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OAS Secretary General Highlights the Challenges of Governance in the Region during Policy Workshop on Latin America

The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, today highlighted the challenges of governance in Latin America during a panel of experts titled, “The Politics of Effective Democratic Governance: What Have We Learned?” The event was part of a daylong policy workshop at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, in the context of the launch of the book, “Democratic Governance in Latin America.”

Secretary General Insulza, who acted as moderator, focused his remarks on the effectiveness of the region’s leaders and how effective citizens perceive them to be. The representative of the hemispheric organization also recalled that democracy is a broad concept not limited to free and fair elections but encompassing the manner of governing and delivering to citizens the promises of democracy.

The panelists at the event were Scott Mainwaring, Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and co-editor of the new book on democracy in Latin America, “Democratic Governance in Latin America”; Daniel Brinks, Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas; and Miriam Kornblith, Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Program at the National Endowment for Democracy. Welcoming comments were by Michael Shifter, President of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.

“To confront the question of governance you must consider two aspects: one is how effective it really is, and second, how do citizens perceive that effectiveness,” Secretary General Insulza said. “The other matter we must consider upon studying this issue is not only how are we doing in matters of governance. Democracy doesn’t just consist in being democratically elected but also in a series of other qualities that should be present in a government of this kind, such as having an independent judiciary, a reasonable balance between the different powers, and transparency and effectiveness, among others. This is an idea that is very relevant to the Organization of American States.”

Scott Mainwaring, of the University of Notre Dame, addressed the lessons about democratic governance in the post-1978 wave of democratization. In his presentation, he mentioned that successful democratic governance is to some extent context-specific. “What works in one place doesn’t work exactly the same in another,” he explained. “So we’re quite skeptical that the same set of policies is uniformly what we want to prescribe for Latin America as a whole,” he added, while acknowledging that generalizations can sometimes be made.

Mainwaring also highlighted one of the book’s conclusions: that in places where there has been effective democratic governance, there has not been consistent, high popular support for democracy or high satisfaction with democracy, and vice versa. “Statistically, there are no significant correlations between good governance and citizen satisfaction with democracy. This opens some difficult dilemmas for policy makers.”

Daniel Brinks, of the University of Texas, spoke of what he called “the Rule of Law problem” in Latin America, referring to some of the challenges that countries in the region must face to improve their democracies: for example, to create the political conditions that make it possible to hold state and government actors to constitutional standards and to the law; to craft institutions that will give us the tools we need to protect ourselves from each other; and to craft state institutions that create a context in which people are by and large observant of other people’s rights. In the last 30 to 35 years, he said, change has taken place in the right direction: “Central governments are becoming more and more subject to law, more and more attuned to constitutional requirements and more and more structured by the rights and responsibilities that are embedded in the normative framework in Latin America.”

A photo gallery of the event is available here.

For more information, please visit the OAS Website at www.oas.org.

Reference: E-420/10