Democratic Regression in Latin America: An Analysis of the Personal and National Economies on Democratic Support and Authoritarian Electoral Success

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Fukuyama (1992) claimed that liberal democracy had won and that this was the end of history. When the third wave of democratization happened, it seemed that he was correct. Latin America was important for this because it was a post-colonial region that has a long history of authoritarian regimes. So now that Latin America was seeing democratic regimes growing, there was a sense that democracy had won, and that Latin America would use their newly found democratic rights to pursue liberalization and candidates to promote their democracy and economic growth. However, democracy is a double-edged sword; Latin America could use these rights to cause democratic regression and revert into an authoritarian state. The literature has found that there is a connection between several measurements, and I continued this by using variables that measure personal and national economic evaluations and a quality of life (QOL) measurement. To do this, I set all my variables on a binary scale and found each respective variable’s significance and coefficient using Hotelling’s T2 and logit regression before finding the McFadden pseudo-r-squared, significance, and coefficients for all variables together. My logit regression found that I had rejected the null and that a combination of personal and national economic evaluations and QOL, specifically QOL that is also tied to economic life, lead to an increased likelihood of the election of an authoritarian.