St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

DOI 10.1007/s12116-016-9216-8

Democracy in the Developing World: Challenges

of Survival and Significance

Kenneth M. Roberts 1

Published online: 3 March 2016

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Abstract The study of political development over the past half century has been
heavily influenced by the ebb and flow of democracy in the global South. The global
experience has demonstrated that the geographic, economic, and cultural range of
democratic regimes is far more expansive than often assumed half a century ago,
forcing major theoretical reassessments of democracy’s political origins and social
correlates. At the same time, the challenges of constructing effective representative
and participatory institutions to stabilize democracy and make it more Bconsequential^
have become increasingly apparent. The tensions between democracy’s rapid spread
and its oftentimes shallow reach have fostered a wide range of experiments with new
representative and participatory channels, creating a fluid democratic landscape in
much of the developing world.

Keywords Political development . Democracy . Party systems . Popular participation

The study of political development over the past half century has been heavily
influenced by the ebb and flow of democracy in the global South. The origins,
evolution, stability, and quality of democratic rule have been central concerns in many
of the field’s most prominent works, and democratic experiments in all the major world
regions during the so-called third wave of democratization (Huntington 1991) have
provided ample raw material to accumulate knowledge and test, refine, or discard
theoretical propositions. Over this time, scholarly thinking about democracy has shifted
in fundamental ways. When Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID)

The author thanks Patrick Heller, Peter Evans, and Barbara Stallings for their insightful comments on earlier
drafts of this paper, as well as the participants in the conference on "Fifty Years of Comparative International
Development: Reflecting on Changes in the Field" at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown
University.

* Kenneth M. Roberts
Kr99@cornell.edu

1
Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49 33

began publishing in 1965—during the early stages of the wave of military coups that
demolished most of Latin America’s mid-twentieth century experiments with democracy—
the dominant modes of theorizing about democracy largely relegated the regime form to
northern European-descendent cultural, economic, and geo-political units. As such, the
ensuing spread of democracy—or something resembling it—to countries and regions that
seemingly offered less hospitable terrain forced scholars to reassess timeworn assumptions
about the causes, consequences, and conditions for democratic rule.
In a recent essay, Philippe Schmitter (2014: 77–78) summarized much of this scholarly
reassessment, claiming that time and events had taught the field that democracy is easier
to establish and sustain than previously thought, but also less consequential in its social
and political effects. With democratic regimes being installed in every major world region,
under a diverse range of cultural traditions and widely varying levels of economic
development and socioeconomic inequality, attempts to identify cultural or structural
preconditions for democracy are readily disconfirmed by a plethora of anomalies and
outliers. Democracy may well have structural and cultural correlates, but these lie in the
domain of probabilistic relationships rather than deterministic conditions. This reassess-
ment is likewise supported by the surprising resilience of third-wave democracies, which
is very much at odds with the initial theorizing about them in the 1980s. Although the
starting point for the vast literature on regime transitions emphasized the tentative and
uncertain character of new democracies (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986), the empirical
record offers remarkably few cases of outright breakdowns or authoritarian reversions in
third-wave democracies (Schmitter 2014: 77–78; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán 2013: 75).
The other side of Schmitter’s paradox, however, is less sanguine for democracy’s
many adherents. The Bdirty secret^ of recent democratization efforts, he says—in
contrast to those in the past—is that they have done little to bring about Bsignificant
changes in power relations, property rights, policy entitlements, economic equality, and
social status.^ 1 Despite meaningful changes in the realm of personal freedoms and
human rights, new democratic regimes have not altered those factors Bthat are most
likely to influence the longer-term distribution of power and influence within the polity^
(Schmitter 2014: 78). Indeed, as Schmitter provocatively asserts, these two different
sides of the democratization equation may not be paradoxical or contradictory at all;
recent democratization efforts have borne fruit and been sustained in large part because
of their inconsequentiality. Rather than threatening power, property, and privilege, they
have accommodated or even protected them, thus removing a Bmajor incentive^ for elite
defection to the defensive mechanisms of authoritarian rule (Schmitter 2014: 78).
The sustainability of shallow and inconsequential democratic rule helps to account
for Dan Slater’s trenchant observation that democracy in the developing world Bis
generally outliving expectations, but not outperforming them^ (Slater 2013: 729).
Shallow democracies may not suffer overt breakdowns or authoritarian reversions,

1
Implicit in Schmitter’s critique is a conceptualization of democracy as a political regime defined in
procedural terms rather than substantive outcomes. Such a conceptual distinction is the norm in empirical
studies of democracy, in part because it makes it possible to analyze—as Schmitter does—whether specified
regime rules, institutions, and procedures actually do have substantive effects in influencing desired outcomes.
I adopt this convention and, following Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992: 43), define democracy
as a regime characterized by Bregular, free and fair elections of representatives with universal and equal
suffrage,^ Bresponsibility of the state apparatus to the elected parliament,^ and Bthe freedoms of expression
and association as well as the protection of individual rights against arbitrary state action.^
34 St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

