ABSTRACT
Latin America is undoubtedly more democratic today than at any time in its modern history. As a result, we often take for granted the importance of citizen participation and civil society for politics. Yet the current interest in both is relatively recent. Civil society was only (re)discovered in the 1980s, while interest in participation more generally has been sporadic-like political democracy in the region-and has been understood from a variety of perspectives that often diverged fundamentally from the liberal democratic paradigm that predominates today. These competing perspectives on civil society and participation re ect more than passing intellectual fads; they re ect various attempts to understand the observed ebbs and ows in how Latin Americans actually related to their societies and states.
