In recent decades in Latin America, democratic political regimes have been challenged not only by open military dictatorships, as in the past, but also by neoliberal policies that resurfaced with the so-called "third wave of democracy" (Huntington 1994). These neoliberal policies, once called the Washington Consensus reforms (Escalante, 2015), accompanied the transitions from authoritarian regimes, limited the possibilities of a leftward shift, and are now returning aggressively to recover and expand what social movements and progressive reforms achieved in terms of democratization.

Contrary to the predictions of their initial theorists (O'Donnell 1989), transitions to democracy never achieved the stability of consolidation. The civil and political rights recovered with democracy were not substantially accompanied by social, economic, and environmental rights (Garretón, 1997; Orjuela, 2003; O'Donnell, 2004). In Latin American academia, historical-structural approaches were gradually abandoned or relegated in political analysis from the 1980s onward, which had repercussions for understanding the relationship between the region's heterogeneous modernization processes and their correlation with democracy (Franco 1998, Nun 2000).

Since the late 1990s, several Latin American countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) have democratically elected governments that have offered a critique and a move beyond neoliberalism, restoring an active role for the state through redistributive policies and democratic participation. At the same time, various social movements, raising issues such as agrarian reform, workers' rights, indigenous rights, and gender equality, have strengthened their presence in Latin American public spheres, thus also highlighting the limitations of transitions to democracy in their liberal form (Svampa, 2010; Almeida and Cordero, 2017). These experiences generated important debates in Latin American academia seeking to characterize these governments of the "turn to the left": their democratizing power, their possible authoritarian drifts or their impacts on the revitalization of the region's political traditions (the national-popular, indianism or socialism) (Laclau, 2005, De la Torre, 2013, Lynch, 2017, Aboy Carlés, 2023; Mayorga, 2024).

The end of the "leftward shift" and the continuation of neoliberalism, according to the experiences of each country in the region, have once again placed the persistence of a series of inequalities on the political and academic agenda. Public opinion studies such as the "AmericasBarometer" (2023) recorded a sustained decline in Latin American public satisfaction with the functioning of democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this scenario of growing social discontent in Latin America (Kessler and Vommaro, 2024). In Latin American societies, not only will disaffection with "official" politics deepen, but heterogeneous strategies will also be employed to influence the government agenda (direct action, lobbying, patronage, etc.), often instrumentalizing the institutional framework of the democratic regime (Crabtree, Durand, and Wolff, 2024).

In this context of social and political crisis, countries like Argentina, El Salvador, and Brazil have experienced the rise of the radical right to power with authoritarian projects, structural economic adjustments, and anti-rights policies; and in many other countries, similar alternatives remain poised to gain power (Stefanoni, 2022; Duárez, 2024; Vommaro, 2023; Ubilluz, 2024). In all cases, this radical right presents itself as extreme right, that is, with a marked contempt for democratic institutions and the rule of law. Basic consensuses that were thought to be stable following the transitions to democracy have been fractured in recent years, such as respect for human rights in contexts of political disputes. In Central America, the Andean Region and the Southern Cone, processes of social democratization from the fields of work, culture and gender have been slowed and in some cases have experienced clear regressions due to government actions that demonstrate a precarious or nonexistent commitment to democracy (Rovira, 2024).

In this sense, we find ourselves in a context of multiple crises in Latin America that affect democracy, both in its form as a political regime and as a form of social life. The various modernization processes that Latin American countries have undergone impact the capacity of states and democracy to respond to citizens' demands and expectations. The challenges are both common and heterogeneous, given that the region's socio-historical processes have generated different social and economic conditions for the functioning of democracy in each country or subregion (Mainwaring and Pérez Liñán, 2010).

This crisis, while evidenced by the rise of radical right-wing alternatives, is also expressed in the very "disputes over democracy" waged by various subaltern groups. These groups (organizations and social movements) seek to advance democratization processes in the face of persistent class, ethnic-racial, and gender inequalities that permeate the region (Carosio, 2012; Quijano, 2011; Velasco, 2005). These democratizing processes present us with the challenge of envisioning a future in which democratization leads to the transformation of our societies in a more participatory and solidarity-based way. This scenario underscores the enduring relevance of the debate on democracy in Latin America as a model to be imported or a promise to be achieved.

