Toward A Model of Democratic Stability: Political Culture in Central America

Abstract

At a recent conference on democratization, one of the Latin Americanists present was overheard saying, "been there, done that." Such comments reflect the views of many Latin Americanists, who, having experienced prior waves of democratization, are perhaps justifiably skeptical about the durability of the current wave. Rather than speaking of long-term trends, we are used to looking at waves of democratization followed by waves of authoritarianism. Latin American democracies grew in number in the early 1940s, declined toward the end of World War II, grew again in the early 1960s and declined thereafter, only to rise again in the 1980s and 1990s A broader, world-wide view of cycles has been provided by Huntington, who has characterized the present upsurge as "democracy's third wave. An even longer-term view is found in the recent work of John Markoff