Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Studies of political parties in Latin America have often been descriptive and not directed to link a theoretical foundation about political parties with qualitative or quantitative empiricism. This was in part because parties in the region were usually perceived as rather unimportant in the political arena. This study attempts to correct this often unjustified proposition by focusing on the development of political parties in five Central American countries: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The analysis focuses particularly on the relationship between party fragmentation, party polarization, the level of democracy, and socio-economic modernization. The quantitative analysis uses a cross-national longitudinal research design and tries to overcome shortcomings in prior descriptive approaches based on case studies. The overall findings show that party fragmentation and party polarization are positively related to the level of democracy in Central America.

Two key themes of this special issue are: how violence challenges democracy and how democratic politics might, over time, diminish violence. This paper explores how violence(s) embedded in Latin America's state formation process are multiplied rather than diminished through democratization, generating a securitizing logic which fundamentally distorts democratic principles. Known for its high levels of historic violence(s), Latin America today is second only to Southern Africa in levels of homicide in the world. Some see contemporary violence in the region as a rupture from the past: ‘new violence’ characterized by its urban and social nature in contrast to the rural and political nature of the past. Violence, however, has a reproductive quality, by which it is transmitted through space as well as time. This article argues that rather than reflecting a rupture with the past, violence in Latin America has merely accelerated its complex reproduction in many forms across (gendered) spaces of socialization. The paradox is that the proliferation of this violence has occurred alongside democratic transitions. Although the state is not directly responsible for all the violence which is taking place, this article argues that in many countries it is the very trajectory of the state-formation process which has facilitated this rapid reproduction of violence. I call this process ‘perverse’. Democracy is increasingly subject to the fears and insecurities of the population, enabling the state to build its authority not on the protection of citizens' rights, but on its armed encounters and insidious collusions with violent actors in the name of ‘security provision’. Categories of people become non-citizens, subjected to abuse by state, para-state and non-state violent actors. If this process continues, democracy will ultimately be securitized.

U.S. policymakers consistently argue that U.S. security depends on hemispheric democracy. As an instrument of U.S. policy, did foreign assistance promote democracy in Central America, 1946 through 1994? Finding that U.S. foreign assistance directly promoted neither GDP nor democracy in Central America, 1946 through 1994, I conclude that U.S. policy failed consistently in this specific regard.