9UNP1197SD_Anne_Hamilton

- I am Kari Borne. I'm from the Office of Continuing Education at UW Whitewater, and we sponsor the lecture series here at Fairhaven each fall and each spring. I'll go ahead and introduce today's speaker. Anne Hamilton is the coordinator of the International Studies Program at UW Whitewater and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science. Before earning her PhD from UW Madison, she worked in the United Nations 
Secretariat and as a US Foreign Service officer. Her first assignment was in Buenos Aires, just as the Dirty War was coming to an end. In 2007, she participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in Argentina titled "Jewish Buenos Aires." And in 2009, she spent three weeks in Peru working with two UW Whitewater undergraduates on research on the foreign policy of South American states. She has also led two travel study courses to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2010 and 12, and at UW Whitewater she teaches an upper level political science course entitled Politics and Government of Latin America. Dr. 

Hamilton's lecture today is titled "The Perpetual Crisis of Democracy in Latin America." Welcome, Dr. Anne Hamilton.

- Thank you. 
(applause)

Good afternoon, can you hear me?

- [Audience] Yeah.

- Great, that's the first test. 

I'm really glad to be here today talking about a topic that I find really fascinating. In part, I didn't include all of the things related to Latin America in the bio but I... When I was a child, my family moved to Mexico City. My dad worked for a company and named Norton Abrasives, and he was asked to set up a plant in Puebla, Mexico. So, at age eight, I ended up in Mexico City and started to learn Spanish, and that began my lifelong interest in Latin America. Many years later, I found myself in Buenos Aires not only at the end of the Dirty War but right at the end of the Falklands War, I was assigned there, or Falklands/Malvinas War, I was assigned, it was my first post in the foreign service, and I was assigned there as a result of the war because you may recall that the embassy was evacuated at the beginning when the British invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982. Those 6,000 sheep farmers who lived down there were going to be protected by the British, and the United States offered to be a mediator in the conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom. But then, when push came to shove, we decided to back the United Kingdom. So the Argentines felt very betrayed. The United States government decided that it wasn't a good thing to keep a lot of the staff at the embassy when the war started, so they evacuated the embassy. 

And this was pretty much the time that I started the foreign service and as a result, there were new postings in Buenos Aires, and anybody who spoke Spanish was going, and going pretty quickly. It turned out to be a fascinating time in Buenos Aires because right after the defeat in the Malvinas War, the Argentine military government announced that it would leave power and that it would make a transition to democracy. It set up-- it allowed some time for parties to form, or reform in the case of the Peronist and radical party, and that they would have an election. And I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in that election in the sense that each of us, as junior foreign service officers, who was the group down there, had to follow a candidate and interview the candidate, interview people from his party, and write up the analysis for the embassy. And then, the second thing that I was really fortunate with was that the vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush, was sent to Buenos Aires to attend the inauguration. And the way these things are done a little bit oddly at times. I had gone to Smith College. Barbara Bush went to Smith College. So they decided that I would be the perfect person to accompany Barbara Bush everywhere, which meant that I was one of the three people at the embassy who got to actually go to the inauguration, go to all of the events. And it was just a really fascinating experience to be involved in that. 

And so I have a broad interest in Latin America. My passion has been my experiences both in Mexico and Argentina, and also all of the human rights implications that have followed the various-- the atrocities that were committed by the militaries that were in so many governments down there. So I also teach a seminar on human rights, and I'm very interested in how all of those, the legacies of these periods, are playing themselves out in these countries. So that's just adding a little bit to the introduction and wanting to let you know where I'm coming from in terms of what my sort of expertise is because Latin America has a lot of countries, and I know more about some places than others. And I just wanted to alert you to that fact. Can you hear me? Okay, good. Okay. When I was thinking about this talk... Whoops, next.

I wanted to start with the title of this talk comes from a speech by a famous Argentine political scientist. His name is up here. His name was Guillermo O'Donnell. Unfortunately, he died in the past few years. And he spent much of his professional career teaching at Notre Dame in the United States. And he contributed a lot to various debates about democracy, not just in Latin America but also in Europe. And he started to, early on, to write about the effects of industrialization on states that were dominated by militaries and how, he called it bureaucratic authoritarianism. This was one of his contributions to explain why, in countries like Argentina that were industrializing, they didn't become democratic, instead they became military. And it had to do with a whole series of issues that he discussed. So he has a long career covering a number of different issues, but he's most known for his theories of democratization, and particularly transitions from authoritarian regimes of which we have many in Latin America. 

