Political Elites and Social, Political and Economic Transformations in Latin America

Abstract

This chapter deals with Latin America’s recent political and economic development as the background to the evolution of political elites in the region and, particularly, Chile. It examines indicators of democratic development and the region’s recent history, taking as a reference the cases of Brazil and Argentina. Another important aspect discussed in this chapter is the relationship between the executive and the legislature in Latin American countries since it is an important indicator of the quality of the region’s democracies. As continent, Latin America is particularly interesting because of the institutional instability seen in most countries in the nineteenth century as the result of the colonisation period and then again as from the 1960s, when the first dictatorial regimes were established in the context of the Cold War and the threat of communism, through to the 1990s when democracy was mostly restored. In the Chilean case, and considering the objectives of this research, it is very important to establish the sociopolitical and economic context that has favoured elitism and the consolidation of numerous forms of inequality because these two phenomena have shaped the recent political evolution of most Latin American countries.