Democracy on the Ground

Is democracy possible only when it is safe for elites? Latin American history seems to suggest so. Right-wing forces have repeatedly deposed elected governments that challenged the rich and accepted democracy only after the defanging of the Left and widespread market reform. Latin America’s recent “left turn” raised the question anew: how would the Right react if democracy threatened elite interests?This book examines the complex relationship of the Left, the Right, and democracy through the lens of local politics in Venezuela and Bolivia. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, Gabriel Hetland compares attempts at participatory reform in cities governed by the Left and Right in each country. He finds that such measures were more successful in Venezuela than Bolivia regardless of which type of party held office, though existing research suggests that deepening democracy is much more likely under a left party. Hetland accounts for these findings by arguing that Venezuela’s ruling party achieved hegemony—presenting its ideas as the ideas of all—while Bolivia’s ruling party did not. The Venezuelan Right was compelled to act on the Left’s political terrain; this pushed it to implement participatory reform in an unexpectedly robust way. In Bolivia, demobilization of popular movements led to an inhospitable environment for local democratic deepening under any party.Democracy on the Ground shows that, just as right-wing hegemony can reshape the Left, leftist hegemony can reshape the Right. Offering new perspectives on participation, populism, and Latin American politics, this book challenges widespread ideas about the constraints on democracy.

A much-needed grass-roots study of two 'populist' experiments in Venezuela and Bolivia. Gabriel Hetland is an astute observer of Latin American politics and this insightful, thoughtful book goes beyond the polemics and cliches to consider what democracy means to people whose opinions are rarely consulted. Indispensable., Hetland masterfully portrays the complexity of implementing democracy on the grass-roots level in Latin America., In this important book, Gabriel Hetland brings his illuminating fieldwork in Venezuela and Bolivia to make a compelling and original argument about how the nature of national political systems can shape the possibility for participatory action on the ground., Democracy on the Ground explores an interesting puzzle: why did political elites embrace participatory democracy in some Latin American cities and not others? This puzzle and Hetland’s findings are important to many debates about democracy, political elites, political parties, and participatory governance. His extensive fieldwork will be of great value to scholars and policy makers who want to better understand the political dynamics in this region

Gabriel Hetland is assistant professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York.