A time for questioning. The challenges of Latin American democracy in the current decade

Abstract

The purpose of this work, developed through a series of questions, is to draw a road map on the problems that Latin American democracies will face during the current decade and some strategies to face them. First, the current state of weakness of democracy globally and in the region is described based on the data published in various reports at the end of 2021. Then, based on those data, it will be proposed that the discomforts that cause its weakness are institutionalized populism and emotional polarization. Finally, democracy is presented as an ascending system for collective decision-making that could serve as a framework for understanding and analyzing those two discomforts.