21.2.Seligson Violence Politics

7/29/2019 21.2.Seligson Violence Politics

1/14

Crime, Hard Times, and Discontent

Mitchell A. SeligsonJohn A. Booth

Journal of Democracy, Volume 21, Number 2, April 2010, pp.123-135 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/jod.0.0159

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by University of Kansas Libraries at 05/11/11 8:49PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jod/summary/v021/21.2.seligson.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jod/summary/v021/21.2.seligson.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jod/summary/v021/21.2.seligson.html


2/14

crime, hard times,and discontent

Mitchell A. Seligson and John A. Booth

Mitchell A. Seligson is Centennial Professor of Political Science andProfessor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. He is the director of

the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which carries

out the AmericasBarometer surveys.John A. Booth is Regents Profes-

sor of Political Science at the University of North Texas and Americas-

Barometer country-team director for Nicaragua. They are coauthors

of The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Democracy and Political

Support in Eight Nations (2009).

The countries of Central AmericaCosta Rica, El Salvador, Guate-mala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panamashare so many important cul-tural, historical, economic, and political traits that it is unsurprising to

find the challenges they face in building democracy bearing many simi-

larities as well. At the same time, there are significant subregional varia-

tions, with democratic consolidation on a firmer footing in some nations

than in others.1 Over the last fifteen years, only Honduras has suffered a

democratic breakdown. That came when its Congress, courts, and mili-

tary threw out then-president Manuel Zelaya in June 2009. Although the

coup and resulting turmoil in Honduras stunned even seasoned Latin

America experts, it was less of a shock to those who had been closelyobserving the growing tensions within that country and studying survey

data showing how limited the reservoir of support for democracy had

become there.

As a region, Central America today faces two main challenges: a

tidal wave of crime and gang violence, and the global economic crisis.

After decades of deadly civil conflicts, the guns finally began to fall

silent with the end of Nicaraguas Contra War in 1990 and peace ac-

cords in El Salvador (1992) and Guatemala (1996). Optimism about a

decisive regional turn away from political violence bloomed, and by and

large has been vindicated. Politics remains a contact sport, but has sofar not given way to renewed internal warfare or widespread repression

Journal of Democracy Volume 21, Number 2 April 2010

2010 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press

Trouble in Central America


3/14

124 Journal of Democracy

anywhere in the region. Yet criminal and gang-related violence has be-

come so pervasive that many citizens look back on the days when vio-

lence was mostly political almost with nostalgia. In those days, Central

Americans tell us, most politically uninvolved citizens had little to fear,since the military and police largely clashed with the guerrilla groups.

Today, however, victimization is random, unpredictable, and seemingly

unavoidable.

Sadly, as the region has democratized, violent crime has become

shockingly endemic, making Central America one of the worlds most

violent and crime-ridden places.2 In October 2009 alone, 411 residents

of El Salvador (population 7 million) were murdered. Over the first ten

months of that year, the official homicide toll of 3,622 yielded a rate of

50.3 per 100,000, compared to the widely reported rate for the United

States of fewer than 7 homicides per 100,000 and the even lower WestEuropean rate of somewhere between 1 and 2 per 100,000.3 An annual

rate of 50 homicides per 100,000 people means that, in a given year, 1

of every 2,000 residents is murdered. Sadly, El Salvadors grim murder

rate is not an exception in the region. Guatemalas rate is 48 and that

of Honduras is 58 per 100,000. In Nicaragua and Panama, the murder

rate is far lowertypically well below 20 homicides per 100,000and

ranges lower still in Costa Rica, the only country in the region with a

long and deeply rooted democratic political tradition.