In 2006, he was being awarded a lifetime achievement award by the International Political Science Association, and in his acceptance speech, he talked about, in fact he titled the speech "The Perpetual Crises of Democracy." It's a short speech. It's really, really pithy, and that's why I borrowed the title because I think that he does a really wonderful job of summarizing some of the main issues. So, in this talk, I'm going to summarize his argument, and since he wrote it in 2006 and since a lot has happened in Latin America since then, what I'm going to do is draw on some recent material that covers the whole continent after that and ask if the conclusions that he drew at that time are still relevant. So I'm drawing heavily on Guillermo O'Donnell in this talk. He also draws on a lot of other theorists as well, so it's part of a larger debate. In his acceptance speech, he asks the question-- I mean he titled it The Perpetual Crises of Democracy-- but he asked the question, is democracy in crisis? And, of course, he answers yes. But before he can answer yes, he has to define democracy. I'm wondering, has every single speaker so far given you a definition of democracy?

- [Crowd] No.

- Oh wow. 
(laughing)

 I thought I'm just going to be adding to the confusion here because there's so many debates amongst political scientists about what are the preconditions for democracy. How do you know a democracy when you see it? What do you have to tick off? And he draws heavily in his definition of democracy on a political scientist from Yale named Robert Dahl, you may have heard of, and who-- he listed a number of elements that he said were requirements for democracy, including, first most obvious one, elections that reasonably free, fair, and at regular intervals, because one election a democracy does not make, obviously. And open to most adults. 

Also, these elections need to be decisive in the sense that the people who are elected, that the results are accepted by the opposition and that those who are elected are allowed to serve out their terms borrowing some sort of reason for impeachment, if that's provided in a constitution. The second major point he makes, this is Robert Dahl, drawing on Robert Dahl, is that there have to be a set of rights and freedoms in place for democracy, for there to be a democracy, such as the ones that are in our Bill of Rights. Things like freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of the press, those kinds of things. He also talks about a rule of law, meaning that everybody is treated equally under the law. And this is a point that Guillermo O'Donnell later picks up on and is very emphatic about. The need for a rule of law which he discusses in terms of-- he talks about the idea that we're not just talking about voters here. We're talking about people who are citizens. And citizenship entails a certain set of rights and a certain set of responsibilities, and it involves being equal under the law. So this harkens back to the idea of the rule of law. Now, those are things that most people agree on in terms of, most, not everybody, but in terms of what is required for a democracy. 

There are debates about whether a particular economic system is required for democracy, about whether something called a democratic political culture is a precondition for democracy. In other words, do they have to be high levels of trust, interpersonal trust so that you can learn to compromise and get along, the kinds of attributes we associate with democracy. There are very heated debates, about both the necessary requirements for democracy and the preconditions. In this brief article, this acceptance speech which later was an article that came out in the Journal of Democracy, Guillermo O'Donnell points to the three major issues that I just talked about. The elections that are free, fair, regular, and decisive, the set of freedoms and rights, and then the notion of citizenship and rule of law. He goes on to sort of roughly categorize, come up with a rough typology of democracies around the world. And I'm not going to go through all those. We don't have time. But in the first set he includes the higher level democracies, which he is very quick to admit are not perfect and in many cases may be declining a bit in terms of the quality of democracy. But then he turns to a second tier. 

He calls it a second tier, and in that tier he includes most of the democracies of Latin America. So that's when we come to the talk. He talks about, he says, "In these countries, "elections are generally less fair "and political freedoms less secure. "The dimensions of citizenship that extend beyond "the purely political are less fully developed "and less widely diffused." So very abstract here. "These are democracies of relatively low quality, "hindered by" and this is the important point, "the malign effects of pervasive poverty, deep inequality, "state deficiencies, and quite widespread corruption." So he includes most of Latin America, recall this is in 2006 that he's writing this, most of Latin America in that group. He's quick to point out, and I'm sure you will point out in your questions too, that there are wide variations in the quality of democracy all around the world, including in Latin America. On the one hand, you have countries like Costa Rica and Chile, and then you have other countries that are more problematic and yet sometimes still even called democracies. So this is not intended to be more than just a sort of gross generalization. 

