Provides a detailed treatment of an important topic that has received no scholarly attention: the surprising transformation of indigenous peoples' movements into viable political parties in the 1990s ...in four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and their failure to succeed in two others (Argentina, Peru). The parties studied are crucial components of major trends in the region. By providing to voters clear programs for governing, and reaching out in particular to under-represented social groups, they have enhanced the quality of democracy and representative government. Based on extensive original research and detailed historical case studies, the book links historical institutional analysis and social movement theory to a study of the political systems in which the new ethnic cleavages emerged. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications for democracy of the emergence of this phenomenon in the context of declining public support for parties.
After a decade in local office, are indigenous peoples' governments in the Andes fulfilling their promise to provide a more participatory, accountable, and deliberative form of democracy? Using ...current debates in democratic theory as a framework, Donna Lee Van Cott examines 10 examples of institutional innovation by indigenous party-controlled municipalities in Bolivia and Ecuador. In contrast to studies emphasizing the role of individuals and civil society, the findings underscore the contributions of leadership and political parties to promoting participation and deliberation - even at the local level. Democratic quality is more likely to improve where local actors initiate and design institutions. Van Cott concludes that indigenous parties' innovations have improved democratic quality in some respects, but that authoritarian tendencies endemic to Andean cultures and political organizations have limited their positive impact.
Political science research on indigenous peoples' politics in Latin America is methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary. It has produced significant insights about citizenship, reform of the ...state, and the causes and consequences of the emergence and success of identity-based social movements and political parties. In order to expand and deepen our knowledge, future research should pursue three goals. First, scholars should explore a wider selection of cases, including countries where indigenous populations are small and where dramatic events have not occurred, in order to better explain more common types of indigenous political mobilization in the region. Second, they should better connect the study of indigenous politics to that of Afro-descendent movements and gender and, thus, expand our understanding of racial and gender politics. Third, they should be more critical of the democratic performance of indigenous organizations and politicians, especially when they hold public office.
One of the most significant and unexpected developments in Latin America during the past 10 years is the emergence of parties organized around indigenous identity. The authors use subnational data ...from six South American countries (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela) to examine the factors responsible for the variation in the emergence and performance of indigenous peoples’ political parties in the region. Using a pooled cross-sectional twin snapshot analysis, the authors find that although indigenous party formation is the result of favorable institutional, demographic, and political conditions, such as permissive electoral rules, optimal indigenous population size, and a regional diffusion effect with respect to indigenous activism, enhanced electoral performance of these parties is determined by structural and political conditions, including higher rates of poverty and less salient class-based identities, in addition to the favorable conditions mentioned above.
Should these regimes generate levels of corruption, economic mismanagement, or human rights violations markedly higher than their predecessors, we are likely to see a backlash against indigenous ...movements, as urban and middleclass voters choose security over social justice. Only where all three forces are relatively balanced and equally committed to the rule of law, accountable governance, and the protection of universal individual human rights and collective rights for distinct cultural groups, will we see the most desirable outcome: the multicultural democratic state.
This paper demonstrates that in Latin America a significant portion of the increased legislative party system fragmentation since the 1980s is explained by the recent political incorporation of ...ethnic populations. Until now, scholars have likely not identified this relationship because they have not used the nuanced measures of ethnic fractionalization that account for internal diversity of indigenous populations and race, and because they have not focused on the time period when ethnic peoples were politically incorporated. In addition to demonstrating this relationship statistically, we use two case studies from Bolivia and Ecuador to illustrate how in recent years the dynamic relationship between ethnic groups and political parties in Latin American legislatures has changed and resulted in the statistical association between ethnic fractionalization and party system fragmentation that we observe. /// Este trabajo demuestra que en América Latina, una porción significativa del incremento en el nivel de fragmentación del sistema de partidos legislativo a partir de la década del ochenta se explica por la reciente incorporación polótica de poblaciones étnicas. Hasta el momento, los académicos tienden a no identificar esta relación porque no han utilizado las mediciones de fragmentación étnica dentro de las diversas poblaciones indígenas y raciales, y porque no se han concentrado en el período en el cual las poblaciones étnicas fueron incorporadas políticamente. Además de demostrar esta relación estadísticamente, utlizamos los estudios de caso de Bolivia y Ecuador para ilustrar cómo la relación dinámica entre los grupos étnicos y los partidos políticos en las legislaturas de América Latina ha cambiado en los años recientes, resultando en la asociación estadística observable entre fraccionamiento étnico y fragmentación del sistema de partidos.
In Bolivia's 2002 national elections indigenous-movement-based political parties combined to capture 27 per cent of the vote, far surpassing their previous performance and constituting a major ...improvement in the representation of the country's excluded indigenous majority. Using a social movement theory framework, I attribute this result to five interacting factors: institutional changes that opened the system; the collapse of two competitive parties; the consolidation of indigenous peoples' social movement organisations; the unpopularity of the Banzer-Quiroga government and the intense anti-government mobilisations it provoked in 2000; and the ability of the indigenous parties to capitalise on growing nationalist, anti-US public sentiment.
The central question of this article is why indigenous social movements formed electorally viable political parties in Latin America in the 1990s. This development represents a new phenomenon in ...Latin America, where ethnic parties have been both rare and unpopular among voters. Institutional reforms in six South American countries are examined to see if the creation and success of these parties can be correlated with changes in electoral systems, political party registration requirements, or the administrative structure of the state. The study concludes that institutional change is likely to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence and electoral viability of ethnic parties.
Through a systematic examination of 9 cases, factors that enabled indigenous movements in five Latin American countries to secure formal recognition of politico-territorial autonomy regimes are ...examined. All 9 cases occurred within the framework of a larger regime bargain - either 1. peace talks intended to end armed struggle when the regime faced a serious challenge to maintain political order or territorial control, or 2. a severe crisis of legitimacy and governability that forced political elites to renegotiate fundamental regime structures via the process of constitutional reform. In the five successful cases, changes in the political opportunity structure occurred that favored indigenous autonomy claimants. These changes were the opening of access to decision-making spheres and the emergence of an influential ally.
The political mobilization of indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, and oppressed majorities has presented challenges to democratizing countries. Although, in other regions of the world, this has ...fostered anti-democratic tendencies, in Latin America, on balance, it has improved the quality of democracy by placing new issues and values (justice, equality, tolerance of difference) on the political agenda and by presenting a model of policy-making in which citizens have a central role. Indigenous movements have forced governments to take into account the impact of public policy on society's most vulnerable. They have been less effective in achieving the implementation of existing rights and in facilitating the design and adoption of alternative forms of inter-ethnic governance. Using Latin America as a primary reference point, this inquiry analyzes the design and implementation of ethnically sensitive democratic institutions in ethnically diverse and divided societies, particularly in reference to indigenous and Afro-descendant populations.
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