A recent study by the United Nations Development Programme

(UNDP) provides the most careful estimates to date of Central Ameri-can homicides over the years from 2000 to 2009.4 As shown in Table

1, considerable year-to-year fluctuation occurs within an overall trend

toward more violence. According to the UNDP study, Central Ameri-

cas Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras has

become the worlds most violent area outside certain war-torn parts of

Africa. As another UN study points out, the political impact of such

violence is clear:

Perhaps the most profound effect of crime is the way it undermines the

relationship between citizens and their government. The most basic obli-gation of the state is to ensure the security of its citizenry. When the statefails to fulfill this essential function, or, indeed, is seen to be complicit inthe criminality, then many citizens cease to take democracy seriously. Asone U.S. official put it, High crime levels, present in many nations of thehemisphere, dampen voters enthusiasm for democratic rule.5

The regions economies, historically tenuous and fragile (especially

in Nicaragua and Honduras), performed relatively well from the second

half of the 1990s until the September 2008 U.S. financial crisis trig-

gered a global economic slowdown. Over the period from 1996 through

2005, average annual growth ranged from 2.5 percent in El Salvadorup to 4.4 percent in Costa Rica and Panama. In 2007, the last full year


4/14

125Mitchell A. Seligson and John A. Booth

before the global downturn, Panama grew at a torrid rate of 9.7 percentannually with Costa Rica in second place at 6 percent. Growth was more

modest in Honduras (4.2 percent), Guatemala (3.7 percent), El Salvador

(2.9 percent), and Nicaragua (1.8 percent). By comparison, GDP growth

across all of Latin America and the Caribbean that year was 4.4 percent.

By 2008, growth in Costa Rica and El Salvador was running at under 1

percent, while Guatemalas rate was 1.5 percent and Honduras and Ni-

caragua both hovered just below 2 percent. The growth rate in Panama,

which has a large service sector keyed to the presence of the isthmian

canal, remained high at 7.4 percent, once again emphasizing the diver-

sity in the region.6

The 2009 figures, while not definitive at this writing early in 2010,

show that all the Central American economies except Panamas have

declined. Guatemalas economy appears to have shrunk by 0.8 percent

(the lightest hit), while that of Honduras has contracted by 3.1 percent

(the heaviest hit, and likely to get heavier still once the effects of coup-

triggered cuts in foreign aid take effect).7 Panama alone managed posi-

tive yet anemic growth of 1.4 percent.

Social scientists since Emile Durkheim (d. 1917) have believed that

economic downturns tend to spawn broadly negative social and political

consequences.8 When democracy is fragile, as it is across most of Cen-tral America, there is reason to fear that discontented citizens may go

beyond simply refusing to reelect incumbents. Mass publics may show

support for drastic alternatives such as a return to the military rule that

long afflicted the region. Some research closely links crime levels to

weakened citizen trust in public institutions, as citizens come to see the

state as unable to protect them from criminal violence.9 Thus it is impor-

tant to probe Central Americans concerns about crime as well as their

possible receptiveness to military rule. In addition, we want to know if

there is any evidence in the public-opinion data that could have helped

us to foresee the Honduran coup and that could help to predict whetherother system-destabilizing events might lie ahead for Honduras or its

Country 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

Costa Rica 6 6 6 7 7 8 8 8 11

El Salvador 45 40 39 40 49 62 65 57 52

Guatemala 28 30 32 37 38 44 47 45 48

Honduras - - 69 65 35 37 46 50 58

Nicaragua 9 10 10 12 12 13 13 13 13

Panama 10 10 12 11 10 11 11 13 19

Table 1Homicidesper 100,000 populaTionincenTral america, 20002008

Source: United Nations Development Programme,Informe sobre desarrollo humano paraAmrica Central 20092010 (New York: United Nations, 2009), 69.


5/14


neighbors. To do this, we examine the Latin American Public Opinion

Project (LAPOP) AmericasBarometer 2008 survey, which was conduct-

ed in the context of high crime, but before the economic crisis struck.10

We begin, then, with the most general evidence regarding support fordemocracy, looking at the widely used Churchill question.11 This item

asks respondents: Democracy may have problems, but it is better than

any other form of government. To what extent do you agree or disagree

with this statement? Respondents replied to the question on a 1-to-7

scale, which we converted to a 0-to-100 metric for easy interpretability

(100 means maximum support for democracy). There is both good news

and bad news to report. Across the six Central American countries taken

together, the average score was 73the weight of opinion in the region

clearly favored democracy. This is in keeping, moreover, with the posi-

tive picture in the Western Hemisphere at large: In none of the 24 coun-tries of the Americas did a majority dispute the view that democracy is

the best form of government, and 14 countries yielded a prodemocracy

score of 70 or more. In Central America, Costa Rica not surprisingly

scored at the top (78.2), placing its citizens in a dead heat with those

of the United States. That is the good news. The bad news is that Cen-

tral America is home to the Hemispheres two lowest-scoring countries:

Guatemala (60.5) and Honduras (59.9), each of which ranks somewhat

lower than South Americas lowest-scoring country, Paraguay (62.9).

