Reflections on the question of democracy

Abstract

Political scientists have many obsessions. The first, of course, is to reflect, speak and think about politics. The second is democracy, especially in Latin America, a continent where political science is alive today and the issue of democracy is one of the great questions that political scientists are called to debate. But this was not always the case and Latin America has a particular history regarding the study of democracy. If you take the sixties and seventies, and read the classic texts of that decade, there are no references to the subject of democracy, since it was not an important variable in those years (Cardoso and Faletto, 1977).