Towards Post-Liberal Democracy in Latin America? A Conceptual Framework Applied to Bolivia
Recent political changes across Latin America that challenge mainstream conceptions of liberal democracy have led to speculation about some kind of post-liberal democracy possibly emerging in the region. Up to now, however, there has been no systematic assessment of this proposition or any explicit conception of post-liberal democracy. This article fills this research gap by proposing a conceptual framework for analysing political change in the direction of post-liberal democracy, in Latin America and beyond, and probes the plausibility of this framework in a case study of Bolivia. It shows that the concept of post-liberal democracy helps us make sense of the contemporary transformation of Bolivian democracy and that it has comparative advantages over alternative conceptual frameworks such as radical populism and defective – that is, illiberal or delegative – democracy.