ABSTRACT
Latin America's political experience has been marked on the dark side by corruption, egoism, injustice, inertia, inequality, violence, exclusion, and shortsightedness. Latin America's experience dramatically underscores the fact that there is no quick and easy path to political development. Most Latin American countries have the formal institutions of democracy—elections, legislatures, political parties, and so on—but are not very democratic underneath. Latin American societies have undergone vast changes in the past generation, changes that have transformed the societal foundations of political life. A decided majority of Latin America's population is urban; soon urbanites will become the overwhelming population bulk. Latin America's experience also underscores the essential validity of views propounded at the end of the 1960s by Dankwart A. Rustow concerning the fact that democratization is a lengthy and generally discontinuous process. The vast expansion of the electorate in recent decades in the great majority of Latin American countries is of the greatest significance with respect to democratic political development.