Another question that the AmericasBarometer uses to gauge the gen-

eral level of support for democracy on the 0-to-100 scale asks simply,How democratic is your country? Not surprisingly, Costa Rica again

ranked highest on this question among all Central American countries

in 2008. At the other extreme, Honduras ranked second lowest in all of

Latin America and the Caribbean, followed only by Paraguay. The other

countries in Central America scored somewhat higher, but El Salvador,

Guatemala, and Nicaragua were among the lowest, while Panama scored

about average for the Latin American and Caribbean region.

More cause for worry about Honduras surfaced with the question Do

you think that our country needs a government with a mano dura (strong

hand), or that problems can be resolved with everyones participation?Only in Honduras was there a mano dura majority (52 percent).

Legitimacy and the Long Term

General questions about support for democracy are instructive, but

in order to shed light on the deeper issue of citizens beliefs about the

legitimacy of their political systems, more is needed. Given Central

Americas strife-wracked past, crime-ridden present, and (outside of

Costa Rica) thin democratic experience, one must wonder how much

legitimacy these democratic systems possess in the eyes of citizens, andhow badly the current economic crisis may be testing and even eroding


6/14


that legitimacy.12 A look back at the first of the AmericasBarometer

surveys, carried out in 2004, is instructive. In a book that we published

months before the June 2009 coup in Honduras, we reported warning

signs of political instability.13

Aware that it is typically elites rather thanmass publics who carry out the direct overthrow of governments, we

nonetheless posited that citizens sense of the systems legitimacy has

a major influence on democratic stabilityif only because elites, in an

era of widespread availability of survey data such as our own, are more

aware than ever of what the public is thinking and will tolerate. 14 Our

data showed, for instance, that the coup in Honduras was carried out in

an atmosphere far more permissive of antidemocratic measures than ex-

ists elsewhere in the region.

Using the 2004 AmericasBarometer data, we found that political le-

gitimacy in Honduras was very thin indeed. By combining expressedlevels of support for democracy, support for national institutions, and

evaluations of the governments economic performance, we created an

index that allowed us to determine the ratio of all voting-age citizens

who were what we called triply dissatisfied to those who were triply

satisfied on those same dimensions.15 In essence, we were comparing

the number of citizens who were above the scale mean on all three key

dimensions of legitimacy (the triply satisfied) with those who fell below

the mean on all three (the triply dissatisfied). We found that while the

triply-dissatisfied-to-triply-satisfied ratio was only .08 in democratical-

ly stable Costa Rica, it was a whopping 1.57 (more than 19 times greaterthan the Costa Rican figure) in tenuously democratic Honduras. That

ratio, combined with the more than 12 percent of Hondurans who were

triply dissatisfied in 2004, meant that a substantial share of the popula-

tion was quite unhappy about regime performance and held undemo-

cratic values, and that there were many more of them than there were of

triply satisfied citizens (see Table 2 on the following page).

After comparing these ratios and population shares within the region,

we concluded that Honduras demonstrated greater risk for unrest, politi-

cal turmoil, and support for antidemocratic regimes than [did] the other

countries based on this indicator.16 Our analysis also found that in 2004,the preference for electoral democracy over unelected strongmen was

less in Honduras than in any other country in the sample. In addition,

support for confrontational political tactics was higher in Honduras

than in any of the other countries. The final piece of evidence from the

2004 AmericasBarometer is especially relevant. We found that justifica-

tion for a hypothetical military coup in Honduras in 2004 was 49.9 on a

0-to-100 scale, a value exceeded only by that for El Salvador (50.5 in the

same year). Thus the average willingness to justify a coup dtat among

voting-age Hondurans was not a low value, but at the scale midpoint

indicating that Hondurans were at best indifferent about whether a coupmight be justified under certain hypothetical circumstances.


