From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics

Based on extensive original research and detailed historical case studies, this book links historical institutional analysis and social movement theory to a study of political systems in which new ethnic cleavages have emerged. It studies the surprising transformation of indigenous peoples’ movements into viable political parties in the 1990s in four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and their failure to succeed in two others (Argentina, Peru). The study concludes with the democratic implications of the emergence of this phenomenon in the context of declining public support for parties.

Donna Lee Van Cott is Associate Professor of Political Science and Latin American studies at Tulane University. She is author of The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America (2000), editor of Indigenous Peoples and Democracy in Latin America (1994), and has published more than a dozen articles on related topics. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship as well as a residential fellowship from the Helen Kellogg Institute of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Dr Van Cott is the founding chair of the section on Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples of the Latin American Studies Association.