Donna Lee Van Cott examines institutional innovation by indigenous party-controlled municipalities in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Using a Colombian case study, this book assesses the potential for court rulings to enact real-life social change.

Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource redistribution. Tracing the movement along these dimensions since the 1990s, the editors argue that the endurance of democratic politics, combined with longstanding social inequalities, create the impetus for inclusionary reforms. Diverse chapters explore how factors such as the role of partisanship and electoral clientelism, constitutional design, state capacity, social protest, populism, commodity rents, international diffusion, and historical legacies encouraged or inhibited inclusionary reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring original empirical evidence and a strong theoretical framework, the book considers cross-national variation, delves into the surprising paradoxes of inclusion, and identifies the obstacles hindering further fundamental change.

In Social Movements and Radical Populism in the Andes: Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, Jennifer N. Collins examines why the new left took the form of radical populism in Ecuador and Bolivia and how social movements were impacted by this development. Using a Laclauian approach, Collins argues that anti-neoliberal social movements provided the groundwork for populist identity formation. This book also offers a nuanced and insightful explanation for the decline of Ecuador's indigenous movement, examining the role of state resurgence in the fragmentation of social movements. Collins’s analysis provides key insights into the life cycles of social movements in the Andes from development to decline.

"Reconstructs the experience of participatory urban governance in three impoverished communities in Montevideo, Uruguay. Offers an account of various experiences and explains successes and failures in reference to the distinct traditions and resources found in each community"--Provided by publisher.

The essays in this book analyze and explain the crisis of democratic representation in five Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In this region, disaffection with democracy, political parties, and legislatures has spread to an alarming degree. Many presidents have been forced from office, and many traditional parties have fallen by the wayside. These five countries have the potential to be negative examples in a region that has historically had strong demonstration and diffusion effects in terms of regime changes. "The Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes" addresses an important question for Latin America as well as other parts of the world: Why does representation sometimes fail to work?

This authoritative book provides a deeply informed overview of contemporary Indigenous movements in Ecuador. Leading scholar Marc Becker traces the growing influence of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) in the wake of a 1990 uprising, the launch of a new political movement called Pachakutik in 1995, and the election of Rafael Correa in 2006. Even though CONAIE, Pachakutik, and Correa shared similar concerns for social justice, they soon came into conflict with each other. Becker examines the competing strategies and philosophies that emerge when social movements and political parties embrace comparable visions but follow different paths to realize their objectives. In exploring the multiple and conflictive strategies that Indigenous movements have followed over the past twenty years, he definitively charts the trajectory of one of the Americas' most powerful and best organized social movements.

In Coca Yes, Cocaine No Thomas Grisaffi traces the political ascent and transformation of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) from an agricultural union of coca growers into Bolivia's ruling party. When Evo Morales—leader of the MAS—became Bolivia's president in 2006, coca growers celebrated his election and the possibility of scaling up their form of grassroots democracy to the national level. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with coca union leaders, peasant farmers, drug traffickers, and politicians, Grisaffi outlines the tension that Morales faced between the realities of international politics and his constituents, who, even if their coca is grown for ritual or medicinal purposes, are implicated in the cocaine trade and criminalized under the U.S.-led drug war. Grisaffi shows how Morales's failure to meet his constituents' demands demonstrates that the full realization of alternative democratic models at the local or national level is constrained or enabled by global political and economic circumstances.

While the process of democratization is nowadays an established scholarship, the reverse process of de-democratization has generated less attention even when the regression or even breakdown of democracy occurred on a regular basis over past decades. This book investigates both the different combination of explanatory factors triggering the transition from democratic rule as well as the role of the actors’ involved in the process. It aims to integrate different levels of analysis and explanatory factors through a comparative analysis of the phenomenon since the beginning of the third wave of democratization. As such, it addresses the existing divide between the approaches focused on the conditions and those focused on the processes of change, using a mixed-method research design. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, democracy, democratization and de-democratization, political theory, and comparative political institutions.