Political-electoral reforms in Latin America (2015-2018)

Since the third wave of democratization (Huntington, 1994), at least 265 reforms have been made to key dimensions of electoral systems in the countries of Latin America. Despite this, reformist activism has not been enough to solve long-standing problems, including the under-representation of different social groups, the weak internal democracy of the parties, the lack of transparency in political financing, inequity in competition, bad electoral practices, and the shortcomings of electoral governance. This research seeks to identify the main tendencies of recent electoral reforms in 18 Latin American countries (2015-2018) with the intention of establishing whether the reformist agendas identified in previous research were maintained (1978-2015) (Freidenberg and Dosek, 2016a). The study uses, the comparative database of the Observatory of Political Reforms in Latin America as its major source of evidence. The results show that, in the last three years, 23 new changes have focused mainly on correcting the unexpected effects of previous electoral reforms and, in some cases, expanding the rights of underrepresented segments of the population. In addition, it is argued that the current reformist agenda lacks innovative proposals that could allow us to glimpse new ways to strengthen democracy in the region.