Was There a Left Turn in Latin America? Building a Social Democracy Index

Abstract

A social democracy index designed to adjudicate among positions in the debate on the extent to which the political left in Latin America has been leftist shows empirically that both the maximalist Marxist and the liberal institutionalist perspectives are inaccurate. Most countries belonging to the so-called radical-left camp have undergone substantial social democratic achievements since their electoral victories. Moreover, the uneven distribution of social democracy performance in so-called moderate and radical camps casts serious doubt on the homogeneity of these country groupings.

Un índice del nivel de socialdemocracia diseñado para establecer las distintas posiciones en el debate sobre el grado de izquierdismo en la izquierda política de América Latina da muestra empírica de la inexactitud de tanto la perspectiva marxista maximalista como de la institucionalista liberal. La mayoría de los países pertenecientes al llamado campo de la izquierda radical han experimentado logros socialdemócratas sustanciales a partir de sus victorias electorales. Además, la distribución desigual de los resultados del proyecto socialdemócrata entre los llamados campos moderados y radicales arroja serias dudas sobre la homogeneidad inherente a estas agrupaciones de países.

Keywords

Democracy Global capitalism Inequality Moderate left Radical left

The Latin American left has long been considered by many to have been historically defeated with the neoliberal turn of the 1980s (e.g., Castañeda, 1993). Yet, the first decade of the 2000s witnessed a tremendous surge of the Latin American social-movement and political left, which was much heralded for its unparalleled strength and influence (Arditi, 2010; Gürcan and Bakiner, 2015; Rovira Kaltwasser, 2011; Ellner, 2014). Geared mostly toward eroding the ideological monopoly of neoliberalism and the regional influence of the United States, Latin America has ultimately grown to be the epicenter of political struggles worldwide (Ballvé, 2006; Burbach, Fox, and Fuentes, 2013; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2011; Rodríguez-Garavito, Barrett,.and Chavez, 2008; Saad-Filho, 2005; Singham, 2015) despite several electoral setbacks since 2015. These debates had become even more salient by the 2020s, after MORENA’s rise in Mexico in 2018, Bolivia’s 2019 military coup but electoral return of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in 2020, and the resurgence of Kirchnerism in Argentina in 2019. In 2021 there was the election of leftist governments in Honduras and Peru, and Chile and even Colombia inaugurated leftist governments after unprecedented social mobilization in 2022. Lula’s Workers’ Party in Brazil was elected to a fourth presidency beginning in January of 2023.

Our question is how leftist the “new” leftist governments that came to power in the 2000s were. To what extent were they successful in translating their socialistic rhetoric into practice? Is there a way to assess the extent to which they moved leftward? We offer both a review of the literature about how to define and operationalize the left and an empirical exploration to adjudicate between the two main strands presented in this debate. What we call the ruptural or maximalist Marxist position—Leninist or Trotskyist in inspiration—contends that Latin America’s left has made no real advance beyond neoliberalism because of its inconsistent policy practices and concessions. The liberal-institutional stand posits a bifurcation of the Latin American left into moderate and radical camps, the former considered more successful because of its emphasis on market-led development and liberal democracy. The radical camp is criticized as populist and fiscally unsustainable.

We contend that both the maximalist and the liberal institutionalist strands are empirically inaccurate. Several radical leftist governments have made significant social democratic advances, particularly in income equality and increasing the real minimum wage. Also, there is no such thing as a coherent bloc of radical or moderate leftism, and the liberal-institutional camp’s claim that the so-called moderate countries are more efficient and successful is not supported by empirical data.

As a theoretical framework, the first section offers a brief overview of radical democracy and the historical strategies of social transformation since the turn of the twentieth century. The second section provides a conceptual analysis of the left in the critical literature, skeptical of Latin America’s left turn. We derive a first set of research sub-questions from maximalist Marxism on whether Latin America’s left constitutes a rupture with the past or has triggered a process of integration into global capitalism. The third section addresses the ways in which liberal-institutional scholars dichotomize Latin America’s leftist governments into moderate and radical lefts. We extract a second set of research sub-questions from this literature to categorize the Latin American left on a continuum from moderation to radicalism and how this plays out in our quantitative analysis. In the fourth section, we discuss our methodological framework for constructing the social democracy index, which is our main contribution here. We then analyze the data and discuss the results and our analytical conclusions.

Radical Democracy and Strategies for Social Transformation

Our main goal in this article is to empirically assess the conceptual positions in the debate on Latin America’s left, but we will briefly outline the theoretical stance that inspires our endeavor, at least on the concepts of radical democracy, the state, and the strategies for social transformation since the turn of the twentieth century.

