This chapter sets out a roadmap to understand the new politics of participation in Latin America by exploring the intersection between two important transformations in society and the state. First, we highlight new actors in state and society who are pressing for policy reform. Whereas the existing literature focuses on interests organized around social class and indigenous identity, we reveal a rainbow of societal actors that span class lines, as well as the emergence of activist bureaucrats, who work together to demand greater social inclusion and policy change. Second, while prior studies emphasize representative institutions as the main site to advance policy change, we analyze the importance of new institutions for participation in the executive and the judicial branches of government. These sites have been central for activism in a range of underexplored policy areas, including the environment; the rights of women, people with disabilities, and sexual minorities; and crime. Together, we argue, these new actors and institutions are redefining the politics of participation today in Latin America.

Astute observers of Latin American politics note a widespread shift towards social inclusion at the turn towards the twenty-first century. Is such a shift evident in written constitutions, and if so, how? We leverage historical data on the content of constitutions to explore this question. A preliminary test is whether the Bolivarian republics of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia – the militant edge of the “inclusionary turn” – represent a shift from their constitutional trajectory. The evidence suggests that in both style and content, the Bolivarian constitutions are novel by historical standards. A second part of the chapter explores, broadly, the patterns of inclusion across the dimensions of recognition, access, and resource distribution. There is, in fact, a strong trend towards the constitutionalization of inclusion within each of these dimensions. We observe the strongest evidence of such in channels of political access, in the form of participation and accountabililty. Finally, we document a counterintuitive element of the inclusionary turn – the persistence of, and even increase in, strong presidential power with respect to lawmaking authority. We advance the possibility that presidential power, for all of its other implications, may be conducive to inclusion. Broadly, processes of political inclusion are well represented in written constitutions.

The growth of economic informality, the transformation of left party-union linkages, and the rise of political decentralization in Latin America have all empowered local “brokers" who are linked to national political parties but also substantially autonomous and often opportunistic. The leaders of left parties in the region – even parties that are externally mobilized or that advance programmatic platforms promoting greater inclusion of popular sectors – have often needed to negotiate with such actors to secure power and implement policies. In this chapter, we consider the resources that intermediaries offer to parties but also the challenges that broker-mediated incorporation poses for left parties. We then use new evidence from Brazil – n particular, from the experience of the externally mobilized, programmatic Workers’ Party (PT) – to show the necessity but also the fragility of alliances with such actors. We assess possible implications of the reliance on brokers for the sustainability of the “inclusionary turn" in Latin America.

An international economic boom was the necessary condition for the sustainability of the inclusionary turn. The boom affected countries differently depending on domestic structures of power. If the economic boom coincided with the twin collapse of the party system and the capital markets, the inclusionary turn manifested itself as rentier populism, a coalition that dominated Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Rentier Populism is the social basis of super-presidentialism in good economic times. Yet, it becomes incompatible both with socioeconomic inclusion and liberal democracy in hard times.

These reflections adopt a macro-historical perspective on the “new inclusion,” comparing it to the more restricted, “initial” inclusion of the labor movement in the early twentieth century. The earlier inclusion, which introduced mass participation, founded and structured two arenas of popular sector participation: the interest and party-electoral arenas. The second inclusion not only encompassed previously omitted groups but also restructured those two participatory arenas. After situating both inclusionary episodes in a wider historical framework, I compare them in terms of four traits: 1) the form of popular organizations, 2) problems of collective action, 3) salient cleavages and issues, and 4) access to policymaking. The restructured arenas represent a move from the centrality of unions, corporatism, and productionist economic issues to a structure of participation that is more fragmented and pluralist, with multiple cleavages and a set of issues that now include a range of identity-based rights and consumption-based demands. While these changes are positive gains, an important question is the degree to which this restructuring has effectively demobilized the popular sectors on important macro and micro economic issues. These are important areas of policymaking, which remain salient in the politics of the elite and have consequential economic, distributional, and political consequences for the popular sectors.

In the last two decades governments across Latin America have adopted and implemented conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, lifting large numbers of poor families out of economic destitution and inducing child beneficiaries to attend school and receive preventive health care on a regular basis. First emerging in Mexico and Brazil, this social policy innovation was quickly adopted in a wide range of other countries in the region. This chapter employs the analytical framework of diffusion to examine and analyze the spatial and temporal clustering that characterized the spread of CCTs in Latin America. Distinguishing between the adoption of the new policy innovation and its implementation, the chapter argues that diffusion dynamics were crucial in the adoption phase. It leverages a diffusion framework to explain why so many countries adopted CCTs at all. At the same time, the chapter grants that many other factors influenced how CCTs unfolded during the implementation phase, shaping the varied forms they have taken across the region.

This chapter compares the temporal evolution of the alignment between ideological platforms and the social bases of partisan support in ten Latin American countries (the eight political party systems from Collier and Collier [1991], plus Bolivia and Ecuador). The chapter shows that whereas the correlation between a party’s ideology and its partisan support among marginalized voters (the poor and informal sector workers) was very weak during the neoliberal consensus of the 1990s, in recent years leftist parties have been more successful in attracting this electorate. At the same time, however, leftist parties’ support from its traditional base (the formal working class and public sector employees) weakened during this time period. Moreover, the extent of this realignment was much stronger in some countries (Brazil, Peru and to some extent Argentina and Venezuela) than in others. The final section of the chapter identifies and evaluates alternative explanations for these cross-national trajectory differences and finds that extensive realignment was more likely to occur in countries where leftist incumbents relied at least moderately on patronage in their electoral strategies. This finding questions the durability of the realignment once leftist parties are out of power.

This chapter analyzes the dramatic expansion of social policy to traditionally unprotected labor-market outsiders (i.e. the informal sector, unemployed, rural workers and dependents) in Latin America. Comprising between 40 and 80 percent of the regional population, outsiders had been historically marginalized from social protection. Focusing on the countries analyzed in Shaping the Political Arena (Collier and Collier 1991) it asks, why did incumbents adopt social policy for outsiders? Why did some expand broad-reaching, nondiscretionary benefits while others refrained from launching significant protections or launched discretionary benefits? The political regime type as well as the presence of either electoral competition for the vote of outsiders or social mobilization by movements representing outsiders and labor unions help explain whether expansion occurred and what pattern of social policy emerged. Moreover, among governments that expanded nondiscretionary and broad-reaching policies, some created more generous and encompassing inclusive benefits in which groups often participated in policy implementation, while others provided more restrictive benefits, with less coverage, lower benefits, and bureaucratic implementation. I show that the balance of partisan power and the involvement of social movements in policy design accounts for whether inclusive or restrictive benefits were launched across three areas – pensions, healthcare, and income support.