but they can experience what Schmitter calls Bsymptoms of gradual deterioration^
(Schmitter 2014: 78), and it is hard to tell when, or if, they ever become fully
consolidated. Furthermore, as Slater states (Slater 2013: 730–731), many new democ-
racies have Bcareened^ in an unsettled manner Bbetween populist and oligarchic modes
of politics.^ While avoiding full-fledged authoritarian reversals, they may experience
temporary breakdowns or military interventions and routine transgressions of basic
democratic norms, and they are subject to extra-constitutional and often plebiscitary
institutional overhauls. In some cases, such careening may relocate regimes to the
hybrid domain of competitive authoritarianism, where limited forms of democratic
contestation occur on an uneven playing field that is structured by de facto autocratic
authority (Levitsky and Way 2010). Although scholars disagree as to whether the world
has experienced an Bauthoritarian resurgence^ or Bdemocratic recession^ since the first
decade of the twenty-first century (see, for example, Diamond 2015 and Levitsky and
Way 2015), there seems little doubt that the three-decade-long democratic advance that
began in southern Europe in the mid-1970s has stalled over the past decade.
Nevertheless, these bleak assessments do not fully capture the wide and diverse range
of democratic experiences in the developing world since the late 1970s. While useful for
identifying the limitations and fault lines of real existing democracies, they mask tangible
gains in a number of countries where democratic regimes have not only been established
and sustained, but also spawned new opportunities for popular participation that have
begun to reduce inequalities, undermine traditional forms of clientelistic control, and
whittle away at entrenched privileges. Other strands of scholarship, then, have focused
explicitly on the quality of democratic governance and explored grass-roots efforts to
Bdeepen^ or Bbootstrap^ democracy by opening traditional representative institutions to
new forms of popular participation and empowerment (Baiocchi et al. 2011).
Democracy’s mixed record in the developing world thus calls for a theoretical reassess-
ment of the conditions, correlates, and contingencies of democratic rule. In that spirit, I start
this essay with a critical analysis of alternative theoretical approaches to the socio-political
origins and founding of democratic regimes, giving special attention to explanations
centered on elite conflicts, popular pressures, and international opportunity structures. I then
shift to an examination of democratic institutions and practices, with a focus on institutional
deficits in the domain of political representation. Since these deficits are especially pro-
nounced in the sphere of partisan politics, I highlight the challenges of constructing durable,
socially anchored, and broadly representative party systems in third-wave democracies. I
also assess efforts to overcome these deficits through new forms of popular participation in
decision-making processes at local levels of governance. The prospects for more meaningful
and robust forms of democratic governance in the global South rest heavily on the ability of
popular sectors to strengthen these representational and participatory channels.

Structure, Process, and Agency: Reassessing the Socio-Political Origins

of Democracy

Over the past 50 years, scholarship on democracy and political development has oscillated
between structuralist and political process or agency-centered approaches. Structuralist
approaches vary widely in their identification of the socioeconomic conditions and con-
flicts that are most conducive to democracy, but they share an emphasis on democracy’s
St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49 35

material foundations and develop generalizable theoretical propositions that link regime
outcomes to such structural bases. Political process models, by contrast, are less theoret-
ically neat and tidy, but more easily accommodate a basic empirical reality—namely, that
democratization in the developing world has not followed a singular pathway or model, but
has instead traversed a wide range of developmental sequences, processes, and pathways.
Indeed, political process approaches have typically been developed in critical dialogue
with the nomothetic determinism of their structuralist counterparts. This was readily
apparent in the classic early-third-wave study of regime transitions by O’Donnell and
Schmitter (1986), which made a sharp break with the structuralist logic of earlier work in
the traditions of modernization theory (Lipset 1959), dependency theory (Cardoso and
Faletto 1979), and bureaucratic authoritarianism (O’Donnell 1973; Collier 1979). By
consigning liberal democracy to particular levels, patterns, or stages of capitalist develop-
ment, these earlier traditions were decidedly pessimistic about the prospects for democracy
in developing countries, at least in the near-term. If anything, authoritarian rule was
theoretically overdetermined in the developing world when the third wave got underway
in the mid-1970s, as virtually every autochthonous trait of Btraditional^ societies was seen as
an impediment to democracy (see Remmer 1991: 479). The bourgeoisie, middle classes,
and civil society were too weak; armed forces were too strong; societies were too poor,
unequal, and ethnically divided; and to top it all off, political cultures were understood to be
intrinsically authoritarian (Wiarda 1974). No wonder Huntington (1968) concluded that the
central task of ruling elites was to construct governing institutions that were strong enough to
channel and contain escalating societal demands—the unintended but inevitable byproduct
of economic modernization. Political order, not democracy, was the foremost concern.
In many respects, this fatalism and determinism reflected real-world political trend lines
in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Latin America veered decisively toward authoritarian
rule and the initial promise of decolonization gave way to the sobering reality of civil wars
in Southeast Asia and single-party or strong-man rule in most of Africa and the Middle
East. Nevertheless, even at the height of the authoritarian wave in the early 1970s, outliers
to the dominant trends showed the limits of deterministic approaches. Costa Rica and
Venezuela stabilized relatively new democratic regimes as the rest of Latin America
veered toward authoritarianism and/or civil war, while India—the developing world’s
largest and most important democracy—continued to defy the odds, sustaining democratic
institutions despite very high levels of poverty, caste-based inequalities, and ethnic and
religious heterogeneity (Kohli 2001). As Sakar (2001) demonstrates, the Indian anomaly
could not simply be attributed to the institutional legacies of British colonialism, as Indian
democracy was built upon strong indigenous and nationalist roots that were not readily
accounted for by the dominant theoretical approaches of pre-third-wave scholarship.
If the theoretical fixation on explaining authoritarianism failed to account for these
prominent anomalies, it became even more incongruent with empirical realities as the
third wave of democratization gained momentum and spread from Southern Europe to
Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s—a clear case of historical events racing
ahead of theoretical expectations (Remmer 1991: 480). This disjuncture between extant
theory and empirical reality set the stage for the O’Donnell and Schmitter paradigmatic
shift. Although the intellectual influence of extant theory undoubtedly factored into
their emphasis on the tentativeness and uncertainty of democratic transitions, their work
nonetheless broke with structuralist traditions—including that of O’Donnell himself—
by treating democratization as an agency-centered political process that was relatively
36 St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

autonomous of structural determination (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 4–5). Building

off the theoretical insights of Rustow (1970), O’Donnell and Schmitter conceptualized
democratization as the art of the possible—that is, as a strategic and contingent construc-
tion of rules, procedures, and political pacts to manage socio-political pluralism, regulate
competition, and allow political rivals to co-exist (see also Przeworski 1991: 51–99).
So conceived, democratic transitions had no economic, sociological, or cultural
preconditions. The regime form was not restricted to societies that had undergone
historical patterns of agricultural commercialization and the political ascendance of a
modernizing bourgeoisie chafing at traditional limitations on economic and political
liberties (Moore 1966). Neither did democratization need to await a higher level of
economic development or the construction of a broad cultural consensus or normative
commitment to political liberalism. To the contrary, democracy could emerge through a
strategic equilibrium between rival forces that were unable to impose their preferred
political alternative on all other contending actors. Democracy, so to speak, could even
emerge in societies with a dearth of committed democrats.
The appeal of such a contingent, process-centered approach was perhaps inevitable as
the third wave continued to spread in the late 1980s and 1990s to Eastern Europe, East
Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, all areas that had few, if any, of the preconditions for
democracy as traditionally conceived. In a similar vein, Kohli (2001: 1–2) attributed the
success of India’s pre-third-wave democracy not to socioeconomic determinants, which
were decidedly unfavorable, but to the ways in which Bpower distribution^ was
Bnegotiated and renegotiated^ between state and societal actors. Claiming that India
Bdefies many prevailing theories that stipulate preconditions for democracy,^ Kohli
directed attention to Bleadership strategies, the design of political institutions, and the
political role of diverse social groups^ that struck a Bdelicate balance^ between central-
izing and decentralizing forces, and between elite accommodation and popular inclusion.
Nevertheless, the intrinsic voluntarism of much of the transitology literature, given its
emphasis on highly contingent and largely atheoretical patterns of elite strategic interac-
tion, created a series of theoretical lacunae for explaining the uneven reach, quality, and
performance records of third-wave democratization processes. Beyond the Southern
European and South American cases that inspired the early transitions literature, scholars
working in other developing regions often identified transitional dynamics that did not
conform to those outlined in O’Donnell and Schmitter’s work. In Central America (Wood
2000), Africa (Bratton and Van de Walle 1994: 460–466), and the post-Communist bloc
(Bunce 2003: 171–174), for example, comparative research found that social mobilization
and protest played a more significant role in democratic transitions than O’Donnell and
Schmitter expected, while elite pacts were less central (and, in Eastern Europe, less likely
to produce the sharp break from the past that democratization required).
Furthermore, even if the political process models were right in rejecting the notion of
democratic preconditions, it did not follow that democratization was devoid of societal
correlates that shaped its likelihood, character, and limitations. These correlates became
a renewed focus of scholarly attention as the third wave expanded, stalled, and
careened. Whereas political process models of regime transitions downplayed domestic
socioeconomic conditions and largely ignored the international arena, both domestic
and international structural patterns returned to center stage in the study of political
development as scholars sought to explain the Bextreme variation^ that Slater (2010: 3)
identified as the Boverarching pattern of postcolonial politics.^
St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49 37

On the international front, the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc and the end
of the Cold War eliminated Soviet support for authoritarian alternatives and induced the
United States to adopt a more consistent pro-democratic stance in its spheres of
influence. More favorable international opportunity structures were widely understood
to encourage democratic currents in developing societies and help to compensate for
the weakness of domestic structural conditions for democratic rule (Mainwaring and
Pérez-Liñán 2013; Levitsky and Way 2010). For Levitsky and Way, the withdrawal of
superpower support for authoritarian regimes made it increasingly difficult to sustain
full-fledged patterns of autocratic rule in the post-Cold War era; the strength of Western
political, economic, and cultural linkages and leverage, however, was a decisive factor
in differentiating regime transitions that culminated in democracy from those that got
mired in durable forms of competitive authoritarianism. A substantial body of research
also suggests that regional and international diffusion effects are critical components of
the wave-like character of democratization processes (Brinks and Coppedge 2006;
Coppedge 2012: 303; Bunce and Wolchik 2011: 278–306; Weyland 2014).
Likewise, several different strands of scholarship reexamined domestic conditions—
both structural and institutional—and their impact on the prospects for democracy. One
influential strand emphasized the independent impact of authoritarian political institu-
tions, often reframing the question to ask not what made democratization more likely,
but rather what made authoritarianism more or less resilient, especially in a context of
global democratizing pressures. Pioneering work on different types of authoritarian
institutions by scholars like Geddes (1993: 27–88) and Bratton and Van de Walle
(1997) set the stage for much of this new research, which explored how authoritarian
durability in parts of Africa and the Middle East was related to factors like the party-
mediated cohesion of elite coalitions (Brownlee 2007) and the strength of coercive
institutions (Bellin 2004). Linking institutional and structural dimensions, Pepinsky
(2009) argues that the ability of authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia to withstand
financial crises was dependent on their construction of cohesive socio-political
coalitions, while Slater (2010: 15) sees strong authoritarian states and parties arising
from the Bprotection pacts^ forged by elite groups that are jointly threatened by the
mobilization of lower-class redistributive demands.
Still other work revisited classical structuralist arguments that tried to account for the
widely recognized correlation between democracy and economic development. This
relationship was reinterpreted theoretically by Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, and
Limongi (2000), who challenged conventional assumptions that the rise of democracy
was an endogenous outcome of economic growth and its attendant social changes. For
Przeworski et al., economic development did not make authoritarian regimes more
likely to fall, or democracy more likely to rise; democratization could occur at any level
of economic development. The statistical correlation between democracy and develop-
ment, then, had a different causal logic: simply put, democracies were less likely to
break down at higher levels of economic development. Differential casualty rates,
rather than the odds of democratic transition, were the decisive factor in explaining
why democracy was more likely to be found at higher levels of economic development.
Other scholars, however, continued to explore how different patterns of economic
development and the social, class, and distributive conflicts embedded within them
shaped the prospects for democratization. From a cross-regional, comparative historical
institutionalist perspective, Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992) argued that
38 St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

democratization was endogenous to the process of capitalist development or, more

precisely, the contradictions embedded within that process. Rather than the rising
bourgeoisie of Moore (1966), Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens saw the working
class as the critical class subject behind the rise of democracy, linking the latter to
historical struggles to obtain universal suffrage and citizenship rights that would allow
popular collective subjects to press political claims for the redress of economic
inequalities. So conceived, democratization was a popular conquest—a regime form
predicated on equal rights of citizenship that was at least partially autonomous of
underlying structural inequalities in society.
Starting from very different methodological and theoretical premises, the rational
choice accounts of Boix (2003) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) also treat democ-
racy as a popular conquest—or, more accurately, an institutional compromise— that
emerges from the distributive conflicts between elite and lower-class citizens. Building
off the influential article by Meltzer and Richard (1981) on democracy, the median
voter, and distributive conflict, these works posit that the material interests of popular
majorities in unequal societies create a preference for democracy as a regime type that
promotes limited forms of redistribution while allowing economic elites to avoid the
threat of revolutionary confiscation. Although the formal models of Boix and
Acemoglu and Robinson reach different conclusions as to the level of inequality that
is most conducive to democratization, they concur on the importance of bottom-up
redistributive pressures—and the implicit threat of revolutionary alternatives—in in-
ducing elites to abandon their natural preference for autocratic rule.
More recent scholarship has raised serious questions about the microanalytic
behavioral assumptions embedded in these models, which derive both regime and
distributive preferences from aggregated individual locations in the societal distribution
of income—that is, from structural locations. Indeed, careful empirical work has
challenged the assumption that economic elites have a natural, materially-based
preference for autocratic rule, as well as the assumption that lower classes have the
political will and organizational capacity to mobilize bottom-up pressures for democ-
racy in pursuit of redistributive goals. In a compelling critique, Ansell and Samuels
(2014) differentiate between land and income inequality, and draw from classical liberal
democratic theory to attribute democratization to the rise of a modernizing bourgeoisie
that seeks protection from arbitrary and potentially predatory forms of autocratic rule.
Ansell and Samuels add formal models and rigorous statistical tests to Moore’s basic
insights, and they marshal substantial evidence to show that democracy has been
associated historically with rising inequalities during the process of economic modern-
ization, and with competition between landed and bourgeois elites, rather than
redistributive pressures from below. Indeed, traditions of Bsociocultural deference^
and collective action problems often inhibit lower classes from mobilizing bottom-up
pressure for redistribution and democratization (Ansell and Samuels 2014: 41–42).
This latter point merits elaboration, as a substantial body of literature warns against
facile assumptions that lower classes will translate democratic instruments of majority
rule into popular empowerment and redistributive outcomes. The poor may well be
incorporated into democratic politics through vertical forms of patron-clientelism that
discourage class-based collective action, favor particularistic benefits over program-
matic forms of redistribution, and function Bas mechanisms of class control^ (Kitschelt
et al. 1999: 49; see also Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007 and Stokes et al. 2013). As
St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49 39

Chandra (2007) demonstrates, in multi-ethnic societies such as India, patronage is often

distributed through ethnic networks, encouraging political identification and competi-
tion along ethnic lines of division, rather than the more programmatic or class-based
forms of competition that many structuralist and rational choice models predict. Indeed,
Thachil (2014) pushes the Bpoor voter paradox^ even further in his groundbreaking
study of lower-caste support for the upper-caste Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) in India. As Thachil asserts, poor people often cast votes that appear to
contradict their material interests, supporting parties that champion the economic
interests and cultural values of elite groups in society. Such voting behavior, however,
may not be as irrational as it seems, and it need not be predicated on clientelistic
manipulation or the ability of elitist parties to distract the poor through cultural appeals
to ethnic or religious identities or other types of moral issues. Instead, lower-caste
Hindus voted for the BJP because the party’s affiliated civic networks engaged in the
private (but non-clientelistic) provisioning of local public goods like education and
health care in low-income communities. Such findings clearly indicate how democratic
outcomes are contingent on the strategic behavior and interaction of intermediary
representative institutions; they cannot simply be derived from underlying structural
conditions.
Such contingency also reflects the ability of economic elites to employ myriad forms
of wealth-based political resources, access, and influence to compensate for their small
numbers and bend democratic outcomes to their advantage (Winters 2011; Gilens 2012;
Ford and Pepinsky 2014). Median voter models that assume democratic politics are
intrinsically redistributive fail to recognize that socioeconomic inequalities both reflect
and reproduce political inequalities that are hardly erased by democratic transitions. To
the contrary, such inequalities may operate to distort democratic outcomes in a
systematic manner.
Given these rival theoretical approaches and often conflicting empirical findings, it
is hardly surprising that the most systematic effort to assess cross-regional democrati-
zation experiences in the third wave concludes that there is no singular model or
pathway that leads to (or from) political democracy in developing societies (see
Haggard and Kaufman 2016). According to Haggard and Kaufman (2012: 512),
theoretical models that are based on distributive conflict and derived from the Western
experience Bdo not appear to travel well to the very different international, political, and
socioeconomic conditions that prevailed during the third wave of democratization.^
Echoing earlier findings by Ruth Berins Collier (1999), Haggard and Kaufman (2012,
2016) find that bottom-up redistributive pressures sometimes play a vital role in
processes of democratic transition and breakdown, but in many other cases patterns
of elite competition are more prominent. Confident of their ability to compete in the
democratic arena and influence distributive outcomes, economic elites and their polit-
ical allies may opt for democratization due to intra-elite divisions, distrust of autocratic
rulers who provide no institutionalized channels of policymaking influence, or strategic
efforts to preempt the rise of more popular-based democratization movements.
The findings of Collier and Haggard and Kaufman demonstrate the highly variable
and contingent mapping of distributive conflicts onto democratic institutions, and they
cast doubt on theoretical approaches that essentialize democracy by linking the regime
form to specific class actors or distributive outcomes. In theory, concentrated wealth
and power may be in tension with formal institutions of majority rule—a tension that is
40 St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

woven through the structuralist determinism of the early O’Donnell to the cautious
voluntarism of O’Donnell and Schmitter’s transitions project and the microanalytic
deductivism of Boix, Acemoglu, and Robinson. These tensions, however, take on
myriad forms, and they are readily submerged or even invisible where democratic
institutions reproduce elite power or fragment and demobilize popular constituencies.
Who democracy empowers, therefore, and how consequential it is, are empirical rather
than theoretical questions, and the answers to them are contingent on widely varying
patterns of popular representation and participation. To understand these patterns
requires a shift to the sub-regime level of analysis, where party systems and civil
society organizations are located, in permanent struggles to lend substance to
democracy’s procedural forms. It also requires greater attention to the coupling of
democratization with the parallel processes of market liberalization and globalization in
the waning decades of the twentieth century, as the latter processes transformed civic
associational life and thus altered the material, social, and organizational bases for the
construction of popular subjects. It is in these representational and participatory spheres
where democratic deficits are often most glaring—but also where democracy’s promise
at times begins to show.

Making Democracy Matter: Parties, Representation, and Participation

Theorists of democracy routinely assign a wide range of critical functions to party

organizations. Parties are primary, though hardly exclusive, institutional intermediaries
between society and the state, where they are expected to aggregate, differentiate, and
represent the plurality of societal interests and preferences in the democratic arena. In
contexts of deep social and economic inequalities, parties can be vehicles through
which lower classes mobilize their potential strength in numbers as leverage to
influence democratic outcomes, providing a counterweight to the oligarchic tendencies
of concentrated wealth. They may also offer economic elites institutional protection
from the uncertainties of democratic competition, making them less likely to abandon
democratic arenas when popular majorities begin to stir (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992:
168–169; Gibson 1996).
Classic studies of European politics have long held that the historical structuring of
partisan and electoral competition by class cleavages and their attendant programmatic
alignments exerted a stabilizing effect on national party systems (Lipset and Rokkan
1967; Bartolini and Mair 1990). Recent work on the third wave, however, has argued
that party systems in developing countries are intrinsically weaker; in less industrialized
societies with weaker labor movements, party systems have shallow roots in class
cleavages, and mass party organizations of any sort are less likely to emerge where
modern forms of mass media communication diminish the need for grass-roots party
branches to mobilize voters (Mainwaring and Zoco 2007). In much of the developing
world, party systems are characterized by highly personalistic leadership patterns,
shallow social roots, skeletal organizational patterns, clientelistic rather than program-
matic linkages to voters, and high levels of electoral volatility. Where parties are weak
or in crisis, democracy is more likely to assume the Bdelegative^ properties identified
by O’Donnell (1994), with autocratic and plebiscitary patterns of leadership that are
weakly constrained by institutional checks and balances and only episodically
St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49 41

accountable to an atomized mass electorate. There is little wonder, then, that Hicken
and Kuhonta (2015: 1) characterize parties as Bthe weakest link^ in contemporary
democracies.
Nevertheless, political parties are not uniformly weak and non-institutionalized in
the developing world; strong and electorally stable party organizations and party
systems can be found. Even relatively institutionalized party systems, however, are
often deficient in their representation of the plurality of societal interests. Indeed, they
are often instruments of the oligarchic and populist careening noted by Slater, or
institutional extensions of prior authoritarian regimes. Hicken and Kuhonta (2015:
14), for example, argue that Asia’s three most institutionalized party systems—those
in Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore—carry Bsignificant authoritarian legacies,^ with
dominant parties forged during periods of authoritarian rule that gradually opened up to
meaningful but restricted forms of semi-democratic contestation in the third wave.
Paradoxically, they find, the coercive practices of entrenched hegemonic parties pushed
opposition forces to build Bmore cohesive and disciplined^ party organizations to
contest the limited democratic spaces that were progressively opened. Party system
institutionalization, therefore, is analytically distinct from democracy itself, as it may
well emerge Bfrom the shell of undemocratic politics^ (Hicken and Kuhonta 2015: 16).
And it certainly provides no guarantee that subaltern groups or traditionally excluded
sectors of society will be well-represented; to the contrary, it may reflect the efforts of
dominant elites to limit competition and strengthen organized networks of social
control.
Similarly, in a compelling analysis of the origins and structuring of democratic
competition in Africa, Rachel Beatty Riedl also finds that strong authoritarian incum-
bents bequeathed more institutionalized party systems following regime transitions.
Adopting a critical juncture approach, Riedel (2014: 4–5) argues that dominant author-
itarian parties with secure bases of support among local elites are in a position to
Btightly control the transition process,^ creating Bformal rules of competition in their
perceived favor^ and restricting Bthe entry of new challengers.^ In the process,
however, they also Bcreate a focal point to propel the opposition to coalesce in an
anti-incumbent cleavage, and provide an organizational model that challengers can
emulate.^ The party systems that result are thus more stable and institutionalized, but
also less representative and participatory, highlighting the potential tradeoffs between
different democratic goals. Where incumbent authoritarian elites are weaker and less
able to control the dynamics of political change, on the other hand, Bmore open,
participatory, and transformative transitions^ produce party systems that are broadly
representative, but less institutionalized and accountable to societal preferences.
Although research on Latin America also notes the importance of Bauthoritarian
successor parties^ in some third-wave democracies (Loxton 2015), rarely have they
been able to lock-in their political control of the electorate for extended periods of time.
Indeed, the timing of the region’s democratization wave during the debt crisis of the
1980s weakened traditional party systems in most of the region and paved the way for
an unprecedented opening of the democratic arena to more popular-based parties and
movements by the turn of the century. Although these new popular alternatives were
strikingly diverse in their political and organizational characteristics, most of them
challenged traditional political and economic elites, supported redistributive social and
economic reforms, and opened new channels for popular participation in policymaking
42 St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

arenas. In response, scholars debated whether Latin America had entered a second
historical phase of mass political incorporation (Roberts 2008; Silva and Rossi, Reshaping
the Political Arena in Latin America: From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second
Incorporation, unpublished), following the labor-based populist incorporation of the
mid-twentieth century (Collier and Collier 1991)—a process that was subsequently
reversed by the military coups and authoritarian exclusion of the 1960s and 1970s, and
by patterns of economic crisis, austerity, and structural adjustment that prevented new
democratic regimes from addressing social welfare needs for most of the 1980s and 1990s.
This new phase of mass political incorporation has several important implications
for the study of democracy and political development. First, its social and organiza-
tional bases are dramatically different from those of the labor-based populist incorpo-
ration of the import substitution industrialization era. Labor unions were severely
weakened by the combination of military repression, economic crises, and market
restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s, and the class-based labor and peasant organiza-
tions that were the fulcrums of corporatist patterns of interest representation—as well as
the backbone of traditional populist parties—gave way to more heterogeneous and
pluralistic modes of representation (Roberts 1998; Oxhorn 2011: 51–90). As the
Bunion-party hub^ entered into decline, new, often territorially-based popular subjects
and Bassociational networks^ emerged (Collier and Handlin 2009), including neigh-
borhood or community associations, local networks of unemployed workers, and
indigenous communities that asserted cultural rights in addition to territorial claims to
land, natural resources, and local self-governance (Yashar 2005; Madrid 2012). This
more pluralistic civil society articulated interests and identities based on community,
gender, and ethnicity as well as class, and often guarded its political autonomy as an
antidote to traditional forms of partisan, corporatist, or clientelist control.
Second, the decentralized, communitarian basis of many of these new popular
subjects were conducive to novel experiments in grass-roots democratic participation,
especially where they coincided with—and provided impetus for—institutional reforms
that augmented the role of municipal governments in infrastructure development and the
delivery of social services. In cases like Brazil, urban associational networks played a
central role in Bbootstrapping democracy^ through new participatory budgeting prac-
tices that gave community assemblies deliberative, consultative, and decision-making
roles in the selection of infrastructure and social service projects and the allocation of
public resources (Baiocchi et al. 2011; see also Baiocchi 2003 and Goldfrank 2011).
Likewise, rural indigenous and community-based organizations transformed local gov-
ernance practices in parts of the Andean highlands (Van Cott 2008). The combination of
administrative decentralization and grass-roots participation demonstrated that it was
possible to Bdeepen democracy^ by Bbringing new actors into the demos^ and broad-
ening Bthe range of issues that are subject to democratic authorizations^ (Baiocchi et al.
2011: 103), even in a region with historic traditions of oligarchic domination, hierar-
chical authority, and clientelist control of popular sectors.
Third, these pluralistic and decentralized forms of grass-roots participation created
obvious challenges of aggregating interests and Bscaling up^ political representation to
national-level democratic institutions. Although an emphasis on political autonomy
was integral to much of this new associational life, emerging leftist parties played a
leading role in the creation of institutional channels for grass-roots participation, and
they often forged close ties to the social networks that helped fill and activate these
St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49 43

channels. Indeed, parties like the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil, the Broad Front (FA) in
Uruguay, and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia had deep roots in
social movements and civic associations, and both the PT and the FA used their
experience in municipal administration—and the reputations for innovative and
effective governance this provided—as springboards to national executive office. In
many respects, the unprecedented political shift that produced left-of-center national
governments in a dozen different Latin American countries between 1998 and 2014
really began at a much earlier date at the sub-national level, where leftist parties could
gain control of municipal administrations and implement social policy reforms and
participatory experiments (Weyland et al. 2010; Levitsky and Roberts 2011).
Nevertheless, the partisan configuration of this Bleft turn^ and the role of social
actors within it varied considerably across the region. Although parties like the PT, FA,
and MAS retained their linkages to well-organized popular constituencies, they often
struggled to translate local-level participatory experiences into national-level governing
and policymaking practices, and the electoral and institutional interests of the party
organizations became increasingly autonomous of their social bases (Hunter 2010;
Anria 2013). The Chilean Socialist Party that led three center-left coalition administra-
tions had an even more pronounced professional-electoral orientation, along with a
highly technocratic approach to governance that reflected its relative detachment from
social actors. In still other cases, myriad forms of grass-roots activism failed to
aggregate or scale-up into national-level political alternatives at all, or else relied
heavily on independent personalities or charismatic populist figures to stitch together
politically fragmented mass constituencies in the electoral arena. Such independent,
left-leaning presidents were elected in Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Paraguay with
little in the way of a party organization and relatively weak ties to organized popular
constituencies (initially, at least, in the Venezuelan case).
Latin America’s Bsecond^ historical phase of mass political incorporation, therefore,
offered a very partial response to the region’s widely noted crisis of democratic
representation (Hagopian 1998; Mainwaring et al. 2006). To be sure, it fostered new
experiments in grass-roots participatory democracy, complementing similar such ex-
periments in other parts of the developing world like South Africa and the Indian state
of Kerala (Heller 2001). Likewise, it provided unprecedented access to national
executive office for individuals from outside traditional ruling circles; since 2000, for
example, five countries in the region have elected a woman as president, three have
elected a former leader of a labor union or an indigenous peasant association, and three
have elected a former member of an insurgent revolutionary movement. Where con-
servative political actors oversaw the process of neoliberal structural adjustment during
the economic crises of the 1980s and early 1990s, established parties of the left were
sometimes effective vehicles for dissent from market orthodoxy. In countries like
Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, this helped to align party systems programmatically,
stabilize electoral competition, and set the stage for institutionalized alternations in
power as leftist parties strengthened electorally in the post-adjustment era.
In much of the region, however, the post-adjustment turn to the left occurred outside
and against established party systems, providing graphic evidence of the crisis of
representative institutions. This was especially the case where structural adjustment
had been imposed during severe economic crises by traditional populist or center-left
parties (see Stokes 2001), leaving party systems without a meaningful institutional
44 St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

outlet for dissent from market orthodoxy. Such patterns of programmatic de-alignment
channeled dissent into extra-systemic forms of social and electoral protest (Silva 2009),
leading to presidential resignations or impeachments in Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador,
and Bolivia; partial or complete patterns of party system collapse; and the election of
new populist figures or Bmovement parties^ in the latter three countries that outflanked
traditional party systems on the left (see Morgan 2011; Roberts 2014; Lupu 2016). As
Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira (2012) argue, these new expressions of populism had
contradictory implications for democracy. On the one hand, they enhanced the repre-
sentation of previously excluded or alienated sectors of society, opened new channels
for popular participation, and introduced a wide range of redistributive social and
economic reforms. On the other hand, however, they tended to concentrate power in
the hands of dominant executives and their newly formed ruling parties in ways that
undermined the institutional checks and balances and minority political rights that are
essential for democratic pluralism. In classic Dahlian terms, they enhanced democratic
participation and inclusiveness—Dahl’s horizontal dimension of polyarchy (Dahl 1972:
7)—but, to varying degrees, eroded the vertical dimension of public contestation.
Clearly, then, the construction of strong, inclusive, and pluralistic representative
institutions remains a pressing challenge for new democracies across the developing
world. New forms of popular participation at the grass-roots level may be essential to
deepen and extend democratic practices in different spheres of social relationships, but
they do not substitute for representative institutions that effectively aggregate a plurality
of interests and contest political authority on a larger scale. As Baiocchi, Heller, and
Silva (2011: 104) emphasize in their study of diverse participatory budgeting practices,
the most effective models entail either participatory and delegative features, or Ba
hybrid of direct democracy and representative democracy.^ Indeed, their comparative
analysis of Kerala (India), South Africa, and Brazil suggests that effective participation
requires not only a strong civil society, since Bsocial movements played a critical role in
setting the stage for participatory reforms,^ but also Ban identifiable agent of change,^
or Bleft-of-center programmatic parties^ that Bcreated significant opportunities for
promoting more democratic forms of local government^ (Baiocchi et al. 2011: 148).
So conceived, the political representation in partisan and electoral arenas is a comple-
ment to, rather than a rival to or distortion of, grass-roots participation in civil society.
Although parties of the left have been central agents of the deepest participatory
democratic reforms in the developing world, redistributive social and economic reforms
may be less dependent on partisanship and more contingent on the institutionalization
of democratic competition itself. As Wong (2004) demonstrates, welfare states expand-
ed in countries like Taiwan and South Korea following democratization, as regime
change provided new political space for the advocates of social policy reform and
forced vote-seeking politicians to build broader bases of public support. Even under the
market pressures of globalization—and in the absence of strong leftist parties—elected
rulers adopted social welfare measures to maintain the relatively egalitarian features of
East Asia’s Bnationalist^ variants of capitalist development (Kohli 2009).
Under Latin America’s more dependent, unequal, and Bhierarchical^ (Schneider
2013) forms of capitalism, however, the independent effects of democratization and
partisanship on social policy may be more difficult to sort out. As Huber and Stephens
(2012) argue, the historical development of welfare states in the region was closely tied
to the spread of inclusive mass democracies in the twentieth century, which allowed
St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49 45

