ABSTRACT
Democracy is one of those essentially contested concepts that, in W. B. Gallie’s famous dictum, “inevitably involve endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users”. In the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars addressed the issue of democracy rather indirectly through the lenses of modernization theory or the dependency paradigm, studies particularly aimed to explain the failure of democracy in Latin America. The new struggle over democracy that has characterized Inter-American relations since the turn of the century is multi-dimensional. With the election of a series of more or less leftist presidents since the first electoral victory of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, domestic challenges to liberal democracy within Latin American countries scaled up to become an issue of Inter-American relations. A rich debate about the proper meaning of democracy is in itself a good indicator of a democratic state of affairs.