We begin with Antonio Gramsci’s expanded definition of the democratic state, for which he developed his theory of revolution in the West (Filippini, 2017). Rather than restricting his demarcation to juridical and political structures, Gramsci refers to the expanded state as the sum of “political society” plus “civil society.” The former is the state in the strict sense, the realm of domination, while civil society is the realm of hegemony and consent. The less democratic a state is, the more it must rely on coercion, domination, or force. Conversely, the more democratic a state becomes, the more it relies on hegemony, the persuasion and consent of its people. Democracy leads its citizens to obey the law because it is accepted, not feared. Thus, democracy, says Gramsci, “must mean that every ‘citizen’ can ‘govern’ and that society places him [or her], even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this. Political democracy tends towards a coincidence of rulers and the ruled” (1971: 40). In this latter sense, democracy eliminates any alienation between civil society and the state. This is, of course, an ideal, aspirational concept of democracy based on Marx’s early writings in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. At the upper limit of emancipation, in his 1871 critique of the Gotha Program Marx foresaw the dissolution of the state and its replacement by an “association of direct producers” in communist society. States exist only where there are ruling classes to keep the dominated in check. If classes wither away, as they are theoretically expected to in a classless communist society, the state withers away, too.

Within this broad conception of radical democracy, one of the central questions becomes how subordinate groups or classes can become hegemonic or dominant or at the very least gain the ability to push for state interventions in their favor even within neoliberal capitalism. For Gramsci, answering this question requires the identification of two phases in the struggle: “autonomy vis-à-vis the enemies they had to defeat” and “support from the groups which actively or passively assisted them” (1971: 53). A third requirement posited elsewhere by Gramsci regards the nature of leadership: unless it is democratic and accountable to its social constituency, demoralization and co-optation may be the result. Too often the character of leadership depends not on the leaders themselves or their constituencies but on the state’s coercive or corrupting action (1971: 80n). Even in neoliberal capitalism, state intervention is thus a key mediating dynamic: it can co-opt working-class organizations, repress them and derail them, or enable their collective empowerment with sufficient organized pressure from below (Otero, 2004). The question on Latin America’s left is the extent to which this kind of pressure has resulted in empirically verifiable improvements for the working classes.

We thus follow a structural and relational approach to understanding the state in the strict sense. The state is viewed as a “complex social relation” rather than a mere “pliant tool” (Jessop, 1990: 30). Nicos Poulantzas (2000: 136), for instance, argues that the state consists of a “strategic field” that reflects a condensation of the relation of forces in the form of popular struggles and factional politics among the ruling classes. Bob Jessop (2016) recasts Poulantzas’s arguments into a more systematic form by proposing a “strategic-relational” approach to the state. For Jessop, the state in capitalism is not simply a coherent entity firmly controlled by the bourgeoisie as maximalist Marxists might think. Rather, it is characterized by an “uneven” representation of “mutually contradictory priorities and counter-priorities” (Jessop, 2008: 127). Moreover, state power can even be activated “through the agency of definite political forces in specific political conjunctures” (Jessop, 2008: 37). It follows that the mobilization of subordinate classes from below may have a progressive effect on state policies, depending on the balance of class forces in each political-economic conjuncture (Jessop, 1990: 186).

The strategies of transformation in the socialist camp since the turn of the twentieth century have revolved around three main forms (Wright, 2010: 308–365). The first, which may be called ruptural, Leninist, or indeed maximalist, was inspired by the French and American revolutions of the eighteenth century in that they involved violent means for taking over state power. In the Leninist tradition, the state was thus considered a central institution to be controlled to smash capitalism and steer development in a more egalitarian direction that favored the working classes. Taking over the state was meant to start a transition to socialism first and ultimately advance toward communism. The problem is that a ruptural party like Russia’s Bolsheviks in the early twentieth century was an ineffective means of constructing a democratic egalitarian alternative. Rather, it resulted in authoritarian state-bureaucratic forms of economic organization (Wright, 2010: 107).

On the other end of a continuum of revolutionary politics is the interstitial, autonomist strand of struggle favored by anarchists and communitarians, which focuses on avoiding the state and trying to build postcapitalist alternatives in the interstices of capitalist society (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Holloway, 2002; Zibechi, 2010; 2014). “Interstitial” describes various kinds of “processes that occur in the spaces and cracks within some dominant social structure of power” (Wright, 2010: 322). This perspective shuns electoral politics, which is considered reformist, and also sees the state as intrinsically untrustworthy. Because they are interstitial, though, these struggles may occupy only spaces that are “allowed” by capitalism. In fact, they may even “strengthen capitalism by siphoning off discontent and creating the illusion that if people are unhappy with the dominant institutions they can and should just go off and live their lives in alternative settings” (326). For the interstitial strategy, the state is a monolithic institution, “without significant cracks and with only marginal potentials for emancipatory transformation” (335). From our structural-relational perspective, however, the state contains a heterogeneous set of apparatuses: “It is an arena of struggle in which contending forces in civil society meet. It is a site for class compromise as well as class domination” (336). Both ruptural and autonomist strategies of transformation are set in a zero-sum game: whatever one side wins, the other side loses.

