Assessing the Third Transition in Latin American Democratization: Representational Regimes and Civil Society in Argentina and Brazil

Recent political and economic transitions in Latin America have shaped a third transition in the nature of civil society and democratic representation. The conceptual territory of democratic representational regimes can be mapped out in four theoretical patterns of state-society relations: adversarial, delegative, deliberative, and cooptive. A comparison of representational regimes in state-society relations in Argentina and Brazil shows a shift in civil society towards organization in nongovernmental organizations, in addition to social movements. Despite this common characteristic, the different emerging representational regimes in these two countries carry different implications for the quality of democracy.