Democratic Dreams, Authoritarian Nightmares: The Legacy of the Latin American Participatory Laboratory

All political regimes require legitimacy to endure. In democracies, legitimacy derives not only from elections but also from citizens’ satisfaction and compliance with established rules. Autocracies are often assumed to rely primarily on coercion; yet they, too, depend on sources of legitimacy. Institutions of citizen participation can serve this purpose, while also aiming to improve governance and, in some cases, to generate mechanisms of social control. Although there is an extensive literature on democratic innovations and participatory democracy—and a growing body of work on participatory authoritarianism—there is still no clear set of criteria to identify when a regime can be meaningfully described as “participatory.” Nor is there a consolidated theoretical framework specifying the core characteristics and functions of participatory institutions across regime types. This paper addresses these gaps by proposing a conceptualization of participatory democracy and participatory authoritarianism, alongside a typology of participatory regimes. The analysis is grounded in four emblematic Latin American cases: Brazil and Uruguay as instances of participatory democracy, and Venezuela and Cuba as cases of participatory authoritarianism. The paper reflects on the normative and political legacies of Latin America as a laboratory of participation.