Finally, the symbiotic social democratic strategy has employed a positive-sum logic, which does not necessarily rule out revolutionary change (Wright, 2010; 2019). Instead of overlooking the enduring pertinence of social revolutions, we posit that the hallmark of social revolutions in the twenty-first century transcends a mere direct assault on the state. Rather, it embodies a synthesis of interstitial and symbiotic strategies. Cases in point are Bolivia’s unfinished Communitarian Revolution and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, which have been marked by electoral victories as well as countless setbacks due to factors such as concerted foreign boycott and intervention, coup attempts, economic crisis, and democratic deterioration as a result of resurfacing contradictions between the state and social movements. Understood as such, the symbiotic social democratic strategy not only places its bets on the electoral process but refutes a deterministic emphasis on violent means to achieve power. Regarding violence, it is similar to the autonomist strategy: they both dislike it and distrust armies as hierarchical organizations that they would prefer not to promote in a future society. Social democrats also consider the state a central institution for steering development in more favorable terms for the working class (Fung and Wright, 2003). A key requirement of the symbiotic strategy is developing the associational, organizational power of the working classes (Wright, 2010: 353). This is reminiscent of Roger Burbach’s (2014: 40–41) portrayal of the Latin American left as offering “alternative economies” including “worker-run cooperatives, municipal and community-owned enterprises, fair trade campaigns designed to assist small commodity exporters and cooperatives, micro-credit banks and community-based funds that make loans to small producers (often in the informal sector).”

Central to working-class empowerment is that it is never a gift; it is always the result of class struggle. As we will see in the Latin American debate, while leftist governments have ascended within social democratic projects and varied coalitions, they have been criticized both by the ruptural, maximalist Marxists and by liberal institutionalists, who distrust them.

Maximalist Marxists on the Latin American Left: Research Puzzle “A”

The so-called left turn in Latin America was postulated on a strong rejection of neoliberalism in discourse. The left’s strategic setbacks in countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Ecuador since 2015 seem to have rekindled the debates about how leftist Latin America’s governments really have been and whether the left has presented a genuine, social democratic challenge to neoliberal capitalism in practice (Ellner, 2019). Our operationalization of social democracy will be contextualized and fleshed out in the subsequent discussion of the Latin American left. In the strategic-relational framework of symbiotic strategies described in the previous section, we define social democracy broadly, primarily in terms of the quest for economic equality and expansion of welfare provisions (e.g., income equality, social spending, employment, wages) and the guaranteeing of elementary democratic rules. While the adjective “social” indicates the leftist or socialistic orientation of the Latin American left, the term “democracy” emphasizes the divergence of this left from the ruptural strategies inscribed in the Soviet tradition of authoritarian state socialism characterized by a one-party political system and a fully state-controlled economy. In this framework, our Gramscian re-interpretation of the term "social democracy" differs from the evolutionary interpretation of social democracy that was prevalent during the era of the Second International, at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as from the centrist conceptualizations advanced by figures associated with the Third Way, such as Tony Blair, at the turn of the twenty-first century. Both interpretations of social democracy focused on reformism and cooptative politics, within an overall (neo)liberal framework, while also lending support to imperialistic wars of aggression.

Pessimistic accounts of the Latin American left turn came from both the maximalist Marxist left and the liberal-institutional mainstream. For example, representing the first position, James Petras posited that the rise to eminence of left regimes in Latin America hardly entails a radical rupture from neoliberalism. This discourse is officially represented by Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, but it can also be associated with the ideal of communitarian socialism in Evo Morales’s Bolivia and the project of a “Citizens’ Revolution” in Rafael Correa’s Ecuador. A common trait of this continental discourse speaks to the critique of state socialism for its antidemocratic political system, departure from the armed guerilla struggle toward democratic electoral strategies, anti-imperialism, and diversification of the political agenda toward gender equality and environmental justice (Arditi, 2010; Burbach, Fox, and Fuentes, 2013; Lievesley and Ludlam, 2009; Petras, 2011; Rodríguez-Garavito, Barrett, and Chavez, 2008).

According to Petras (2011: 32), regardless of the political diversity of Latin America’s left governments, they tend to be closely involved with multinational corporations and their extractivist projects. Having remained an oil-dependent country, Venezuela, for example, has failed to resolve the question of inequality, introduce a sweeping agrarian reform, and reverse class hierarchies by imposing progressive taxation and suppressing bourgeois interests from the ranks of state bureaucracy (Petras, 2011: 14–17). Petras’s portrayal of Venezuela strongly echoes those of others who observe that the private sector “takes up a larger share of the economy than it did before Chávez came to office” (Beasley-Murray, Cameron, and Hershberg, 2010: 9). A similar situation is observed in Ecuador’s “Citizens’ Revolution,” which has imposed restrictions on strikes and allowed for greater foreign ownership in strategic areas including mining and energy resources, telecommunications, banking, and commercial exports (Petras, 2011: 17–19). Despite tremendous achievements in the area of indigenous rights and autonomy, Bolivia has increasingly been relying on cooperation with foreign-owned extractive firms and large landowners (Petras, 2011: 19–24).

