Citizen’s Income and Democratization in Latin America—A Multi-Institutional Perspective

Abstract

This chapter links democratization to the extension of real opportunity freedom through equal and multiple memberships of core institutions. In Latin America today there is broad recognition that inequality as well as poverty poses problems for both democracy and development (Zepeda et al. 2007). However it is not quite clear in what sense inequality matters and what in this context comprises the problem of public reform. In one perspective the problem of inequality is broadly of an institutional and political nature. It is argued that at the heart of the weak extension of political democracy into the social and economic domains lies a basic inequality of citizen status (Haagh, 1999; O’Donnell, 2001; Whitehead, 2007; Haagh, 2002a, b). Expanding on this perspective, this chapter explores how far the institutional foundation of citizen status is relevant to the realization in practice of opportunity freedoms. Can policy judgments be usefully informed by an institutional prism and help explain how for instance major advances in educational coverage have so little impact on relative incomes and social equality? (Bonelli, Gonzaga, and Veiga, 2008: 47–48).