Early in the twenty-first century, Latin America became a center for experiments with participatory institutions. While many observers applauded the growing possibilities for building more inclusionary polities, there are limits to the degree of popular sector empowerment delivered by the new institutions, whether instigated by revived left parties, charismatic populists, or technocratic elites. To account for the varying trajectories and limitations of participatory institutions, this chapter looks for inclusion in the most likely cases, starting with the diffusion of a single institution, participatory budgeting, and continuing with an examination of the countries that advanced most in bringing several types of participatory institutions from parchment to practice at multiple levels of government – Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Uruguay. Even in these most likely cases, such institutions tended to offer access through low quality channels of participation that entailed consultation rather than effective decision-making, focused on issues or resources of lesser magnitude, restricted involvement to a limited public, or even reinforced clientelism in some cases.

What role do popular sector associations play in party building in contemporary Latin America? While corporatist ties to hierarchically organized labor and peasant associations have diminished, a bevy of “dissident” popular sector organizations have emerged, such as neighborhood associations, indigenous movements, and informal sector associations. These organizations have played contrasting roles in party building for new left-wing parties such as Brazil’s PT, Bolivia’s MAS, Mexico’s PRD, Uruguay’s FA, and Venezuela’s AD, varying from durable and programmatic neo-corporatism to contingent patronage ties. Based on these cases, this chapter inductively identifies founding party traits that shape linkage type. Parties that established formal rules for incorporating organizational allies in party leadership and included a major segment of the labor movement in their founding coalition were most successful at institutionalizing spaces for allied organizations’ programmatic influence. This argument is tested through a subnational analysis of Mexican state governments under the PRD.

This chapter examines the movement toward greater inclusion across Latin America over the last three decades. It introduces three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups; access to policymaking; and resource redistribution. It shows how the rate of adoption of reforms on all three dimensions has increased across the region since the 1990s. The chapter then seeks to explain the inclusionary turn. It argues that the combination of long-standing social inequalities and the endurance of democratic institutions created both incentives and unprecedented opportunities to adopt inclusionary reforms. The chapter examines factors – such as left government, social mobilization, electoral competition, and natural resource wealth – that explain variation within the inclusionary turn. We then explore some of the important trade-offs and limitations inherent in inclusionary reform, including tensions between inclusionary policy initiatives and liberal democratic institutions, the various limitations imposed by state weakness, and the trade-offs associated with using the state to promote participation. We conclude by examining the sustainability of inclusionary reform in Latin America, focusing on the centrality of the state in ensuring that inclusionary reforms that are written into parchment are actually implemented, enforced, and sustained in practice.

Can populism be a source of long-lasting changes in citizens' beliefs, behaviors, and political identities? This chapter follows recent literature in treating populism as identity-shaping. Populist movements mobilize constituencies based on anti-establishment appeals that draw a wedge between a "corrupt elite" and a "victimized people" of the nation. It is electorally advantageous to define the "people" in a broad but bounded way, such that there is simultaneously a large, heterogeneous coalition of voters and a clearly defined enemy. We show through observational and experimental evidence that populism's emphasis on a broad but bounded concept of the people can shape the distribution of citizens' identities by reducing the cost and increasing the benefit of assuming non-elite social identities. Populist discourse is thus an identity-shaping political tool that can serve to incorporate those at the margins. This heterogeneity, however, creates a sustainability problem. With little to glue its members together beyond their anti-elite status, populist support coalitions are particularly vulnerable to disintegration after victory. We argue that some correlates of populism, like redistributional economic policies, and a tendency to organize constituents, are driven by the populists' need to stabilize their support coalitions. We argue that these are identity-stabilizing political tools.

