4
The Political Returns of Democratic Governance
out. Elected leaders tend to be more attentive. The region’s experience
also draws attention to the uneasy interaction between democratic
governance and development – economic or political. The conventional
wisdom begins with the failings of public governance as the root causes
for ensuing economic and political crises – for example, Alan Garcia’s
staggering 2,000,000 percent cumulative five-year inflation increase in
Peru in the early 1990’s which destroyed individual citizen livelihood.
The corruptive excesses of the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional
(PRI)
governments in Mexico by the late 1970s or Peronism in Argentina
during an approximately similar period underscore experiences where
government in the end did not deliver. None of these experiences were
very democratic either.
In contrast, the democratic wave that accompanied free market reforms
in the 1990s delivered a continuum of good governance, also generally
more democratic, operating in tandem with trends toward growth in
income and welfare – in other words, development. This generated a
substantial boost in democratic institutions gaining local ownership of
the development process, leading to economic growth. A significant
indicator was the rise of civil society and demands for more responsive
government. Multi-party democracy was institutionalized in some of
the larger countries – Chile, Brazil, Mexico – but has not responded as
well elsewhere – Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Central America. But
the vibrancy of civil society in its many forms and particularly at the
local level has had two repercussions.
First, in cases where there were democratic reversals – Venezuela, Peru,
Ecuador, Guatemala – or simply weak governance – Bolivia (1997 -
2006) – civil society enabled a political process to avoid the normal
patterns of the past, notably military interventions. It also temporarily
supplemented where the instruments of democracy – political parties
in particular – essentially failed. This has all been far from perfect,
Venezuela being a highly visible case in point. Second, what was perhaps
prematurely dubbed “Pink Tide,” framed by the electoral successes of
left-of-center governments over the past decade, has largely avoided
the excesses of populism and instead highlighted the fundamentals of
