ABSTRACT
The problem of mass politics and popular, or lower-class, political representation has been an abiding issue in Latin America. While Latin American countries exhibit a long history of democratic constitutions, the lower classes have not been well represented, especially relative to their large numbers. Throughout the region, historically the world’s economically most unequal, anti-popular political actors have pursued a variety of strategies to reduce lower-class political in uence. The military regimes launched by the coups of the 1960s and 1970s are a dramatic example: the resort to authoritarianism was historically the response to a perceived threat stemming from lower-class political pressures. Since the 1980s, when the region established relatively stable democratic regimes, the question of popular representation has become particularly salient, and many studies have explored a great variety of topics related to this issue. It is now time to build on these studies and pose the question of mass politics and popular representation and to undertake macro comparisons across historical periods and across countries.
