Rethinking Latin America's Left Turn: A Historical and Theoretical Approach

Around the turn of the century, a wave of leftist governments spread across Latin America. Paul W. Posner revisits this movement and diagnoses the reasons for its failure to achieve traditional leftist goals, such as reducing inequality, increasing inclusion of marginalized groups, and strengthening social solidarity. He investigates two sets of paired comparisons of paradigmatic cases: the moderate leftist regimes of Chile and Uruguay and the radical leftist regimes of Ecuador and Venezuel...