The Political Incorporation of Popular Sectors in Latin America

• In Event: Political Incorporation: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Implications

Abstract

Why did the expanded inclusion of popular sectors in Latin America not prevent the eruption of a severe legitimacy crisis? The process of inclusion does not necessarily entail a process of politically incorporating the popular sectors into the political system. We assume that political legitimacy results from the functioning of political institutions that politically incorporate the popular sectors, i.e., social organizations and political parties with the ability to permanently channel the demands and interests of substantive constituencies into the political system. In line with this assumption, we reconsider the concept of political incorporation. Our concept of political incorporation has two dimensions: 1. the existence of political rights (a formal component) and 2. the system capacity of political aggregation (a substantive component) that grants, individual citizens acting collectively, permanent access to the decision-making; both are necessary attributes of the concept. Our definition differs from others in the literature in two important ways. First, the adoption of policies, even those associated with the ability to access the political process (e.g. participatory mechanisms) or policies recognizing the rights of previously marginalized actors (e.g. expansion of rights of indigenous peoples), is not a component of our concept since we view it as an outcome of political incorporation. Second, in contrast to current theories that conceptualize the incorporation and inclusion of specific constituencies (associated with a given territory or a given issue), our definition emphasizes the aggregate level of politics. This second difference is crucial because the relationship between political incorporation and the legitimacy and stability of the political system is contingent upon the ability of political agents to harmonize different constituencies’ preferences and make them part of the general political process. Based on this new conceptualization we developed an index of incorporation and a typology of diminished forms of incorporation that we applied to Latin American countries.

Authors

• Rafael Piñeiro, Universidad Catolica del Uruguay

• Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Universidad de la República

• Fernando Rosenblatt, University of Manchester