Reflections on the Application of Democratic Theory to Latin America

• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18808775
• Author: Steve Ellner
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 224, Vol. 46 No. 1, January 2019, 285–288

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18808775

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

285

Book Review

Reflections on the Application of Democratic Theory

to Latin America

by

Steve Ellner

Joe Foweraker Polity: Demystifying Democracy in Latin America and Beyond. Boulder:

Lynne Rienner, 2018.

Joe Foweraker and Dolores Trevizo (eds.) Democracy and Its Discontents in Latin

America. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2017.

In both of the books under review here, Joe Foweraker points to the shortcomings of

long-standing theories on the democratic experience in Latin America and elsewhere.

He sees their main flaw as their focus on government, which in Latin America is domi-

nated by the executive branch, at the expense of the entire state apparatus, in which

oligarchies exercise a major influence. Foweraker argues that in failing to conceptualize

the state, U.S.-European-based democratic theory generally overestimates the quality of

democracy, particularly in developed nations, and exaggerates the disparity between the

performance of democratic systems of developed nations and that of developing ones.

His critique can be summarized as follows: “Modern democratic theory of Latin America

. . . fails to take sufficient account of the immanence of oligarchy and takes democratic

politics to be the whole of the political system . . . [which] is neither democratic nor oli-

garchic but is composed of both” (Polity, 123).

Indeed, any analysis that focuses on electoral democracy while ignoring the inner

workings of the state will lead to superficial explanations and misleading conclusions.

It will overlook informal relations— the “deep state” or what Nicos Poulantzas called

“power centers” and “networks.” Foweraker takes special aim at Robert Dahl, the

founder of the U.S. school of pluralism in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Foweraker,

although Dahl recognized the limitations of U.S. democracy, he only scratched the sur-

face because he failed to examine power centers and informal flows of influence.

Foweraker has a more pessimistic view of the performance of U.S. democracy and

denies that it is much superior to its counterparts in the developed world. By way of

example, he points to the 2000 presidential election, which was “compromised in some

degree by the pathologies of peripheral democracy, namely patrimonialism, elitism,

nepotism, electoral corruption, and a dubious judicial impartiality” (Polity, 19).

According to Foweraker, Dahl created a skewed checklist of “institutional attributes,”

a system subsequently adopted by Freedom House that tended to “award almost all the

highest scores to the established democracies of the West” (18). He suggests that these

criteria contain “cultural bias” and sides with skeptics who claim that comparing the

democratic credentials of developed and developing nations amounts to comparing

“apples and oranges” (18). He adds that whereas popular and academic views perceive

a direct relationship between inequality and the limitations of democracy in the devel-

Steve Ellner taught economic history and political science at the Universidad de Oriente in

Venezuela from 1977 to 2003.

808775LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18808775Latin American PerspectivesEllner / Book Review

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