Abstract

ALCANTARA, Manuel; BARRAGAN, Mélany  and  SANCHEZ, Francisco. Latin American Presidents and the Characteristics of Democracy . colomb.int. [online]. 2016, n.87, pp.21-52. ISSN 0121-5612.  https://doi.org/10.7440/colombiaint87.2016.02.

The objective of this paper is to seek relationships between the characteristics of democracy in a country and the features of its political class. In order to so, indexes that measure different attributes of democratic political systems are linked with the political and social profile of the individuals who have occupied the presidency. The study applies to Latin America presidents in the period between 1978 and 2015. Starting with an initial observation of the data, the analysis concentrates on six countries: the three that present the best results and the three with the worst scores in an aggregate of indicators used to assess democratic systems. To the extent that the quality of political systems increases, there is a tendency for the quality of their politicians to increase as well, or at least there is less likelihood that leaders with low levels of training and political professionalism will be able to succeed in politics.

Keywords : Politicians; democracy; Latin America; elites (Thesaurus); characteristics; presidents (author's keywords).

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