The Means and Ends of Democracy in Latin America

Although democratic innovations are usually defined as institutional designs aiming at increasing citizen participation, in Latin America the latter seem to be mostly a means to achieve other ends. More than allowing citizens to have a broader role in the political process, participatory experiments have been allowing governments to pursue social ends, in particular redistributive and recognition policies. In addition to social inclusion, participatory innovations have been used as means to improve representative institutions and match democratic deficits by enhancing responsiveness and accountability. This paper engages with those claims drawing on a dataset of over a hundred cases of democratic innovations spread over almost all countries of Latin America. It intends to show how citizen participation can be designed and combined in various ways (representation, participation, deliberation, e-democracy and direct democracy) seeking to achieve alternate outcomes (recognition, redistribution, responsiveness accountability). Whether those outcomes are indeed achieved and lead to an improvement of the quality of democracy is an empirical question that this paper aims to address by using qualitative comparative analysis and unfolding the concept of pragmatic democracy.