The rise of ethnic politics in Latin America

Résumé 0

Project Summary: This research, which was eventually published in a 2012 book by Cambridge University Press entitled The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America, focused on the emergence of indigenous parties in Latin America. Specifically, it sought to explain why some parties based in the indigenous population succeeded while others failed. The study focused on the three South American countries with the largest indigenous populations--Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru--but a comparative chapter examined the fate of indigenous parties in the rest of Latin America as well. The central argument of this study is that indigenous-based parties have succeeded in recent years by using inclusive ethnic and populist appeals to reach out to whites and mestizo as well as indigenous people. Indigenous parties, unlike many other ethnic parties, have managed to win support across ethnic lines because the long history of racial mixing in Latin America blurred ethnic boundaries and reduced ethnic polarization. Data Abstract: This study used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews, party documents, journalistic accounts, surveys of public opinion and municipal-level census and electoral data. The data consist of notes in Spanish from interviews with prominent party leaders, legislators, interest group representatives, government officials, and pollsters. I selected interviewees who were deemed to have extensive knowledge of the elections and the parties involved in them and the interest groups that supported them. I was particularly interested in interviewees who were knowledgeable about or involved with the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia, Pachakutik in Ecuador, the Partido Nacionalista Peruano (PNP) in Peru, and Winaq in Guatemala. The interviews were conducted in 10 summer research trips to Latin America between 2002 and 2008. The interviews were unstructured in nature and were conducted by the author.