In line with Veltmeyer and Petras, Jeffery R. Webber and Barry Carr (2013) concur that most of Latin America’s leftist governments amount to a continuation of the neoliberal capitalist project. Webber infers that new left policies in Latin America constitute “a tactical response of the ruling classes to adjust to the social contradictions generated by the implementation of neoliberalism in the region while preserving the underlying class-project and the successes it has enjoyed” (Webber, 2010: 227). He goes on to associate Latin America’s left with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “passive revolution,” in which “capacities for social mobilization from below are co-opted, contained, or selectively repressed, while the dominant classes’ political initiative is restored” (Webber, 2017: par.16). According to Webber, Bolivia is a case in point regarding the Latin American left’s limitations. This country underwent an insurrectionary cycle with the outbreak of water and gas wars between 2000 and 2005, but it was interrupted by a return to conventional parliamentary politics and eventually the reconstitution of neoliberalism. Bolivia’s political economy following the insurrectionary period was marked by greater integration into the global market combined with heavier reliance on the exportation of hydrocarbons and minerals. Increasing government revenue was not reflected in social spending, which substantially decreased as a proportion of the gross domestic product (GDP). Accompanied by growing inflation rates, precarious labor conditions persisted alongside high poverty and inequality levels (Webber, 2011). Similarly, William I. Robinson (2019) relies on Gramsci’s notion of “passive revolution” to conclude that Latin America’s left has represented the power of dominant classes and a global force that Robinson calls the “transnational capitalist class” (Gürcan, 2015; Otero, 2011). Through this class, “many of the Pink Tide states were able to push forward a new wave of capitalist globalization with greater credibility than their orthodox and politically bankrupt neoliberal predecessors” (Robinson, 2017: par. 5).

Compared with maximalist analyses, meanwhile, Tom Chodor (2015: 147–148) offers a more nuanced analysis that contrasts the counterhegemonic thrust represented by the Venezuelan left with the passive revolution represented by Brazil. While on the very surface this comparison seems to resonate with bifurcated approaches voiced by the mainstream literature, Chodor acknowledges that both counterhegemonic and passive-revolutionary alternatives offer increased opportunities for opening up “political, economic, and ideological spaces within which Latin Americans have gained more autonomy from external pressures emanating from the United States, the institutions of the neoliberal world order and transnational capital.”

A main research puzzle that guides the course of this research is thus the so-called authenticity of Latin America’s left, labeled a “pink tide” by many (e.g., Robinson, 2008). An interesting sub-question that arises from this puzzle is how leftist radical leftist governments are in practice in countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador compared with their more “moderate” counterparts in countries such as Chile and Brazil. Our research seeks to contribute to these debates by offering an empirically based comparative analysis to assess the degree of social democratic policy implementation in practice.

For the purposes of this article, we use the term “left” to designate a vast array of political or social movements that rhetorically— if not always substantively—prioritize the social democratic issues of social justice, equality, and democracy so as to include both moderate reformers and revolutionaries (Katz, 2005; Zibechi, 2003). In fact, these issues seem to be a recurrent theme that runs through much of the discussion on the definition of the left in the literature. For example, in Castañeda’s (2006: 32) definition, the left is portrayed as “a current of thought, politics, and policy that stresses social improvement over macroeconomic orthodoxy, egalitarian distribution of wealth over its creation, sovereignty over international cooperation, democracy.” A vague reference to democracy is also echoed in Richard Flacks’s (1988: 100) definition of the left as “a body of thought . . . that seeks to expand the capacity of the people themselves to make the decisions that affect the conditions and terms of everyday life.” In turn, Hugh Stretton (1976: 2) emphasizes the equality component of the left by defining it in terms of political actors’ attitude in favor of reducing inequalities (Stretton, 1976: 2). Similarly, Juan Pablo Luna and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s (2014: 4) definition frames the left as “characterized by the idea that the main inequalities between the people are artificial and thus seeks to overcome them by active state involvement.” Likewise, Steven Levitsky and Kenneth M. Roberts (2011: 5) conceptualize the left as “political actors who seek to employ public authority to protect individuals and groups from market insecurities, reduce social and economic inequalities, and strengthen the voice of underprivileged groups.” Tony Hilfer (2014: 2) also views the left “as a politics aimed at restructuring the socioeconomic order so as to equalize wealth and power.”

From this brief overview we can see that there are considerable overlaps among scholars of varying theoretical positions that pertain to a wide spectrum of socioeconomic phenomena. This wide spectrum has an advantage in that it can help us to capture the widely acknowledged “heterogeneity” of the Latin America left (Ellner, 2014; 2019; Lievesley and Ludlam, 2009; Rodríguez-Garavito, Barrett, and Chavez, 2008; Raby, 2014; Burbach, 2014). The literature’s emphasis on the centrality of social justice and equality—used here interchangeably and broadly understood as an “ideal condition in which all members of a society have the same basic rights, protection, opportunities, obligations, and social benefits” (Barker, 2003: 404)—is reflected in key social- democracy indicators such as income equality, employment rates, minimum real wages, social spending, and democracy as part of the left’s foundational claims against neoliberal capitalism.