So after setting out his definition of democracy, which draws from the literature that's widely accepted, and a rough typology of democracies, he asked the question again, "Is democracy in crisis?" And his answer is extremely interesting, at least to me. He says yes, it is in rich countries. He considers it in crisis in rich countries. Then he says it is even more so in lower quality democracies. And there he refers to authoritarian actors, the disaffection of large parts of the population, as shown through public opinion polls. And where there's a serious risk that democracy could end. Because of the serious disaffection and all of the what you might call defects of democracy in those countries. Then he goes on to say, I have two slides that set out his major argument, which I think is fascinating, and this is the reason I use this in this lecture. "We must consider that democracy is "and always will be in some kind of crisis. 

"It is constantly redirecting its citizens gaze "from a more or less unsatisfactory present "toward a future of still unfulfilled possibilities." And the next slide, if I can do this without making a mess again. I'll let you, the first line, "It is also the often "notorious sign of a lack. "It is the perpetual absence of something more, "of an always pending agenda that calls "for the redress of social ills and further advances "in the manifold matters which, at a certain time "and for a certain people, most concern "human welfare and dignity." It's odd English. It is also the often notorious sign of a lack, which I think is a really wonderful phrase. But what I really like about this is that the way he associates democracy with-- later in the article he talks about hope, hope for the future, it's always associated with hope. And also the notion that inherent in a true democracy would be concerns for human welfare and human dignity. And elsewhere he's written, he's not talking about socialism or communism. He's not talking about equality of condition. 

He is talking about though, a society in which the conditions are present where people can have a certain level of human welfare, have the potential to reach human welfare and dignity. He talks a lot about dignity.

So he has said yes, democracies are in crisis in Latin America, as of 2006. He's also sort of said, well, when I read this, I think he's always saying they're going to be in crisis. So we're kind of in a catch-22 here. No matter how much progress you make, you're always going to be in crisis. But I think he's talking about two different situations here. He's talking about certain deficits, certain problems with democracy that you can identify and that you can fix, and then he's also raising the idea of a utopia, some kind of utopia ideal, and he's cautioning the world, which I think is particularly appropriate in this kind of acceptance speech, to always be looking for something better. You know, that to say, well, we already have a developed democracy in the United States and therefore, we have arrived and we are consolidated, as the transition theorists would say, is to ignore the many, many problems that we have here in the United States with democracy and to, as he said, cast our gaze to the idea that there always could be something more. It always could be improved. 

That's our challenge as citizens in democracies to try and improve the democracies. So he's sort of talking on two levels, reality and vision, in this speech. Now I want to return to a more practical question of what's happening today. If Guillermo O'Donnell were alive, what would he point to in terms of assessing the quality of democracy in Latin America today? Since I did not choose initially to focus on just a few countries, I decided to look at some work that's comprehensive, that sort of casts a general eye across the whole continent. And for that, I'm using two major sources. First, the Freedom House reports that are put out every year called Freedom in the World. These reports classify countries on a seven point scale in two areas, political and civil liberties and economic and social liberty. And the scale goes from one to seven, with seven being the least free, so they have this thing. One is all free, most is completely free. 

They use the term "free" because it's Freedom House. And seven is completely unfree or not free. I'm going to look at some rankings for Latin America there. And then I'm going to turn to the UNDP's Human Development Reports. Sort of look at what they're saying about Latin America. They're very current reports about current trends in Latin America to try and see what points O'Donnell would pick out in terms of dealing with this question about, "Is there still a crisis?" So, to point out first that they've assessed in their latest reports, when you see there, they say that 71% of the population is considered free, live in countries that are considered free, and they also do a separate assessment of the press and internet freedom, and they point to a major problem right here that the press in these countries is below 50% in terms of what they classify as free. So that's not such a good thing. Just to refresh your memories about the map, the green countries here, and this is kind of a neat thing, so here's Brazil, you hover over it. Green means that their overall assessment is that its-- it has a score of either one or two in the seven point scale. 

So it's mostly free. But then, when you look along the side here, you have, the Internet they're saying is partly free and the press is partly free. Who has a country that they want me to look at? Because I can't do them all, but I'll be happy to, if there's a country of interest, I'll hover over it and go there next.

- How about Columbia?

- Argentina.

- Okay, I'll do Columbia first. There we go. So they have a ranking, so you see they're yellow. Yellow means that it's lower than 2.5. 

