Democratic Innovations and the Consolidation of Democracy in Latin America. A Comparative Analytical Framework and Empirical Application to Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil

Whereas in Europe the concerns of politics and academics alike center on the crisis of (established) representative democracies, in Latin America the „democratic malaise“ (Newton/Geissel 2012) can still be seen as a phenomenon of another kind: it is the consolidation of democracy that has not yet been fully completed. Several countries are still characterised by solid informal political institutions (Levitsky 2012) and intermediary organisations are unstable (e.g. Luna/Vergara 2016). Interestingly, despite these flaws Latin America is also one of the most topical regions when it comes to real-world practices of democratic innovations that aim to create new links between citizens and decisions, for instance, referendums, public consultations and citizen assemblies (Pogrebinschi 2017). The paper seeks to deepen our understanding of these parallel phenomena and sets out to answer the following research question: How can participatory innovations contribute to the consolidation of Latin America’s democracies? The paper pursues two aims. First, we develop an analytical framework for cross-nationally evaluating the effects of three types of democratic innovations on the consolidation of democracy: plebiscitary elements, instruments of deliberative democracy and citizen assemblies. We seek to disentangle the mechanisms through which these instruments can take effect on the core elements of the consolidation of democracy, particularly those that have been identified in Merkel’s (2010) multilevel model: What effects do democratic innovations in Latin America have on the meso-level of intermediary organisations? How can „informal veto-actors“ (Ibid., 123) be better controlled? And do the new instruments increase citizens‘ trust in democracy on the micro-level (see Geissel et al. 2014)? Second, we present a first empirical application to assess the viability of the framework by reference to countries that are typical for these three variants of democratic innovations in the region: Ecuador (referendums), Colombia (public consultations) and Brazil (citizen assemblies).