Contribution to a Historical-Structuralist Understanding of Latin American Democracy

Abstract

Mainstream views for the study of democracy and of democracy in Latin America tend to center around a restricted model of democratic systems, which decides to ignore the wider social environment in which they exist. This article seeks to contribute toward a more sociological understanding of democracy and democratization in Latin America and the world. It does that through a review of structuralist and neo-structuralist theories of democracy and of Latin American democracy, which is put in dialogue and confrontation with mainstream political science views of democracy and more recent critical views of really existing democracy. From that exercise the article proposes what it calls a historical-structuralist view of Latin American democracy based on looking at the interaction of social structures, political institutions, and sociopolitical actors, to understand its democratic systems as determined by the possession or lack of sociopolitical power through resources within the inequalities of capitalist and global structures.