Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2003 by Nylen, William M

Book Reviews

Avritzer, Leonardo. Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Tables, notes, bibliography, index, 202 pp.; hardcover $55, paperback $18.95.

Leonardo Avritzer has written the most ambitious and important contribution to the literature on democratization in Latin America that this reviewer has read in the last several years. This is not a book for the casual reader. Neither is it likely to be accessable to students without a solid background in political science or, at the very least, a strong desire to engage themselves in many of the finer details and debates of contemporary democratic theory and practice. Those who decide to take the plunge, however, will be rewarded by this fine example of social science scholarship and evenhanded normative commitment to democratic ideals. Indeed, it is just this mixture of empirical and normative theory that makes this book exemplary of the best of contemporary political science writing.

The book begins with an exhaustive review and critique of several theoretical frameworks purporting to shed light on contemporary processes of democratization. Clearly, the principal targets of Avritzer's critique are mainstream Western political science "democratic elitism" (for example, Weber, Schumpeter, Downs, Dahl, O'Donnell and Schmitter, Linz and Stepan) and "the dualist tradition" of the associated theories of modernization and dependency. Avritzer then draws on select components of Jurgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere, social movements theory, and contemporary cultural studies of "cultural hybridism" (such as Melucci, Garcia Canclini, and Da Matta) to argue that the almost exclusive focus of mainstream theories on elite politics and on elite culture carries with it an analytical and ultimately normative bias against nonelite politics and nonelite culture and, more important, the positive effects that these can and do (and should) have on democratization in Latin America. For it is at the level of the essentially nonelite public sphere-social movements, rights-based protests, nongovernment organizations, and the like-that Latin America has seen its most strikingly democratic transformations relative to past processes of democratization. In the elite-dominated political sphere of elections, political parties, and state bureaucracies, meanwhile, Latin American democracies have become increasingly identified with corruption, clientelism, an overly powerful executive, and sociopolitical inequality.

In contrast to the inherent biases of mainstream theory, Avritzer argues that the principal political problem in Latin America is not an antidemocratic political culture or antidemocratic nonelite political movements; neither is it necessarily the institutional design of the elite-- dominated political sphere, Instead, the problem is the lack of effective institutional linkages between the public sphere and its essentially democratic "public culture," and the political sphere and its correspondingly antidemocratic "political culure." Avritzer labels such linkages "participatory publics" and argues that they could and should serve to harness and utilize the public sphere or culture to rein in and transform the political sphere or culture.

Having identified and explained this fundamental political and cultural divide, Avritzer goes on to illustrate it empirically in three case studies of cultural change and democratic activism in the public sphere in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. More important, for the latter two cases, he demonstrates precisely how that divide has been effectively bridged to positive effect.

The Argentine case centers on the politicization of the issue of human rights abuses in the years following the collapse of the military-- led authoritarian regime in 1982. Avritzer shows how political society elites were able to sidetrack, then essentially ignore, public sphere activity precisely because the political parties and the state were not accountable to these groups and individuals except by way of elections-a political process they effectively controlled, at least insofar as determining what would ultimately be on or off the political agenda.

The Brazilian case is the well-known participatory budget (PB) process conducted in most cities governed by the Workers' Party (PT). Avritzer discusses PBs implemented in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, identifying them as perfect examples of the necessary institutional link of "participatory publics" between the public and political spheres. The same argument emerges from the Mexican case, which examines the process whereby a series of protests in the 1980s, emerging from a string of fraudulent elections, became channeled into a nonpartisan citizens' organization called the Civic Alliance (Alianza Civica) and ultimately led, via a process Avritzer labels ciudanizacion (literally, citizenization), to the formation of an independent Federal Electoral Institute (Instituto Federal Electoral, IFE) charged with supervising Mexico's electoral process.