That's where they go to yellow. And it's a huge scale, they do extensive surveys. They have people in the countries who are doing surveys all the time. So their freedom rating is 3.5 and their press is partly free. Argentina. So they have a ranking of two. One would be the best. Two in terms of their freedom rating, and then Internet is free but their press is partly free. Lately, in Argentina, there have been a lot of takeovers, and there's a particular battle going on between the current government and a major, major newspaper grouping called Clarín, sort of at war with each other. As you can see from this, just overall, and again, without having the time to go through each country, there's a lot of green here which means overall pretty good. 

The countries that-- you have Bolivia and Paraguay here, and then Venezuela, Columbia and Ecuador. Mexico is often classified as a democracy, but according to them, it's partly free. And part of that, of course has to do with press plays a big role, and they've got the press listed as not free. Not just partly free but not free here. So there are, and Cuba's the, let me find Cuba. Cuba is the blue one. Not free. They get a 6.5 out of seven, and seven is least free. Overall, this is an assessment. It's a bipartisan group, actually an international group that runs it. 

It's been around since the Roosevelt era it was founded. So it's a pretty well respected organization, but a lot of people criticize it for its western bias. But I spent some time looking at who its supporters were and its history, and it does seem to be, cross a pretty wide political spectrum, at least from within the United States and western Europe. That's pretty good news. I think O'Donnell would applaud that. Next I'm going to turn to the economic news. I'm not going to put up the report, the major report by the United Nations Development Program that just came out. Every year the UNDP puts out something called a human development report. It's absolutely wonderful. It has an amazing amount of statistical analysis in it that goes into quite a bit of depth on a number of development issues, and the most basic step that they use for every country that they calculate is something called a human development index. 

And instead of just looking at something like per capita income, to assess level of development, they come up with this index that includes not only per capita income but also years in school for an indicator for schooling, and also life expectancy for health. This is all wrapped up in an index that is more sophisticated than some of the cruder measures of development that you see out there, like per capita income. Every year they update it, they manipulate this index in many different ways. So it's a wealth of information. But their latest one, in terms of Latin America, it points out that of all the developing regions, it has the highest human development index. So that's good news. They also point out that it's the one region, the one region where income inequality has decreased. So Guillermo O'Donnell's concerns about income inequality, this is relevant here. And a lot of that has to do with government redistributive programs in Latin America. In the last 10 years in Latin America, poverty has been decreased or reduced by half. 

That is, the number of people living in poverty have been reduced by half. So 56 million people have come out of poverty in the last 10 years in Latin America. The statistics that they're using are less than $4 a day. Often I've heard less than $2 a day. So less than $4 a day, if 56 million people have come, gone above that, that's very hopeful. There are a number of countries, including Chile, Argentina, Mexico, I believe, and Brazil. Brazil's is the most talked about, I think, that have these cash transfer programs, or poverty alleviation programs, that have brought a lot of people out of poverty. In Brazil alone, more than 40 people, 40 million. Not 40, 40 million have come out of poverty. The news however is it's positive but it's not that great because the average annual growth rates are not increasing as fast as they were. 

In 2000 to 2010 they were half what they were in the previous decade. Here's what the UNDP is looking at, which is something of concern to me and which I think would be of concern to O'Donnell, is that there are a lot of people, most of the people have just come out of poverty, but they're not yet in what they think would be the middle class. They say that anything over $4 a day is you're out-of-dire poverty, but you need to make-- you live on $10 a day or more to be considered in the middle class. And there's a huge number of people who are sort of stuck right at the edge and are considered highly vulnerable. Highly vulnerable for a number of reasons and who live lives of great uncertainty. So, that's one of the concerns with the economy. It's sort of the glass half-full, glass half-empty kind of thing. The last thing that I want to talk about, the last major indicator, is the most worrying of all, and that is the issue of physical security in Latin America. The statistics that I was just talking about from the UNDP were from their Global Human Development report for 2014. They also did a report titled-- it's a regional development report for Latin America-- and it's titled "Citizen Security with a Human Face: Evidence and proposals for Latin America." 

And here is where the major, major problem is. The statistics are completely startling.

