Title: The State of Democracy in Latin America
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The State of Democracy in Latin America
Youth and Democracy
End of an era: opportunities and challenges
A new debate: the quality of democracy
My opinion
Daniel Zovatto
Former Brookings Expert
Director for Latin America and the Caribbean - International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance

Content: This year the region will grow, at most, 2 percent, with potential implications of social stagnation.” As a result social conflicts will continue to exist (or even increase) and demands which may not threaten the continuity of democracy, will still make governability more complex. It is therefore important to pay attention to new phenomena or emerging trends in the region, among them, two models of democracy: one republican, the other authoritarian, illustrative of the fracture of the concept of democracy set forth in the Inter-American Democratic Charter (IDC) of 2001. My opinion
Daniel Zovatto
Former Brookings Expert
Director for Latin America and the Caribbean - International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
Twitter
Zovatto55
The complex and heterogeneous reality of Latin American democracy demands a new type of debate, not on traditional authoritarian regressions but on new types of challenges (processes of stagnation, plateauing or decline) and the new modalities of authoritarianism, more sophisticated and difficult to control, such as the “illiberal democracies” or the “competitive authoritarians.” A debate centered on the quality of democracy, on how to guarantee not only the legitimacy of origin but also the legitimacy of performance, both regulated by the rule of law (as established in article 3 of the IDC); on how to move from an electoral democracy to a democracy of citizens and institutions; on how to reconcile democracy with economic development in the context of societies with a greater level of social cohesion, less inequality and poverty and greater gender equality; on how to search for a more strategic relationship between the market and the state and a more functional relationship between the state and society; on how to make it possible for democracy to deliver efficient answers to new types of demands from more complex, more modern, more urban and younger societies – this is the agenda that Latin American democracy needs to debate with urgency and with intelligence.