The Boiling Frog Paradox or How Democracies Slowly Die. A Deep Analysis on Democratic Erosion and Autocratization in Latin America

Abstract

In the 1990s, Argentine political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell theorized about a particular political animal within the ecosystem of global transitions, delegative democracies. These emerged in contexts of deep structural crises and were characterized by a meager development of traditional democratic institutions, coexisting with deeply rooted practices of particularism, clientelism, and low state bureaucratic density. Despite these anomalies, O’Donnell maintained a relative twofaced optimism regarding transitions in Latin America, on the one hand, he foresaw few possibilities for a classic authoritarian regression in most countries of the region; and, on the other hand, he assumed that the different institutional configurations adopted by these political regimes still belonged to the genus of democratic systems, even if they were far from what traditional theory catalogs as an institutionalized polyarchy.