ABSTRACT
AS WE SAW in the introduction, judging the condition of democracy in Latin Amer-ica may depend on how we understand the meaning of democracy. Th e United States, the most powerful nation in the world, promotes “liberal democracy,” a version that most political scientists take almost for granted today. But democracy as it is defi ned in the United States does not necessarily refl ect what democracy means to Latin Americans. Most of this chapter is devoted, however, to the U.S. conception and a model, called “ polyarchy ,” that emerged as the orthodox (main) way that political scientists conceive liberal democracy. Of course, we do not use “polyarchy” in everyday speech, and rarely do we fi nd it in news. But the model, if not the term, has migrated from academia to the world of policy.