They refer to a region characterized by extremely high levels of lethal violence and crime. They cover 18 countries in the report which are the worst, and 11 of the 18 have homicide levels, murder rates, that are what the World Health Organization considers to be epidemic levels. At least 10 out of a hundred thousand inhabitants killed by murder. An even more startling statistic, to me at least, is that robberies have tripled in the last 25 years, and in 2012, one out of five people reported being a victim of robbery. The percentage of the total victims of robbery range from 10.82% in Chile to 25.19% in Ecuador. And six out of 10 of the robberies in Latin America are violent. So this is a lot of violent crime. This report is filled with all sorts of wonderful analysis and very, very interesting statistics that I don't have time to cover. 

But one thing that really stuck out to me is that we're so concerned about-- especially now with all the children on our borders who have been arriving all summer-- they talk about fleeing gangs and drug violence. And the surveys that the UNDP did show that although people are concerned about drug violence and gangs, they're really, by large numbers, much more concerned with robbery, and daily, what they call, common crime. And coupled with this, they're extremely concerned because they have absolutely no faith in the police or the judicial system to take care of them, to help them get justice. And so if you have a lack of confidence in the police and a lack of confidence in the judicial system, you have a major problem with democracy in Latin America. Crime violence and fear limit the capabilities and freedoms of people. It affects greatly how they organize their lives. One of the studies shows how people, the number of people who have changed the places they go-- you know, where they go outside to relax and have recreation-- is affected by the security system. It also greatly affects how they relate to the state and other institutions. Many of them report thinking it's okay to engage in vigilantism, for example. Okay, so you see these two. 

It's still a little bit hard to see, but I think it illustrates the point well. Public perception of police participation in criminal activities. The colors here, the blue, the police protect people from crime. So that's the one to the left there. You can see that in Panama and Nicaragua, for example, and Chile and Columbia, they have reasonably high. That's up to 50% saying that the police protect people from crime. But then the really interesting one is this gray line here that for each country you have to look along the percentages, but the police are involved in crime. This is based on public opinion surveys, but in Guatemala, you've got greater than 50%. Same thing in Bolivia, same thing in Venezuela, Dominican Republic. There are quite a few. 

The one on the right is neither or both, which really doesn't tell you anything. But you have, in a number of these societies, large segments believing that the police are involved in crime. This is public perceptions, but perceptions are really important because they affect how citizens relate to the state. The next one that I wanted to show you is even more telling, and I hope this stays. This is one called Citizen Confidence in the Criminal Justice System in Latin America. Respondents were asked the following question, "If you were the victim of a mugging or a robbery, "how confident would you be that the judicial system "would punish the guilty party?" You've got a lot or you see quite, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, you know, close to 25%. Then some confidence. But once you get over to the gray line here, you've got nearly all the countries have more than 50%, and in some cases significantly more than 50% having either only a little confidence or no confidence that the judicial system would punish the guilty party. You have high rates of crime, high rates of physical insecurity, and no confidence in a judicial system to take care of you in terms of providing you justice. 

Now, all of this relates, you have an economic situation that's quite uncertain because of the vulnerabilities, despite some achievements. You have this physical insecurity, which makes your life very uncertain. Then a number of political scientists have talked about the fact that political institutions in Latin America are very prone to change, and I have a report here, if you're interested, the number of countries that have changed their constitution, have changed their electoral rules. They just keep changing the rules of the game. Then even when they put in new rules of the game, they're very contingent. They don't really mean a lot because they are informal power brokers who actually end up making up the rules in a lot of countries as they go. Depending on the power, configuration of power. You have a lot of uncertainty on the political front too. In most of the countries that have made a transition to democracy, even the ones who you will consider the strongest democracies, have not been solid democracies for that long. So there is a lot of uncertainty, and I think that particularly based on the physical insecurity aspect, which I didn't mention but it's actually much worse in Latin America, the insecurity has increased a lot more in Latin America than elsewhere, which contrasts with the progress economically. 

I think that Guillermo O'Donnell would be very concerned about this, and that he would applaud the progress that has been made but reiterate his belief that they are very much in a second tier set of, set of democracies worldwide and that they have a lot more work to do and that they should bear in mind this idea that you can always make for a better democracy. My last PowerPoint slide refers to some of these uncertainties and poses the question to you, which is just, "Is democracy in crisis in Latin America?" That's meant for you to decide. I've given you my answer.

- I will go ahead and thank Dr. Anne Hamilton for a wonderful presentation today.

-[Anne] Thank you. 
(applause)

- I am Kari Borne.