Convocatoria RELASP-N.10
On the risky restructuring of politics
Francisco Gutierrez Sanin
M. Hermínia Tavares de Almeida
Juan Russo
In contrast to what happened a few decades ago, Latin American politics is undergoing a profound (and long-term) restructuring of politics. Centrifugal forces prevail in the spaces that used to unite. Fragmentation of parties and competitive spaces, the proliferation of personalist parties, the emergence of antagonistic leaders, and the weakening of control institutions are some of the symptoms of a restructuring that brings severe risks of political hybridity, if not of regression towards authoritarianism. On the one hand, changes at the level of the State as a central actor of consensus and in social order and integration and, on the other, changes at the level of civil society, which is experiencing difficulties in its incorporation into channels of political representation, lead to the generation of new characteristics of the region’s political orders. The changes in the role of the State as the central articulator of welfare policies and as the axis of the necessary synthesis of social life (Lechner dixit) are not unconnected to the loss of prestige of parliamentary institutions and the loss of relevance of political parties. As a result of all this, the following aspects have been accentuated: (a) the fragility of viable government coalitions; (b) the inability of politics to propose credible solutions to problems perceived as important; (c) the relative instability of electoral competition configurations; and (d) the difficulties in resolving conflicts without resorting to violence. It is also important to consider how the above-mentioned phenomena are shaped by the transformations of the global scenario in which the disappearance of the old blocs and the generation of new alignments impact the configuration of national spaces in new ways.
RELASP invites scholars of politics, society, and history to present papers of both theoretical and empirical nature (case studies and comparisons) to analyze relevant dimensions of current political changes.
