Democratic Innovations and Populism in Latin America: Participation, Contestation, and Latinos In-Between

On the one hand, recent events like Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election or the latest Brazilian general election have captured the attention of scholars, journalists and citizens to the concept populism, and the contemporary significance of citizen participation in modern liberal democracies. On the other hand, while researching the dilution of modern liberal democracies, and the erosion of democratic institutions, academics have theorized and mapped democratic innovations (DIs) that enhance citizen participation in different decision-making processes, and that improve the quality of democracy. In the same vein, scholars have as well hypothesized about the effects of populism and DIs on the quality of democracy. Concerning populism, scholarship has suggested positive and negative effects on the quality of democracy. On the contrary, research on DIs has apparently only theorized their corrective effects and not their threats. However, research on DIs seems to be academically ahead of the academic work on populism because the former has documented systematically diverse DIs around the globe in different database projects, highlighting their importance in enhancing citizen participation in modern liberal democracies, improving the quality of democracy, and getting closer to the ideals of deliberative democracy. However, both academic areas would benefit from more academic works conceiving both theoretically and empirically-quantitatively about the causes of both. Moreover, this work considers DIs and populism as two different answers to the so-called erosion of modern liberal democracies, yet, it does not share with other academic works the idea that populism might have positive effects on the quality of democracy. Drawing on the database LATINNO, a collection of DIs in Latin America, this research aims, first, through a quantitative analysis to explain the variation of DIs in 18 Latin American countries between 1918 and 2018 by attending to its causes, and second, profiting from the mapped DIs along time, this work targets to relate DIs, populism, and deliberation in Latin America.