7/14


Support for a democratic regime deteriorated in all of Central Amer-

ica between 2004, the the date of the data set that we used in our book,

and 2008, the year of our last measurement prior to the coup. Moreover,

Table 2 above shows that between 2004 and 2008, the ratio of triply dis-

satisfied to triply satisfied citizens had increased in Costa Rica, El Sal-

vador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. But it was Hon-

duras, the outlier country in 2004, which saw a huge rise by 2008. Triplydissatisfied citizens went from 12 percent to more than 31 percent of

the voting-age population, and there were over six times more of them

than the triply satisfieds. We interpreted this as a clear warning sign of

a substantially increased risk of instability.17 The index could not, of

course, have predicted the specific events that took place in Honduras

in June 2009, because those depended on the particular circumstances

of the moment, but it does point to the presence of a climate of opinion

that was ominously ready to accept the rejection of essential democratic

procedures.

John Booth and his coauthors found that a cross-national comparisonof Central American attitudes (as measured by the 2008 AmericasBa-

rometer) singled out Hondurans as expressing the highest level of sup-

port for a military coup in Central America (48 percent), along with the

highest level of agreement with the claimed need for a strong leader

who does not need to be elected (39 percent).18 (The latter value is more

than double the corresponding number from any of the four other Cen-

tral American countries included in the comparison.) Hondurans also

expressed the highest support by far for confrontational political meth-

ods, such as demonstrations, building takeovers, and even violent rebel-

lion against an elected government. Honduras in 2008 had a very largeproportion (just over 30 percent) of citizens who hit the troubling tri-

Country

2004* 2008**

Ratio % TriplyDissatisfied

Ratio % TriplyDissatisfied

Honduras 1.57 12.1 6.17 31.4

Guatemala 1.37 14.7 3.23 18.7

Nicaragua .53 6.6 1.12 7.1

El Salvador .21 5.4 1.39 8.8

Panama .11 2.9 1.67 13.0

Costa Rica .08 2.3 .18 4.5

*Calculated from John A. Booth and Mitchell A. Seligson, The Legitimacy Puzzle in LatinAmerica: Democracy and Political Support in Eight Nations (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2009), Table 8.2 (ordered by 2004 results).

**Calculated from LAPOP 2008 survey.

Table 2raTiosof Triply dissaTisfiedTo Triply saTisfiedciTizensin six laTin american counTries


8/14


fecta of being at once receptive to antidemocratic attitudes, dissatisfiedwith their countrys public institutions, and unhappy over their govern-

ments economic performance. By contrast, only 4.9 percent were pro-

democratic, institutionally satisfied, and happy with the governments

handling of economic policy.

In order to place these results in the broader context of Latin America

and the Caribbean, we have developed an index that combines the ele-

ments of the triple dis/satisfaction ratios and weights them by their dis-

tribution among the entire citizen population. We calculated the mean

score for each country on a scale of triple dissatisfaction in which 0

equals triply satisfied, 1 equals mixed values, and 2 equals triplydissatisfied.19 The Figure above presents the mean score on this scale

by country. Index values below 1.0 indicate a low proportion of triply

dissatisfieds to triply satisfieds and a large proportion of mixed-values

citizens. Values slightly above 1.0 reveal more triply dissatisfieds than

triply satisfieds, but also indicate that the deeply dissatisfied are out-

weighed by large numbers of mixed-value legitimacy moderates. Values

above 1.05, we believe, suggest that the share of triply dissatisfieds is

large enough to warrant concern for democratic stability.

We see in the Figure that Honduras has the highest triple-dissatisfac-

tion-index score (1.25) of any country in all of Latin America and theCaribbean, not merely in Central America. This finding strongly confirms

figuremean levelsofTriple saTisfacTionand dissaTisfacTion, 2008

Dominican Rep.

Paraguay

Chile

Ecuador

Haiti

Honduras

Costa Rica

Nicaragua

Brazil

Panama

Guatemala

Colombia

Bolivia

Argentina

Jamaica

Peru

Uruguay

0.00 0.20 0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00 1.20

Mexico

Venezuela

El Salvador

Mean Triple Dissatisfaction Index (0 = triply satisfied, 1 = mixed, 2 = triply dissatisfied)


9/14


the extremity of the Honduran case. Outside of Central America, Haiti

follows with a triple-dissatisfaction index of 1.23. Peru and Ecuador have

index scores above 1.05, also indicating widespread discontent with de-

mocracy, regime performances, and institutions in those countries.The scores of other Central American countries on our index also war-

rant comment. The second most troubling case identified by our approach

is Guatemala. With a ratio of triply dissatisfied to triply satisfied citizens

that measures 3.23 to 1 (Table 2)a ratio that has increased by a factor

of 2.5 since 2004and an index score of 1.13 (Figure), the situation in

Guatemala appears worrisome. Yet even there, only 18.7 percent of the

population counts as triply dissatisfied, a much smaller share than the

31.4 percent figure from Honduras. Nevertheless, this measure suggests

problems for Guatemala. Foremost among them, as Anita Isaacs details

elsewhere in this issue and Mitchell Seligson has shown in his detailedstudy of the case, is the lost promise of the 1996 peace accords that ended

a decades-long guerrilla war.20 Central to those agreements were reforms

that should have brought important advances in the political rights and

economic conditions of Guatemalas large indigenous population. Yet

precious little progress has been made in this regard. Guatemalan elites

have shown little commitment to democracy since the liberalization pro-

cess began in 1985. In 1993, President Jorge Serrano even attempted a

self-coup, although external pressure and constitutional institutions even-

tually prevailed. A year later, the rightist party of former military ruler

Efran Ros Montt managed to make him the presiding officer of Congressafter he had been denied a place on the ballot in that years presidential

election. In 2003, Ros Montt mobilized mass demonstrations as part of

a campaign to pressure the Constitutional Court into letting him run for

president (he got on the ballot, but came in third).

The shocking recent escalation of criminal violence in Guatemala

has been punctuated by bizarre events that have aroused protests and

probably sapped democratic legitimacy. In 2005, the leftist URNG

party led intense demonstrations against the Central American Free

Trade Agreement, eliciting a police response that was marked by vio-

lence. Organized crime, partly associated with narcotics trafficking,has driven the violent-crime rate up. Other outrages have proliferated

as well, including the murders of women. In 2008, alarmed lawmakers

passed bills aimed at curbing violence against women and at sharply

restricting access to firearms. An anticorruption campaign in 2004 at-

tempted to prosecute former president Alfonso Portillo, a Ros Montt

associate, for corruption in office. This prompted Portillo to flee to

Mexico, which eventually extradited him. On 25 Janu 2010, Portillo

was indicted for money laundering in the United States.

In 2007, three Salvadoran delegates to the Central American Parlia-

ment and their driver were murdered in Guatemala. The denouement ofthis incident was still more bizarre than the murders themselves. The


10/14


murder suspectspolice officerswere in turn murdered in their jail

cells. Further developments implicated both Salvadoran and Guate-

malan politicians and police in the killings and cover-up. In the 2007

election campaign, fifty congressmen, candidates, and political activistswere killed, a level of violence that eclipsed even the horrific levels of

the 1980s elections, held prior to the signing of the peace accords.

In yet another extraordinary incident in May 2009, the fatal shooting

of a noted attorney, Rodrigo Rosenberg, led to the release of a posthu-

mous videotape of the victim forecasting his own murder and prospec-

tively accusing President Alvaro Colom of being involved in it because

of Rosenbergs investigation of a financial scandal. Coloms support-

ers and critics alike took to the streets in protest, and many observers

viewed the incident as an effort to force him to resign. In perhaps the

oddest twist of all, a UN-sponsored investigation concluded in Janu-ary 2010 that Rosenbergestranged from his children and ex-wife and

reportedly despondent over the murder of his girlfriendhad arranged

via intermediaries for hired gunmen to kill him while he rode his bicycle

down the streets of Guatemala City in a strange case of suicide by hit

man.21

Other Countries at Risk?

Does our tridimensional legitimacy ratio point to any other countries

in the region as candidates for democratic backsliding? From 2004 to2008, Panama, El Salvador, and Nicaragua all saw large increases in the

ratio of triply dissatisfied to triply satisfied citizens. We note, however,

that in Panama only 13 percent of the voting-age populace was triply dis-

satisfied as of 2008, while in El Salvador and Nicaragua the figures were

8.8 and 7.1 percent, respectively. Further, in none of these cases did the

triple-dissatisfaction index surpass the 1.05 level, and in none did the

share of the triply dissatisfied approach the nearly one-third of citizens

found in Honduras in 2008 or the one-fifth in Guatemala. Interestingly,

Panama saw the sharpest increase in the ratio, but the total share of tri-

ply dissatisfied citizens there remained relatively low in 2008 comparedto the shares in Honduras and Guatemala. Although these numbers are

cause for concern, the slices of the public upon which antidemocratic

schemers in these countries can count are still fairly small. On the other

hand, Costa Rica remained strongly democratic (its triple-dissatisfac-

tion index score was 0.79 and only 4.5 percent of its voting-age citizens

were triply dissatisfied), even though it faced numerous challenges to its

efforts to expand its welfare state while confronting serious economic

problems.22

Our measure of satisfaction and dissatisfaction allows us to identify

countries with larger proportions of antidemocratic, institutionally dis-loyal, and economic-performancefrustrated populations. Assuming that


11/14


such attitudinal clusters boost the potential for political instability, we

may extrapolate from the evidence in the Figure to identify other coun-

tries that may be at risk. Haiti is close to Honduras in the high proportion

of triply dissatisfied citizensa situationthat the terrible earthquake of 12 January

2010 may make worse if the government

proves inept in dealing with the aftermath

of the tragedy. After all, it was the corrupt

response of Nicaraguas Somoza regime to

the 1972 earthquake that is often cited as

the turning point that eventually led to the

downfall of that dictatorship. Guatemala

(as noted), Peru, and Ecuador also have

relatively high triple-dissatisfaction scoresin the 2008 AmericasBarometer survey. In

contrast, based on their low index scores

and their high ratios of triply satisfied to

triply dissatisfied citizens, the countries

that appear to be the least at risk are Uru-

guay, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Haitis

neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, the

Dominican Republic.

How can the presence of large num-

bers of triply dissatisfied citizens encourage elites to risk antidemocrat-ic adventures? Throughout Latin America, regularly published opinion

polls report levels of citizen satisfaction regarding economic indicators,

governmental performance, and public order and security. Elites can

read these polls, and they enjoy access to more exclusive channels of

information as well. Elites who are weakly committed to democratic

rules can estimate what the public reaction will be should they break

them. Against a background of broad public discontent and weakly held

democratic norms, specific catalytic eventsunknowable to opinion

researchers but more evident to close observers of individual polities

can trigger antidemocratic actions by elites. For example, Manuel Ze-laya insisted on conducting a plebiscite to gauge popular support for a

prospective constituent assembly, despite opposition from Congress and

negative rulings from other parts of the Honduran government. Zelaya

responded by trying to force the vote and then cashiering the head of

the military. The courts ruled this action illegal. Zelayas foes in key

institutions (Congress, the Supreme Court, senior military ranks) almost

certainly knew that the public was split. Having at hand no formal con-

stitutional mechanism for impeaching and removing the president, they

moved to oust him anyway, bundled him off into exile without due pro-

cess, and justified these unconstitutional actions by claiming that thecrisis had been provoked by Zelayas unconstitutional actions.

It was againsta background odemocratic vulner-abilitywhere lowconsolidation o keydemocratic norms methigh dissatisaction

with governmentalperormance andinstitutionsthatlocal actors carriedout the specifc deedssparking the Honduranbreakdown.


