Conclusions: Government Performance, Political Representation, and Public Perceptions of Contemporary Democracy in Latin America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A quarter century after the Third Wave of democratization began in Latin America, democratic regimes have never been as prevalent or even as secure in Latin America. There have been no reversals of democracy to speak of in the past quarter century – only in Peru in 1992 was there a partial exception to democratic rule, and only in Cuba today is an authoritarian leader so firmly entrenched that uncertainty remains about the way to effect a democratic transition. In most of the continent, that transition took place so long ago that an entire generation cannot remember living at a time when they could not vote for their leaders. Yet, all is not well. Public support and enthusiasm for democracy is as weak as it has perhaps ever been. When asked specifically whether or not they prefer democracy to any other form of government, Latin Americans manifest high rates of ambivalence. Latinobarómetro data – published annually in The Economist magazine – shows that Latin America is replete with “doubting democrats.” On average, in 2003 only slightly more than half of Latin Americans agreed with the statement that “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government” ( The Economist 2003: 33), and 52 percent of respondents across the region agreed that they would “not mind a non-democratic government in power if it could solve the economic problems” (Latinobarómetro 2003: 12). Only in Honduras, Venezuela, and Mexico has public support for democracy not eroded in the past seven years (see Table 1.11).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".