reform-minded leftist and populist parties to access power and implement redistributive
policies. Indeed, the generalized strengthening of leftist alternatives during the third
decade of Latin America’s most recent wave of democratization—following structural
adjustment, the defeat of hyperinflationary pressures, and economic stabilization in the
mid-1990s—suggests that the institutionalization of democratic competition in contexts
of severe inequality and porous safety nets is likely to generate significant political
pressure for social protection measures. New leftist governments in the region did adopt
a wide range of redistributive measures, from targeted poverty relief to higher wages
and more universal forms of social citizenship rights to pension and health care systems
(Pribble 2013). Such measures were also adopted by a number of more conservative
governments, however, perhaps reflecting the competitive pressures of the democratic
marketplace (Arretche 2015). As such, the post-2000 decline in Latin America’s Gini
index of income inequality was notable in most of the countries that were governed by
the left, but it was not limited to them. Indeed, it was not clear how much of the
reduction in inequality was attributable to policy initiatives and political factors, as
opposed to market forces and the employment-generating or trickle-down effects of the
global commodity boom (see López-Calva and Lustig 2010; Cornia 2014).

Conclusion

The end of the commodity boom in the second decade of the twenty-first century
undoubtedly narrows the policy space for social reforms and may in fact exacerbate
distributive conflicts that were tempered during a period of relative affluence. If that is
the case, the years ahead could be politically rocky for democracy in the developing
world. Previous experiments with democracy have often foundered on the shoals of
economic hardships and crises, as Drake (1989) suggests for Latin America during the
Great Depression of the 1930s, and as O’Donnell (1973) and Skidmore (1977) found
during periods of inflation-induced stabilization in the early post-war period. If Latin
America escaped this fate during the early stages of the third wave, it was in part
attributable to fortuitous timing; the debt crisis broke out in the early 1980s when
military regimes still ruled over much of the region, and the economic crisis arguably
weakened those regimes and contributed to democratic transitions rather than break-
downs (Remmer 1992–93). Although many of the new democratic regimes proved to
be surprisingly resilient in the face of ongoing economic hardships, including bouts of
hyperinflation, and expectedly capable of imposing politically unpopular adjustment
measures (Remmer 1990), there is little doubt that economic recovery in the 1990s and
commodity-fueled rapid growth after 2003 exerted a stabilizing effect on third-wave
democratic experiments across the developing world.
With the waning of these favorable conditions in the middle of the second decade of
the twenty-first century, new challenges to democratic governance are sure to emerge.
In contexts of economic recession or stagnation, the social welfare gains of recent years
will be difficult to sustain without unleashing distributive conflicts and the political
uncertainties they generate. The relative fragility of representative institutions in much
of the developing world exacerbates these uncertainties, and it complicates efforts to
manage distributive conflicts within the consensus-building policymaking venues of
established democratic regimes (see Flores-Macías 2012). Indeed, it makes it more
46 St Comp Int Dev (2016) 51:32–49

likely that conflicts will trigger the types of populist and oligarchic careening that Slater
identified as the hallmarks of underperforming democracies.
This new Bpolitics of hard times^ (Gourevitch 1986), therefore, will undoubtedly
test some of the salutary, self-reinforcing democratizing effects discovered by authors
like Lindberg (2006) and Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán (2013) in their comprehensive
studies of third-wave democracies in Africa and Latin America, respectively. Accord-
ing to Lindberg, elections and other democratic practices helped to strengthen civil
liberties, stabilize regime institutions, and nourish democratic values in Africa. Democ-
racy, whatever its flaws, and however unfavorable its surrounding conditions, can beget
more democracy. Similarly, Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán attribute the durability of the
third wave in Latin America to the progressive consolidation of democratic norms and
preferences among major political actors and organizations, a process that was encour-
aged by ideological depolarization and a supportive international environment.
Even if some of these salutary processes are potentially reversible in periods of
economic hardship and distributive conflict, they have nonetheless established a more
secure foundation for continued democratic governance than the developing world has
ever seen before. Indeed, the routinization of democratic practices—in particular, the
practice of relying on contested elections as the singular legitimate means for accessing
public office—has created initial openings for deeper and more Bconsequential^ forms
of popular sovereignty, to return to Schmitter’s original paradox. Representational and
participatory deficits that diminish democracy’s reach beyond the electoral sphere are
real and widespread, and they are resistant to quick institutional fixes. Nevertheless, as
this essay shows, painstaking work by social and political activists to address such
deficits is underway in much of the developing world, and the fruits of their labors can
be seen in new participatory forums, representative bodies, and channels for institu-
tional accountability. Unlike 50 years ago, when scholarly debate centered on the
viability and preconditions for democracy in the developing world, the debate has
shifted decisively toward the study of its quality and significance. That shift is a
veritable intellectual sea change, and it is indicative of how quickly and profoundly
the political landscape of the global South has been transformed.

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Kenneth M. Roberts is Professor of Government at Cornell University, with a specialization in comparative

and Latin American politics. He is the author of Changing Course: Party Systems in Latin America’s
Neoliberal Liberal Era (Cambridge University Press), as well as Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left
and Social Movements in Chile and Peru.