The first four indicators of our social democracy index are thus intended to measure the left’s commitment to equality and the working class. The Gini coefficient, turned into a percentage, is used to assess income inequality: a value of 0 represents perfect equality and 100 represents perfect inequality. We then subtract Gini scores from 100 in order to estimate income equality (see Pampel and Williamson, 2001: 264, for an example). With the new calculation, the closer the income equality score is to 100, the more income-equal the society is. While economic equality is estimated based on the World Inequality Database, employment data are extracted from the International Labor Organization database (2021). Minimum real wages and social spending are derived from the online database of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Social spending includes expenditures on education, health and nutrition, social security, social assistance, labor, housing, water, and sanitation (CEPAL, 2016).

Besides the basic working-class demands claimed by leftism, moreover, we assess the Latin American left’s claim to democracy, equality, and pluralism based on an indicator of voter turnout in national elections that is derived from the International Idea database (Idea, 2021). Clearly, this indicator is a far cry from our aspirational definition of radical and participatory democracy, but it is the most proximate indicator available for assessing national democracies in the region. The higher this indicator is, the better conditions there are for deepening democracy.

In a first approximation to our data presentation and analysis, we focus on the commodities-boom period, from 2000 to 2014 (IMF, 2017). In this period, Latin American governments took advantage of rising global primary commodity prices to the benefit of state taxation and social policies (Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014). When we rank-ordered our sample countries according to their social democracy indices in 2014 (Figure 1), the top performer was Argentina, followed very closely by Brazil, Uruguay. and Chile, with Venezuela occupying a middling position. Then came Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, all of them above our control group of neoliberal countries, Colombia and Mexico, which are at the bottom.

Figure 1.

Social democracy index for the commodities-boom period (2000–2014).

Focusing on the starting and ending years of the commodities boom, 2000 and 2014 and rank-order from left to right according to how much their social democracy indices had increased by 2014, we find Argentina the country that showed the greatest advance and Uruguay the country that showed the least (Figure 2). Note, however, that Uruguay had started out with the highest score, 0.33, in 2000. Thus the relative advances of Colombia and Mexico should be assessed in this context: they both advanced from very low levels and remained at the bottom of the pack by 2014 (although rounding makes it appear as if they were tied with Nicaragua). Until 2014, then, the self-designated leftist governments did in fact achieve better social democracy performances, contrary to what maximalist Marxist critics have asserted.

Figure 2.

Social democracy indices in first and last years of commodities boom (grey, 2000; black, 2014).

Liberal Institutionalists on the Latin American Left: Research Puzzle “B”

A central discussion in the literature on Latin America’s left is how to categorize and differentiate between the various strands of Latin America’s leftism, which was initiated by Jorge Castañeda’s dichotomy between the “good” and the “bad” left (Castañeda, 2006; Levitsky and Roberts, 2011; Moreno-Brid and Paunovic, 2010;Vargas-Llosa, 2007; Weyland, 2010). According to Castañeda, the new Latin American left is divided into what he calls the “pragmatic, sensible, realistic, honest, responsible, and humanized” left (Brazil, Chile, Uruguay) and the “nationalist, populist, and statist” or simply dishonest and irresponsible left (Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina) (Castañeda, 2006; 2008). Comparable language is used elsewhere to differentiate between the so-called vegetarian and the carnivore left (Vargas-Llosa, 2007: 60) or social democracy and populism (Lynch, 2007: 378).

Parallel with Castañeda’s categorization, Kurt Weyland proposes the “moderate left” and the “contestatory left” and concludes that the moderate left performs better as to social justice and democracy (Weyland, 2010: 6). For him, the contestatory left, represented by Venezuela and Bolivia, ended up undermining liberal democracy because of its emphasis on participatory democracy, which allegedly resonates with majoritarianism rather than genuinely deepening democracy (Weyland, 2010: 14). According to Weyland and colleagues, one of the major benefits of the moderate left represented by Brazil and Chile consists of respecting liberal democracy and its “existing political institutions” while dedicating its efforts to finding common ground with the opposition instead of “rewriting the political rules” (Madrid, Hunter, and Weyland, 2010:141–142). Using Castañeda’s language, these scholars also brand the radical left as “inefficient, imprudent, and irresponsible” (Weyland, 2011: 73–74).

Castañeda’s and Weyland’s frameworks find an echo in the work of Steven Levitsky and Kenneth M. Roberts. According to them, the new Latin American left is differentiated in terms of levels of institutionalization of political parties and social movements and the nature of the political authority in place (Levitsky and Roberts, 2011: 12). As far as levels of institutionalization are concerned, Levitsky and Roberts distinguish between established organizations that have long-standing effects (Chile, Brazil, et al.) and recently created organizations that simply serve as electoral vehicles for leaders or movements that challenge the preexisting institutional structure (Venezuela, Bolivia, et al.). As for political authority, they identify movements dominated by individual figures and those that disperse power (Levitsky and Roberts, 2011: 12–13). Despite their critique of Castañeda, however, Levitsky and Roberts cannot avoid resorting to the dichotomy between moderation (“good left”) and radicalism (“bad left”).

