This chapter addresses two key issues concerning the process of democratic development in Bolivia in the last two decades. First, I tackle the issue of why Bolivia, notwithstanding its previous authoritarian past and a series of harsh obstacles during the transition, succeeded in building a stable competitive regime in the post-1982 period. Second, I assess the democratic regime's major advances as well as its shortcomings and present challenges. I consider whether this process has laid the foundations for a stable and consolidated democracy and how much the regime's lingering problems affect democracy's future viability. The key question is whether sheer survival or durability has been the major achievement, or whether a political process has taken place that has given rise to the conditions for a self-sustaining democracy.

Scott Mainwaring (1999c: 104) has stressed that in Latin America's third wave of democratization, “no development is more surprising than Bolivia's democratic stability since 1982.” Does this stability allow us to regard Bolivia's democracy as consolidated or moderately viable (Whitehead 2001: 3–20)? A consolidated democracy is one in which democracy as an intricate system of institutions, rules, and incentives has become “the only game in town” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 5). But consolidation does not involve a linear teleological process leading to a system capable of overcoming all challenges to its stability and precluding the possibility of future breakdown.