Qualidade da democracia na América Latina: o que importa para sua efetividade?.

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the democratic regime and the factors that impact the quality of democracies in Latin American countries. Initially, a theoretical review is made about the very idea of what democracy is, in the liberal sense of the term, and what constitutes a democratic quality regime, always based on the studies of the exponents of contemporary political science. In a second step, we sought to analyze the selected variables for the empirical study, with the dependent variable being the quality of democracy and the independent variables being impunity, corruption, the electoral process and the independence of the judiciary. To this objetive, this approach included a total of 16 countries that make up Latin America, with the time frame of the data as the base year for the period of 2017. The analyzes, as well as the indicators, are important to understand these processes of change these countries go through. To assess the quality of democracy (dependent variable), data from The Economist Unit Democracy Index were used. For independent variables, data from the Global Impunity Index (impunity); International Transparency (corruption); and V-DEM (electoral process and independence of the judiciary). Two hypotheses were raised for this research. The first suggests that countries with better electoral performance and independent judiciary have better democratic quality; the second that countries with low levels of impunity and corruption tend to be more democratic. A database was created comprising all the countries in the section and all the variables involved in and, based on the descriptive statistical analysis, correlation and regression, it was possible to confirm the hypotheses previously raised, with emphasis on the independence of the judiciary and the electoral process. . In other words, in countries whose independence from the judiciary is evident and whose electoral process occurs more fully, democracies tend to be more consolidated, thus coming in line with related literature.