The transformation of evangelical Christians from a discriminated-against minority to full citizens with rights and political influence constitutes an important component of the inclusionary turn in Latin America. In some countries, this process of inclusion has translated into a formidable presence in elected office, with evangelicals leading a socially conservative backlash against progressive policy agendas. In other countries, evangelicals have little presence within the halls of power. This chapter seeks to explain differences in evangelicals’ involvement and success with electoral politics in Brazil and Chile, South America’s two most heavily evangelical countries. Rejecting arguments that focus on external barriers, such as social discrimination or constraints posed by political institutions, I instead emphasize the historical process by which a religious identity is or is not politicized, via struggles for legal equality with the Catholic Church and more recent battles over abortion and same-sex marriage. In Brazil, ongoing threats to evangelicals’ core interests and identities, combined with opportunities to defend against these threats via legislative politics, have produced a much more politicized and electorally successful evangelical community than in Chile.

Latin America’s recent inclusionary turn centers on changing relationships between the popular sectors and the state. Yet the new inclusion unfolds in a region in which most states are weak and prone to severe pathologies, such as corruption, inefficiency, and particularism. The first part of the chapter outlines an argument, developed at more length elsewhere, regarding how “state crises” helped drive the consolidation of three distinct party system trajectories among the eight South American countries where the Left would eventually win power. The second part of the chapter argues that these trajectories differed in three ways that likely conditioned how the concomitant inclusionary Left turn unfolded in each case: the institutionalization of left-wing parties, the occurrence of state transformation via constitutional reform, and the level of state capacity. The discussion helps highlight the central role of the state and its pathologies in both driving alternative paths of political development and in conditioning the politics of inclusion. By putting the emphasis on the state and its pathologies, we can better consider not just the sources of sociopolitical exclusion but also the limits of sociopolitical inclusion.

At a general level of neoliberal repudiation or expansion of social policies, most post-neoliberal Latin American governments in the 2000s have exhibited similarities. However, coalitions with popular actors have displayed a lot of variation. In order to compare popular sector coalitions the article constructs a framework with two central dimensions: electoral and organizational/interest; in post–import substitution industrialization (ISI), Latin America the latter is composed of both unions and territorial social movements (TSMs). It contends that the region witnessed four types of popular coalitions: electoral (Ecuador and Chile), TSM-based (i.e. made of informal sector-based organizations, Venezuela and Bolivia), dual (i.e. composed of both unions and TSMs, Argentina and Brazil) and union/party-based (Uruguay). The study argues that government–union coalitions are largely accounted for by the relative size of the formal economy, and by the institutional legacies of labor-based parties. Coalitions with informal sector-based organizations were more contingent and rooted in the political activation of these TSMs during the anti-neoliberal struggles of the 1990s.

Historical change is often driven by demands for inclusion by previously marginalized groups. Latin America’s most recent inclusionary turn was characterized by an emphasis on constitutionalism, an explosion of popular participation, and a commitment to social policies that empowered and lifted millions of people out of poverty. Practices of citizenship were at the heart of these struggles for inclusion. Yet failure to ratchet-up citizenship rights leaves the region vulnerable to the undoing of inclusionary reforms, and thus a return to exclusion, repression, and democratic backsliding. To trace the evolution of inclusion in the region, and to better understand how cycles of inclusion and exclusion have often eroded state capacity, this chapter outlines political logics of inclusion, describes how these logics have changed over historical periods, analyzes the structural-historical conditions that shape whether inclusion threatens the interests of powerful actors, sketches alternative pathways to inclusion, and discusses inclusionary outcomes and the unfinished business of building a citizens’ democracy. It compares cases varying along two dimensions: changes in the types of inclusion over time and differences in pathways to inclusion across the region. The breadth of the comparison brings structural-historical factors back into focus, without denying the importance of political institutions.

Although Latin America’s inclusionary turn produced tangible benefits for lower-income citizens, these benefits remained partial and politically contingent. The new inclusion extended recognition, access, and resources to social sectors left behind or excluded from the historical process of labor incorporation, but it was noted more for its breadth than its depth, for pluralist as opposed to corporatist modes of interest representation, and for organizational diffuseness rather than density. These traits help explain why the new inclusionary turn was associated with an “easy stage” of redistributive politics in which politically innocuous, low-cost cash transfers could be made to large numbers of weakly or non-organized popular constituencies. They also help explain why the region struggled to advance toward a “higher stage” of redistributive politics requiring more expensive and politically contentious investments in public services and institutional reforms