Another significant categorization effort comes from Jon Beasley-Murray, Maxwell A. Cameron, and Eric Hershberg (2010). While acknowledging the diversity of the Latin American left, Beasley-Murray and colleagues argue that differentiation within the left can be better assessed once the focus of attention is shifted to the question “Why is liberalism insufficient in Latin America?” (13). Accordingly, they praise the democratic potential of indigenous movements as long as they remain within the confines of the “basic liberal rights and freedoms” (13, 16) rather than revolutionizing the conventional liberal democratic institutions. The same argument is reasserted elsewhere as to the need for “peacefully and (more or less) legally transforming the system” (Cameron and Sharpe, 2010: 77) without resorting to revolutionary violence and transforming property relations via class struggle. Ultimately, this perspective unintendedly reproduces Castañeda’s “bad left” thesis to the extent that those who attempt to transform bourgeois legality may be demonized as enemies of liberal democracy.

Finally, Francisco Panizza (2009) suggests categorizing the new Latin American left with reference to forms of political representation. His categorization is predicated on a liberal-institutional account that echoes that of Cameron and colleagues in that he tends to favor liberal over participatory democracy because of the latter’s “well-known problems of legitimacy, mobilization bias and representation” (Panizza, 2009: 224). In analyzing internal differences within the left, he identifies three forms of representation—those associated with party, social movement, and personalist leaders. For example, Venezuela is ranked low in party representation, low-medium in social representation because of limited autonomy in movement participation, and high in personalist representation. Brazil ranks low in personalist representation and high in party representation because Lula’s leadership was constrained by institutional checks and balances and higher levels of institutionalization in the Workers’ Party. Somehow, Brazil’s performance in social representation is reflected as medium-low—better than Venezuela’s performance, probably because of higher levels of autonomy rather than the intensity of social mobilization (Panizza, 2009).

In Bolivia’s case, party representation is assessed as low, whereas social and personalist forms of representation are high. Argentina is medium in party representation and high in personalist representation because of the Kirchners’ charismatic leadership and exhibits relatively high levels of institutionalization within the Peronist left (Panizza, 2009: 189–193). Surprisingly, Panizza presents Argentina’s performance in social representation as better than Brazil’s, although liberal-institutional and even maximalist Marxist accounts in the literature complain about higher levels of co-optation in social movement organizing and lower levels of dispersion in the sharing of political power in Argentina (Levitsky and Roberts, 2011; Robinson, 2008).

Worthy of note is that Argentina’s leftism is a matter of controversy in the literature. Part of (post-) Castañeda-type scholarship portrays Argentina as a representative of the so-called bad and radical left (Castañeda, 2006; 2008; Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2012), whereas maximalist Marxist accounts categorize it under the social democratic and capitalist left (Robinson, 2008: 290). Others prefer to view Argentina as part of the “moderate left,” closer to Brazil’s experience in leftism (Ellner, 2014; Levitsky and Roberts, 2011: 12–13; Webber and Carr, 2013). Therefore, a second research puzzle that arises from these discussions in the liberal-institutional literature is how variation in Latin America’s leftist governments from moderation to radicalism plays out in our quantitative assessment of the social democracy index. Is this variation consistent with the mainstream literature’s portrayal of Latin American leftist governments?

Constructing the Social Democracy Index

Our assessment of how leftist self-described left governments are relies on the construction of a social democracy index consisting of the geometric mean¹ of a set of five indicators with varying weights assigned by us for 2000–2019: minimum real wages, social spending, income equality (inverse of the Gini coefficient), employment rates, and voter turnout (CEPAL, 2016; World Bank, 2016; Idea, 2021; ILO, 2021). In previous sections, we have identified our variables and discussed our reasoning for including them in dialogue with the literature on the Latin American left reviewed above.

The sample of Latin American countries for which we have calculated the index includes (1) Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Argentina as part of the so-called radical left; (2) Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay as the moderate left; and (3) Mexico and Colombia for a high-contrast sub-sample of all-out adopters of neoliberal policies (i.e., the “nonleft”). To assess the debate reviewed on Latin America’s leftism, we present our sample countries in a continuum that goes from moderation to radicalism per the liberal-institutionalist categories. We first look at data between 2000 and 2014 (after Hugo Chávez’s 1998 electoral victory and the last year of the commodities boom). A second set of data presented later includes a postboom period through 2019 for comparison.

