Joe Foweraker

Grassroots Movements and Political Activism in Latin America: A Critical Comparison of Chile and Brazil

This essay addresses the changing trajectory of grassroots political activity in Latin America, with special reference to Chile and Brazil, and assesses its impact on the policy and practices of social development. It traces this trajectory through the transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule, and focuses on the responses of grassroots organisations to democratic governance and the rise of neo-liberalism. In particular, it shows that social movements have declined or been transformed (or both), while non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have multiplied and become more visible. It appears that where grassroots organisations interact with the state they may be subordinated to state policy, and where they fail to interact they may be ineffective. Their influence on social development mainly occurs piecemeal through social service delivery, not through the shaping of social policy itself.

Measuring Liberal Democratic Performance: An Empirical and Conceptual Critique

Liberal democratic performance is understood as the delivery of liberal democratic values, and not as regime longevity or government efficacy. Measuring it is a matter of how far liberal democratic governments achieve in practice the values they endorse in principle. It is recognized that the performance of liberal democratic governments varies widely. But extant attempts to measure this variation suffer problems of reliability and validity, and the object of measurement is often unclear. By defining the range of liberal democratic values we demonstrate that performance is multidimensional and that trade-offs across different values can create distinct performance profiles. The narrow gauge of the extant meaures – usually of just one or two values – is often disguised by single scales that masquerade as summary performance indicators.

Review Article: Institutional Design, Party Systems and Governability Differentiating the Presidential Regimes of Latin America

The general elections in Chile and Brazil in 1989 marked ‘the first time that all the Ibero-American nations, excepting Cuba, enjoyed the benefits of elected constitutional governments at the same time’. This occurrence was not as dramatic or visible as the collapse of Communism and the transitions to democracy in Eastern and Central Europe, which began in the same year, but it did mark a historical watershed. After almost two centuries as independent states, the countries of Latin America now comprised a new democratic universe. Similarly to the Eastern European experience, the Latin American watershed presented new opportunities for comparative research into democratic governance. In particular, it created a new context for the study of the relationships between institutional design, party systems and governability – defined in the narrow sense of institutional efficacy, as expressed through government stability, legislative capacity and the avoidance of gridlock. This article sets out to review the recent research on these topics, in order to describe the predominant regime type in Latin America and differentiate its distinct variants, examining their impact on governability.

Constitutional Design and Democratic Performance

The article examines the relationship between constitutional design and democratic performance. To do so, it draws on a new data set, containing measures of eight core values of liberal democratic government (accountability, representation, constraint, participation, political rights, civil rights, property rights, minority rights) for 40 country cases over 29 years. It uses pooled cross section time-series regressions to explore the effects of executive-legislative relations, electoral rules and federal-unitary government, while controlling for the contextual conditions of economic wealth, political culture, and the longevity of democratic government itself. The article reviews previous attempts to explore the relationship in order to sharpen the definition of democratic performance, explore key aspects of the research design, and compare the statistical results with the present state of our knowledge. Overall the results tend to support the superior performance of parliamentary over presidential systems, and, in lesser degree, of unitary over federal systems. The performance profiles of proportional representation and plurality electoral systems, on the other hand, appear as distinct but quite evenly matched. But reasons are given for exercising some care with causal inferences, and for applying the results to closer-focus comparative institutional analysis.

Accumulation and authoritarianism on the pioneer frontier of Brazil

The essay addresses the relationship between pioneer frontier and State in Brazil: departing from an empirical investigation of the roles of law, bureaucracy and violence on the frontier itself, on the one hand, and an assessment of the major interpretations of the State, on the other, the argument focuses on the forms of mediation which characterize the State, and which constitute the social forces in struggle — both on the frontier and elsewhere in the society. It concludes that only by specifying the political content of such mediations can analytical distinctions be drawn between different forms of capitalist State.

Differentiating the democratic performance of the West

. It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructed Database of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the ‘rest’. The Database is designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy.

Individual Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Inquiry

This article is a comparative study of the relationship between social movements and the individual rights of citizenship. It identifies three main connections between collective action and individual rights made in theory and history, and analyses them in the context of modern authoritarian regimes. It does so by measuring both social mobilization and the presence of rights over time in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Spain, and analyses their mutual impact statistically – both within and across these national cases. The results demonstrate the mutual impact between rights and movements, and more importantly, constitute a robust defence of democracy as the direct result of collective struggles for individual rights.