12/14


Our public-opinion data did not directly predict the Honduran

democratic breakdown of 2009, nor can they foretell an impending

breakdown in other countries. The data did, however, identify Hon-

duras as the single case in Latin America with the highest level oftriply dissatisfied citizens, with relatively low support for democracy,

and with high support for coups, confrontational political methods,

and rebellion. The data also point to Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, and

Peru as higher-risk cases. It was against a background of democrat-

ic vulnerabilitywhere low consolidation of key democratic norms

met high dissatisfaction with governmental performance and insti-

tutionsthat local actors carried out the specific deeds sparking the

Honduran breakdown. Our telltale configurations of low legitimacy

may therefore indicate where antidemocratic adventurism might pose

an elevated risk.We believe that we have developed a useful tool for identifying

where such instability has a greater (or lesser) likelihood of occurring.

That, we think, is an improvement in social-science predictive capacity.

We share the dilemma of the weather forecasterunable to say with

certainty whether there will be a tornado or if and when the tornado will

hit a particular barn. The weather forecaster can, however, say some-

thing about when the conditions are ripe for a tornado to drop out of

the sky, and we can see conditions in which a democracy-threatening

event might occur. Among the Central American nations, Honduras and

Guatemala appear to us to face the greatest challenges to democraticgovernance.

NOTES

1. Except for the small Anglophone enclave of Belize (formerly British Honduras,and not considered in this essay), Central Americas countries all spring from commonSpanish-colonial origins, they all speak Spanish, and at least up until very recently(when Evangelicals may have become the majority in Guatemala, they have all beenmajority Catholic). They are all small in both land area and population, covering intotal about half a million square kilometers and containing a total regional populationof around 42 million (Guatemala being the largest both in geographic and, with 14 mil-lion people, demographic terms). The export-oriented cultivation of tropical crops suchas coffee beans and bananas has long dominated their economies. See John A. Booth,Christine J. Wade, and Thomas W. Walker, Understanding Central America: Global

Forces, Rebellion, and Change, 5th ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2010).

2. Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine, Latin American Urban Violence as a Devel-opment Concern: Towards a Framework for Violence Reduction, World Development34(January 2006): 89112.

3. For El Salvador, see David Marroqun, www.elsalvador.com/mwedh/nota/nota_completa.asp?idCat=6358&idArt=4202737. Worldwide data taken from United NationsOffice on Drugs and Crime, Tenth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and Opera-tions of Criminal Justice Systems (New York: United Nations, 2008). See also Hans Ma-thieu and Paula Rodrguez Arredondo, eds., Seguridad regional en Amrica Latina y elCaribe (Bogota: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2009).


13/14


4. United Nations Development Programme, Informe sobre desarrollo humano paraAmrica Central, 20092010 (New York: United Nations, 2009).

5. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Latin America and the CaribbeanRegion of the World Bank,

Crime, Violence, and Development: Trends, Costs, and PolicyOptions in the Caribbean (New York: 2007), 78.

6. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Economic Survey ofLatin America and the Caribbean (Santiago, Chile: United Nations, 2009).

7. Data supplied to authors by Luis Felipe Lpez-Calva, Chief Economist, Bureau forLatin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme, November,2009.

8. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951).

9. Gary LaFree, Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Insti tu-tions in America (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998); Randolph Roth,American Homicide

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

10. The AmericasBarometer is carried out every two years and covers nearly all thecountries in the Western Hemisphere. In 2008, it included 24 countries, stretching fromCanada to Chile, involving national samples of face-to-face interviews with more than40,000 individuals. The AmericasBarometer is a consortium of universities and think tanksin the hemisphere, coordinated by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) atVanderbilt University. Major donors are the United States Agency for International Devel-opment (USAID), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the United NationsDevelopment Programme (UNDP).

11. William Mishler and Richard Rose, Five Years After the Fall: Trajectories of Sup-port for Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, in Pippa Norris, ed., Critical Citizens:

Global Support for Democratic Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

12. For the reservoir theory of legitimacy see David Easton, A Re-Assessment ofthe Concept of Political Support, British Journal of Polit ical Science 5 (October 1975):43557.

13. John A. Booth and Mitchell A. Seligson, The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America:Democracy and Polit ical Support in Eight Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2009).

14. As early as the Second World War, the British War Cabinet under Prime MinisterWinston Churchill regularly read and digested the results of public mood surveys,an unscientific sampling of public opinion, when considering whether or not to resist

Nazi aggression. See John Lukacs, Five Days in London, May 1940 (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1999).

15. Our rationale for the measure is that we believe that the arguably most importantlegitimacy norms for the survival of democracies are three: support for regime demo-cratic principles, support for the specific national democratic institutions, and citizensevaluations of regime performance. We found empirically that performance evaluationhas the greatest effect on participation (i.e., it moves people to take action more) of allthe six legitimacy dimensions that we isolated in our study The Legitimacy Puzzle in

Latin America. Moreover, it stands to reason that a democracys survival should ben-efit from a positive level of citizens support for democratic principles (i.e., citizensshould be democrats) and from citizens supportive evaluations of the formal institu-tions of democratic government. Hence our triple dis/satisfaction concept: A democracy

is at increased risk to the extent to which citizens are simultaneously unhappy about itsperformance and about its formal institutions, and are also disloyal to democratic prin-ciples. The higher the ratio of triply dissatisfied citizens to triply satisfied citizens and


14/14


the larger the proportion of triply dissatisfieds as a share of all citizens, the greater therisk for democracy because more people may act against it, and especially because elitesmay be tempted to take advantage of the discontent to undermine democracy expectinglimited popular resistance.

16. Booth, Wade, and Walker, Understanding Central America, 248.

17. Other countries in which in 2008 the ratio increased into the +1.00 range, indicat-ing many more triply dissatisfied than triply satisfied citizens, were El Salvador, Guate-mala, Nicaragua, and Panama. The latter three in 2004 had more triply satisfied than triplydissatisfied citizens (i.e., ratios below 1.00). The shift from 2004 to 2008 suggests anincreased potential for unrest in several countries.

18. Booth, Wade, and Walker, Understanding Central America, 192.

19. This measure was constructed by assigning a value of 2 to all those simultaneouslyscoring below the scale midpoint on all three legitimacy measures: support for democraticprinciples, institutional support, and evaluation of government economic performance.

All those simultaneously scoring above the scale midpoint on these dimensions receiveda score of zero, indicating triple satisfaction, while those with mixed views received ascore of 1. Importantly, this measure incorporates the proportional weighting of the triplysatisfied and dissatisfied segments (on the legitimacy extremes) with that for the mixedvalues share of the population. This corrects the raw measure so that a tiny handful of tri-ply dissatisfied versus triply satisfied (which would yield a high ratio) does not skew themeasure out of proportion if the vast bulk of the population lies in between these extremes.Thus, for example, in a country in which a sample (such as ours from the AmericasBa-rometer) of 1,500 respondents were distributed with only 1 triply satisfied person versus100 triply dissatisfied people and the rest with mixed values, the ratio would be 100.0, butthe index value for the country would be 1.06, suggesting a very modest potential threat.In contrast, with 500 triply dissatisfied citizens out of 1,500a much larger sharetoonly 50 satisfied ones and 950 respondents with mixed values, the countrys ratio would

be 10.0 (lower than in the first example and thus somewhat misleading). In contrast forthe second example, the national triple dissatisfaction index value would be high andtroubling at 1.3.

20. Mitchell A. Seligson, Democracy on Ice: The Multiple Paradoxes of GuatemalasPeace Process, in Frances Hagopian and Scott Mainwaring, eds., The Third Wave of

Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2005); Dinorah Azpuru, Democratizacin en Guatemala y El Salvador:Un desarrollo desigual, in Leticia Heras and John A. Booth, eds., Perspectivas parala democracia en Amrica Latina (Mexico City: Universidad Autnoma del Estado deMxico, 2009).

21. Jonathan Franklin, The Truth About Guatemalas YouTube Murder, Guardian, 13

January 2010. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/13/guatemala-murder-ro-drigo-rosenberg?utm_source=headgrabs&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=20100114.

22. Mitchell A. Seligson and Juliana Martnez Franzoni, Limits to Costa Rican Het-erodoxy: What Has Changed in Paradise? in Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully,eds., Democratic Governance in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2010).

21.2.Seligson Violence Politics

Documents

Transcript of 21.2.Seligson Violence Politics