Background on the Fragility of Latin American Democracies in the 21st Century: The Pattern of Discordant Political Inst

Abstract

This article is inspired by my insatisfaction with the Authoritarianism-Democracy dichotomies developed by political scientists in order to understand the nature of post-oligarchic political regimes in Latin America. I attempt to further develop the metaphor of “fuzzy sets” proposed by Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos. In pursuing that endeavor, and inspired by Daniel Brumberg´s concept of “dissonant institutionalization,” I argue that it could be useful for a more nuanced understanding of those political regimes emerging from the transitions to democracy of the 1980s. I argue that the new democracies have not only to deal with the reversal of authoritarian legacies. They also had to rebuild social and political institutions and scripts that had collapsed as a result of the demise of dissonant institutionalization.