In this sense, the context of multiple crises in the region demands that academia develop rigorous studies in a historical and comparative key to explain and understand the socio-political processes that have been developing, around democratization, de-democratization and forms of government.

The studies to be developed by the working group will pay particular attention to the various versions of democracy currently in vogue globally and their specific manifestations in Latin America. The aim is to identify the characteristics of these versions of democracy and the social structures to which they respond. We are interested in understanding how the dominant versions of democracy attempt to influence others, colonizing their message and language and denying the status of democracy to those that do not share certain characteristics that the former consider key or necessary.

Our analysis will begin with the various contributions made by authors who have explored the debates on democracy in Latin America (Lechner, 1995; Franco, 1998; Nun, 2000; O'Donnell, 2004; Lynch, 2009, 2014). The Working Group aims to contribute by describing how the debate on democracy in Latin America is presented today and what characteristics hinder the development of certain versions—at the political and intellectual levels—while fostering others.

To this end, the Working Group will establish a dialogue between politics and the history of democracy, seeking to identify, in the region, both periods and political regimes, as well as the subjects of democracy (Nun, 1989; Aboy Carlés, 2013). It will seek to establish the relationship between these elements, especially with those included and excluded (social classes, ethnic-racial groups, gender identities) from the political regime, in order to further clarify their interests and identities.

Our analysis of political regimes and democratization processes will consider the role of the state. We aim to analyze the impact of the type of relationship between Latin American states and their respective democratization processes on the configuration of their democracies (Kurtz, 2013; Soifer, 2015). We begin with the hypothesis that when states are stronger than democratization processes, the political regime tends to be authoritarian or undemocratic. Conversely, when democratization processes are vigorous (culminating in the formation or strengthening, for example, of political parties) and tend to outpace states, they shape more robust and higher-quality democratic regimes. Furthermore, we posit that when a "catastrophic equilibrium" occurs between states and democratization processes, pendulum swings occur in political regimes (between authoritarianism and democracy). It is also highly likely that when states and democratization processes are weak, authoritarian enclaves (Gibson, 2005) will emerge within their respective national territories. These hypotheses stem from the central idea that democracy is the product of the balance of power between the state and citizens (Tilly, 2017), on the one hand, and of the procedural relationship between democratization and liberalization (Dahl, 1993), on the other.

Our analysis of the strength of Latin American states will consider the ways in which dominant elites and rulers acted, the level of state capacity, the institutional and organizational configurations they adopted, and their responses to the demands of popular sectors. To this end, we will examine different periods in Latin American politics: classical populism, developmentalism, the Washington Consensus, the leftward shift, and the counteroffensive of the radical right. We will also review the extensive literature on the state that exists in North American and Latin American academia (López, 1997; Przeworski, 2007; Przeworski and Wallerstein, 2008; O'Donnell, 2010).

Analyzing democratization processes in the countries of the region requires examining the actions and reactions of societies to key state policies and the characteristics of the political regimes they adopted. Our study of democratization processes will engage with the debates of classical theorists of democratic revolution (Tocqueville, 2018; Marx and Engels, 2017), the contributions of contemporary political theory on democracy (Lefort, 1990; Mouffe, 2016), and modern transitionalists on the transitions from authoritarian regimes to democracy (Huntington, 1994; O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, 1988). Recognizing that democratization processes are not linear or teleological, we understand that there are advances and setbacks, making it important to also analyze what Tilly (2017) has termed "de-democratization."

Our theoretical and methodological perspectives will comparatively analyze two types of democracy: democracy as a type of society and democracy as a form of government (Bobbio, 1992; Lynch, 2020). We will argue that a vigorous and high-quality democracy requires the existence of both types. To conduct this analysis, we will go beyond the perspective of some scholars who only analyze democracy as a form of government (Meléndez and Vergara, 2010). In democracy as a type of society, it is necessary to examine the elimination of privileges, class discrimination, gender discrimination, and racism—that is, the equality of social conditions existing in Latin American societies (Przeworski, 1995). In a democracy as a form of government, it is important to analyze the mechanisms that institutionalize political representation, the balance of power within political parties, citizen participation, and the relationship between the executive and congressional branches, among others (Manin, 1997; Gargarella, 2013; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, 2014). The main objective of the Working Group will be to contribute to the development of an emancipatory proposal for democracy, taking into account current regional conditions so that democracy can become a transformative mechanism.