazil, provides a timely and useful paradigm for helping fathom the current course of Vatican policy in Central and East Europe. In turn, the results of comparative inquiry may even serve to stimulate an entirely fresh discussion of the Brazilian and Latin American experience.

Labor Movements in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico M. Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Labor

The history of Latin America cannot be understood without analyzing the role played by labor movements in organizing formal and informal workers across urban and rural contexts.This chapter analyzes the history of labor movements in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. After debating the distinction between “working class” and “popular sectors,” the chapter proposes that labor movements encompass more than trade unions. The history of labor movements is analyzed through the dynamics of globalization, incorporation waves, revolutions, authoritarian breakdowns, and democratization. Taking a relational approach, these macro-dynamics are studied in connection with the main revolutionary and reformist strategic disputes of the Latin American labor movements.

Language as a Key to Latin American Historiography

1955 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-539
Author(s):  
Richard M. Morse
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New World ◽  
Old World ◽  
History Of

Latin americanists have in recent years become increasingly concerned with constructing the basis for a unified history of Latin America. Frequently this enterprise leads them to contemplate the even larger design of a history of the Americas. While the New World may still be, in Hegel’s words, “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” it is now recognized as having an independent heritage; its history is no longer experienced as “only an echo of the Old World.”

Notes on Emerson in Latin America

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Englekirk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Extended Treatment ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Literary Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good Coverage

A number of chapters—some definitive, others suggestive—have already appeared to afford us a clearer picture of the reception of United States writers and writings in Latin America. Studies on Franklin, Poe, Longfellow, and Whitman provide reasonably good coverage on major representative figures of our earlier literary years. There are other nineteenth-century writers, however, who deserve more extended treatment than that given in the summary and bibliographical studies available to date. A growing body of data may soon make possible the addition of several significant chapters with which to round out this period in the history of inter-American literary relations. Bryant and Dickinson will be the only poets to call for any specific attention. Fiction writers will prove more numerous. Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hearn, Hart, Melville, and Twain will figure in varying degrees of prominence. Of these, some like Irving and Cooper early captured the Latin American imagination; others like Hawthorne, and particularly Melville, were to remain virtually unknown until our day. Paine and Prescott and Mann will represent yet other facets of American letters and thought.

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