In constructing our index, we assigned weights to our variables by conducting the analytic hierarchy process, a widely used method (OECD, 2008) for “identifying relative weights of indicators and sub-indices” (Sutadian et al., 2017: 222) given its practical advantages as a method that is “readily understandable and easily implemented” (Juwana et al., 2022: 4082). Its main advantage is to quantify the researchers’ objective and subjective judgments “in order to make a trade-off and to determine the priority (relative weight of each element over another).” To calculate the index weights, the researcher creates a hierarchy of indicators and constructs a pairwise comparison matrix by using a 1–9 scale (OECD, 2008; Gómez-Limón, Arriaza, and Guerrero-Baena, 2020). We thus regrouped our five variables into three sets with differential weights: equality, working-class demands, and democracy. Equality and democracy are represented by sole variables, income equality and voter turnout, respectively. Working-class demands include the remainder of our indicators—minimum real wages, public social expenditures (per person in constant dollars), and employment rates. Our model assigns to equality the highest order of importance among the variables involved.²

To assess the empirical validity of our index, we focus on construct and convergent validity. Construct validity concerns the correspondence “between the measure under consideration and theoretical expectations about that measure” (Badie, 2011: 1515). To maximize construct validity for our index, we heavily relied on the literature on the Latin American left by inductively extracting and defining our variables from this debate, as discussed above. Finally, we conducted an internal consistency reliability test by calculating Cronbach’s alpha, which assesses the internal consistency of multiple-item measures (Dukes, 2005). Our calculations show a very strong correlation between our variables (0.885).

Convergent validity is understood as “comparing findings from different techniques of data generation . . . to measure the same concept” (Loseke, 2016: 137). Convergent validity has been established through a correlation analysis of the Human Development Index and the social democracy index scores of our sample.³ Countries that have advances in social democracy will presumably also increase their HDI. Results for each country indicate a strongly positive correlation that ranges from 0.73 to 0.98, except for Venezuela (0.45) (UNDP, 2020).

Analysis and Discussion

Our data analysis will test two hypotheses derived from the literature on the rise of Latin America’s left since the 2000s. The immobility Hypothesis A suggests that Latin America’s left turn is but an illusion because the Latin American left has failed to translate its radical discourse into practice and instead facilitated regional integration into neoliberal global capitalism. At the risk of oversimplification, the bifurcation Hypothesis B contends that a left turn has actually taken place in Latin America but is not a uniform or homogeneous process. Rather, the left is bifurcated into two distinct tendencies: a moderate left that is presented as a success story for its “liberal-democratic” and “pragmatic” approach and a radical left that is doomed to failure due to its “populist” and “inefficient” approach.

Our social democracy index calls for a more cautious and nuanced interpretation than merely focusing on absolute values. Simply comparing the scores obtained in 2014 might lead to misleading interpretations, especially if the countries concerned started out with higher scores prior to the leftist upsurge as is particularly the case for Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. The total percentage change in each country between 2000 and 2014 (Figure 3), which reveals the surprisingly good performance of Argentina and Venezuela alongside Brazil and Nicaragua, deeply questions the validity of Hypothesis A.

Figure 3.

Increase in social democracy index by country (%), 2000–2014.

The break may not be definitive, and Latin America continues to depend on extractivism, but engaging in redistributive policies and deepening democracy do lead our sample countries to improve their social democracy performance. There is at least some movement in the right direction, and this should be acknowledged.

Still, it turns out that extractivism as an indicator of both socioenvironmental destruction and closer involvement with multinationals constitutes a well-substantiated concern about leftist governments that will be further validated when we extend our analysis through the post-commodities-boom period to 2019 below (see also Riofrancos, 2021). At this point, thanks to extractivism and heavy oil dependency, Venezuela is the country that most sharply validates Hypothesis A’s concerns (Figures 4 and 5), but for reasons other than those invoked by maximalist Marxists. It is not surprising, however, that Colombia and Mexico’s index is also at the bottom of our sample, as they were the most staunchly neoliberal throughout the period.

Figure 4.

Social democracy index, 2000–2019.

Figure 5.

Social democracy index change between 2000 and 2019.

Analyzing the percentage changes in the index from 2000 to 2019, we see that Mexico was the second-worst performer, after Venezuela. Mexico has fared disastrously since its incorporation into the North American Free Trade Agreement, with slower economic growth than the rest of Latin America and compared with its own record for the previous two decades (Bartra and Otero, 2009; Hristov, 2014; Otero, 2011b), stagnant real wages, rising unemployment, stagnant poverty rates at nearly 50 percent, increased unemployment, and loss of agricultural jobs (Weisbrot, Lefebvre, and Sammut, 2014). But Colombia’s fourth rank is surprising, given that it has also been a bulwark of neoliberalism (Avilés, 2012; Hristov, 2014; Motta, 2014; Ocampo, 2015:4). A plausible hypothesis is that the continued presence of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) until the 2016 peace agreement pressured the government to engage in redistributive policies to enhance its legitimacy.

