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.

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.