Levitsky: I think it is possible, and Chavez is clearly moving towards that direction. Venezuela is no longer a democracy. The book I am writing right now is on competitive authoritarian regimes, hybrid regimes, that are formally constitutionally democratic, that have some level of collective competition, that is opposition leaders aren’t banned or jailed, but in a variety of reasons and ways, the playing field is stacked in favor of the incumbents. So, it is not a full democracy. Venezuela is clearly in that camp right now, and there is some possibility that Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua could move in that direction. These are not going to be, with the possible exception of Venezuela, out and now dictatorships. They are not going to near the kind of repressive dictatorship that you saw in Latin America in the 1970s. But, hybrid regimes, what people call semi-authoritarian regimes or what I call competitive authoritarian regimes, are quite possible.

HIR: Do you think the United States could potentially, in the future, help make Latin Americans more optimistic about democracy?

Levitsky: It is not easy to do. There are long standing structural problems in the Andes. Unbelievable levels of social and racial inequality that are centuries old in the best of cases take centuries to address. They are weak states, states in which the rule of law doesn’t really affect or penetrate the national territory, and have very weak political institutions. Nobody in the United States knows much about how to build strong states and effective political institutions. Solving those pretty deeply rooted problems is a decades long task at best. The one thing the United States can do is to help to contribute to higher levels of economic growth, and I think the best single thing it can do is to open its markets to Latin American exports. That is something that would contribute to economic growth, and higher levels of growth, at least in the margins, would increase satisfaction with democratic institutions. If democratic governments are delivering the goods moderately well, the public is more likely to accept democratic institutions.

HIR: In ten years, do you think there will still be a strong leftist and populist movement in Latin America? For example, are there public opinion polls or evidence that people are beginning to turn more moderate, or are people becoming more and more left?

Levitsky: The evidence from opinion polls is, first of all, not very clear. Outside of a couple countries, publics haven’t moved that far to the left. Publics are pretty critical of privatization and relatively supportive, in some cases, of re-nationalization. But, publics everywhere, even in Bolivia and Venezuela, in my knowledge continue to embrace free trade, continue to embrace openness to foreign investment. So, there is no public demand, no demand from voters, for a hard left turn. This is not to say that people are wildly enthusiasts of neo-liberalism either, but there has not been a hard shift to the left among voters. What you saw, again, was an anti-incumbent vote more than anything else. So, I don’t think public opinion has changed all that much. Yes, it is a bit more anti-American, but that doesn’t make it particularly left. The electorate in Bolivia, and maybe Venezuela, shifted a bit and it shifted a little in Argentina. But, in general, in Mexico and Brazil, there is very little evidence that it has shifted.

I think in ten years, you will have left governments in some places and you will have the return of right governments in other places, particularly where democratic politics is institutionalized. You are going to see a rotation of power and you will see, as in all democracies, shifts from left to right. Will you continue to see populism? Yes, as long as you have extreme levels of inequality and weak and ineffective institutions, you will see populism. You won’t necessarily see left-wing populism. I want to remind you that in the 1990s, we saw several populists in Latin America who were right-of-center. Alberto Fujimori in Peru was a clear example of that. People talked about the phenomenon of neo-populists in the 1990s, but most of these characters, with the exception of Chavez, were right-of-center. In places of weak parties, inequality, and weak institutions, you will see personalistic leaders rallying the masses against the status quo, and winning. That phenomenon you’ve seen throughout Latin American history and until the structural roots of that are changed, you will continue to see populists. The populists tend to take this ideology, this platform of sort of where the winds are blowing at the particular time. So, in the 1940s, they were nationalists and statists, in the 1990s they were pro-market, in the early 21st century they are a bit more left wing. Who knows in another decade, maybe it will be anti-crime and right wing. There will be populists, but there won’t necessarily be leftists!