Overall Social democracy scores also provide a conflicting picture regarding both hypotheses. Several leftist governments in Latin America have indeed undergone substantial leaps in their social democratic achievements since the electoral victory of leftist governments. Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay have recorded increases of over 42 percent, 32 percent, and 26 percent, respectively (see Figure 5). Although the so-called moderate left is supposed to be more efficient than its radical counterpart, Argentina outpaced all the countries in our sample by 2014. Even Venezuela was performing fine until 2014 in fifth place among ten countries. When the percentage increase of social democracy scores since 2000 is considered, the so-called radical left turns out to have been more articulate in Argentina, which was the best performer in this category with a substantial increase, from about 0.25 to more than 0.36 points. Argentina is followed by Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, all of which are considered “moderate.” Furthermore, the fact that Uruguay has the third-best score in 2014 (see Figure 2) but only a small percentage increase (see Figure 3) questions the validity of the bifurcation hypothesis of homogeneity of the moderate leftist camp. As Figure 4 shows, the so-called radical left camp is no less heterogeneous than its “moderate” counterpart, also given the disparity between Argentina and Ecuador’s absolute scores in 2014 (see Figure 2). When it comes to the percentage increase of social democracy scores since 2000, Nicaragua ranks seventh, although Argentina occupies the top of our list by 2014. That Venezuela’s performance is the poorest in our sample when considering the social democracy through 2019 is further confirmation of the heterogeneity of the so-called radical leftist camp (see Figures 4 and 5). In Venezuela’s case, though, one cannot ignore the huge role played by the continued boycott and harassment by the U.S. state, at least since 2014.

Concluding Remarks

In this article, we have assessed the scholarship about the left turns in Latin America since 1998. Given the strong skepticism that pervades the literature, we first outlined our theoretical stance on radical democracy, the state, and, especially, the strategies of social transformation since the turn of the twentieth century: ruptural, interstitial, and symbiotic. We argued that the leftist governments in Latin America have adopted the last, symbiotic or social democratic strategy. To measure whether it has made any progress in practice, we construct a social democracy index that measures the extent to which Latin America’s leftist governments have actually moved policy leftward, toward social democratic outcomes that favor the working class. Venezuela being an exception, our conclusions confirm that the “pink tide” did not do nearly as badly as the maximalist Marxists or the liberal democrats had predicted: there were in fact significant social democratic advances.

We tested two hypotheses based on a set of five variables making up the social democracy index: Hypothesis A, extracted from the maximalist Marxist, skeptical literature on the left turn from the perspective of ruptural and interstitial strategies of building the left; and Hypothesis B, derived from the liberal-institutional mainstream literature that categorizes the left moderate and radical or good and bad. Regarding Hypothesis A, evidence from our index calls for caution in underestimating the scope of Latin America’s left turn while confirming the challenge of overdependency on extractivism and multinational corporations (Ellner, 2021). Latin America’s progressive governments must do a much better job of transcending social-assistance programs in favor of structural transformations toward an endogenous model of development (Otero, 2021). As far as Hypothesis B is concerned, not only is the moderate-radical categorization questionable because of the lack of homogeneous performance within these country groups but also the portrayal of the so-called moderate left as “efficient, pragmatic, and responsible” and the so-called radical left as “inefficient and irresponsible” does not meet our empirical test, again with the exception of Venezuela. In fact, special mention is to be made of Venezuela’s surprisingly poor overall performance as the poster child of the so-called radical left. Ironically, there is a coincidence in Venezuela’s case for predictions of both Hypotheses A and B in its bad or radical-left variant. Yet, U.S.-promoted foreign involvement, sanctions, and economic blockade must be factored into Venezuela’s social democratic collapse after 2014. As social scientists, as usual, we must test discourse with as much and as good empirical evidence as we can muster. As progressive social activists, we can hope that pushing for more revolutionary social democratic policies can indeed bear fruit, even in a still-dominant neoliberal capitalistic world.

The main historical challenge for the left is to resolve what Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden, and Marc Becker (2014: 7) call the “strategic dilemmas” of the Latin American left by forging a grand confluence between the autonomist social left, focused on civil society, and the social democratic left, focused on political society or the state in the strict sense. Thea Riofrancos (2020; 2021) has labeled the latter strand as the left-in-power, mostly pushing a development project that comes from before and is deeply rooted in the half-millennium history of extractivism in Latin America. Then there is the left-in-resistance, based in the communities that are most affected by extractivism. As long as these two strands of the left cannot talk to each other and agree on ways of transcending the extractivist model with one that is endogenous and self-sustaining, advances toward a popular social democratic project will face greater challenges. Colombia’s 2022 elections could well become the first test case of a political alliance of these two lefts: President Gustavo Petro coming from the political, electoral or social- democratic left and Vice President Francia Márquez coming from the autonomist, communitarian left. If their respective constituencies can agree on a common, postextractivist program, Colombia could become a model to emulate.

Footnotes

Notes

Efe Can Gürcan is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and an associate professor of international relations at İstinye University, Gerardo Otero a professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University, and İlayda İsabetli Fidan an assistant professor of economics at İstinye University.

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