The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin American Transformations Compared

Why did Eastern Europeans protest less about the brutal social consequences of systematic change than the people of Latin America a decade earlier? Why has the regionwide authoritarian or populist turnabout not occured? Why has democracy in these countries proved to be crisis-proof? In what ways has the economic crisis impacted on the politics of the region? In addressing these questions, this text uses a comparative analysis of the structures, institutions, cultures, and actors shaping both the Eastern European and the Latin American transformations, and argues that structural, institutional, and cultural factors have put a brake on destabilizing collective actions and have paved the way for the emergence of the enduring, low-level equilibrium between incomplete democracy and imperfect market economy which seems set to characterize the Eastern European experience for the foreseeable future.