Abstract

This paper analyzes the surprising expansion of arenas of concertation in Latin America after the political and economic liberal reforms. Expected not only to base new democratic regimes, in addition of reducing the size and role of the State in economic matters, these reforms also provoked a pulverization of a myriad of labor and capital corporatist organizations, many of which built and/or sustained by privileged access to the State. However, this seems not to be the end of the history, given that a number of new autonomous societal tripartite arenas have been built in many countries of the region, including at subnational level, alongside with traditional democratic institutions. Therefore, after assessing these unfoldings, this paper will discuss a number of tentative explanatory hypotheses for this issue, hardly considered in the studies about the region democratization, that tend to emphasize a couple of “democratic institutional deficits” in the Latin American countries, addressing these nations through a single viewpoint, like “incomplete, partial, hollow, or shallow” democracies.