write 15 pages on democratic politics
Answers
Explanation:
Orderly republics and democratic politics was another promise that Latin America sought to capture as it entered the twentieth century. Yet democracy and order have proven elusive in its twentieth-century history. While Argentina (1912) and Uruguay (1917) embraced mass democracy early, most other countries in the region experimented with oligarchic, military, and populist regimes with short and unstable periods of democracy throughout most of the twentieth century. Even Argentina, the most advanced and most ‘European’ nation reverted to authoritarianism in the 1930s, not regaining stable democracy until the 1980s. Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica (the last one especially after the 1940s) were the only Latin American countries with a reasonable, but by no means perfect, democratic record. A number of authors and scholars drew on the region to unveil the clues to democratic success and failure. Some of these scholars were specifically studying Latin America, others had larger samples, but almost all gave a prominent space to Latin America as a particularly promising puzzle.
Modernization theory was, as we shall see later, a dominant paradigm in regard to social change and development in Latin America, but its political version was also of importance and Seymour Lipset one of its major proponents. In his classic article, a simple yet powerful proposition was laid out: it was not simply capitalism that led to democracy, but also growth and social development (Lipset 1959). Following this hypothesis, Latin America was not democratic, because it was not rich. As economies developed, so democracy would flourish. By increasing the riches, creating a middle class and expanding education, countries that successfully traveled towards industrialized and modern economies would also increasingly become democratic. From another perspective, Robert Dahl and Samuel Huntington also proposed a hypothesis that would help explain Latin America's democratic failures: the lack of order (Huntington 1957, 1968, 1991, Dahl 1971). Dahl's strongest claim implied that countries that incorporated the masses before institutionalizing rules of the game would have frail democracies. For Huntington, praetorian societies in which no order could be constructed together with the dislocation that rapid economic and social change brought about helped explain the role of the military as a constructor of order and institutions and as a major player in Latin American politics. Neither Lipset nor Huntington nor Dahl constructed their theories for Latin America. And, in contrast to the homegrown economics of Latin America, the region only produced one truly unique body of work that not only grew from the specific study of the region but that also questioned the former theories.
Guillermo O'Donnell (1979) asked why the richest nation in Latin America was under authoritarian rule in the 1960s and 1970s. Lipset could not answer that, nor could Dahl (as a matter of fact, in Dahl's classic work, he offers an ad hoc explanation for Argentina). In O'Donnell's view, a new form of authoritarianism was emerging in Latin America—one that grew out of the tensions and political bottlenecks that Import Substitution Industrialization had created—he called the governments that exemplified it, bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes. These regimes were meant to neutralize the demands of the middle and working classes in order to deepen Import Substitution. In contrast to Lipset, O'Donnell suggested that in rich economies, dictatorship was indeed a possibility. Even more, when ISI met dependency, authoritarianism was the natural outcome. The spread of authoritarian regimes in the 1970s suggests that O'Donnell was not far off the mark, even though these new authoritarian regimes would eventually bury, rather than deepen, import substitution (this was the case in Chile, Uruguay, and the last dictatorship in Argentina, but not in Brazil and Argentina in the 1960s).
In the 1980s and 1990s the region returned to democracy and a series of studies looking at the key to successful transitions from authoritarianism to democracy was to become a whole new field of study for comparativists. These studies renounced structural and long-term explanations of democracy and focused on the concrete choices and strategic devices that in short periods of time were used to move countries from dictatorship to open competitive regimes. The name adopted for this new field, which had as its major input the study of Latin American societies and of Southern Europe, is ‘transitology.’ Its major contribution to political science was the recognition of contingency and strategic action as critical factors to understand large political outcomes.
Explanation:
A democracy means rule by the people.[1] The name is used for different forms of government, where the people can take part in the decisions that affect the way their community is run. In modern times, there are different ways this can be done:
The people meet to decide about new laws, and changes to existing ones. This is usually called direct democracy.
The people elect their leaders. These leaders take this decision about laws. This is commonly called representative democracy. The process of choosing is called election.[2] Elections are either held periodically, or when an officeholder dies.
Sometimes people can propose new laws orSometimes people can propose new laws or changes to existing laws. Usually, this is done using a referendum, which needs a certain number of supporters.
The people who make the decisions are chosen more or less at random. This is common, for example when choosing a jury for a trial. This method is known as sortition or allotment. In a trial, the jury will have to decide the question whether the person is guilty or not. In Europe, trials with a jury are only used for serious crimes, such as murder, hostage taking or arson.To become a stable democracy, a state usually undergoes a process of democratic consolidation.
A democracy is the opposite of a dictatorship, a type of government in which the power is centralized on the hands of a single person who rules the nation, lacks political pluralism, the people have no participation in the local politics and little to no freedom of expression.