(with Veronica Hurtado, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez)
Do individuals care about democracy? Does this rest on a liberal or procedural conception of democracy? Does a shared understanding of democracy matter for democratic resilience?
This project examines how citizens across Latin America interpret undemocratic behaviour and its relation to democratic norms and institutions through an interpretivist approach.
The first stage of the project focused on studying how Peruvian Citizens, in particular in the southern Andes, perceived former President Castillo’s 2022 self-coup attempt. Our initial findings suggest that citizens’ interpretations of undemocratic behaviour are deeply shaped by historical memory and lived experience. Many respondents did not regard Castillo’s attempted coup as undemocratic—not because they were misinformed, but because they understood it through their own experiences of political exclusion and state violence. In these narratives, Castillo was often perceived as entrapped by authoritarian elites. At the same time, the subsequent repression of protests was seen as a continuation of the state’s long-standing practices of criminalising and stigmatising rural and Indigenous populations.
Viviana Baraybar-Hidalgo 