Red Emma’s

Right-wing forces have repeatedly deposed elected governments that challenged the rich and accepted democracy only after the defanging of the Left and widespread market reform. Latin America’s recent “left turn” raised the question anew: how would the Right react if democracy threatened elite interests?

This book examines the complex relationship of the Left, the Right, and democracy through the lens of local politics in Venezuela and Bolivia. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, Gabriel Hetland compares attempts at participatory reform in cities governed by the Left and Right in each country. He finds that such measures were more successful in Venezuela than Bolivia regardless of which type of party held office, though existing research suggests that deepening democracy is much more likely under a left party. Hetland accounts for these findings by arguing that Venezuela’s ruling party achieved hegemony—presenting its ideas as the ideas of all—while Bolivia’s ruling party did not. The Venezuelan Right was compelled to act on the Left’s political terrain; this pushed it to implement participatory reform in an unexpectedly robust way. In Bolivia, demobilization of popular movements led to an inhospitable environment for local democratic deepening under any party.

Democracy on the Ground shows that, just as right-wing hegemony can reshape the Left, leftist hegemony can reshape the Right. Offering new perspectives on participation, populism, and Latin American politics, this book challenges widespread ideas about the constraints on democracy.

Gabriel Hetland is associate professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Using ethnography and comparative historical methods, he studies the forces that enable and constrain the deepening and extension of democracy, researching left and right parties, social and labor movements, climate change, and national and urban politics in Latin America and the US. His award-winning work is published in leading university presses and social science journals, including Qualitative Sociology, Social Text, Journal of World-Systems Research and Latin American Perspectives. He has authored dozens of public-facing pieces in outlets such as the Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Independent, The Nation, In These Times, NACLA, Jacobin and elsewhere, and has also appeared regularly in the media to discuss Venezuelan and Bolivian politics, with appearances on Al Jazeera English, Democracy Now, NPR, BBC Radio, Fox News, Radio Canada, and elsewhere.

Nicole Fabricant is Professor of Anthropology at Towson University in Maryland. She is the author of Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land _and _Fighting to Breathe, as well as co-executive editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas.