Research Question

Following is the "research question" subsection (sans footnotes). I've decided to move it up to the beginning of Chapter 1, rather than to combine it w/ the research design & methods section. Mainly, because I think it makes more sense to have this go first, before launching into a 20-25 page literature review (so readers will at least start w/ a better understanding of why I'm looking at the literature I'm looking at as a framework).

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[81] After two decades of remarkable political stability, Bolivia’s democratic future became increasingly uncertain after 17 October 2003, when Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada resigned his presidency amid social unrest that left at least 59 dead. For the next two years, Bolivia has lurched from one dramatic political crisis to the next. This was a sharp break from the country’s previous democratic experience. Although Bolivia’s democratic experience was marked by periodic protests, few of these threatened the country’s basic democratic stability. At the very least, Bolivia stood in stark contrast to its Andean neighbors. After the October 2003 “guerra del gas”, many wondered not only whether Bolivia could reestablish some sort democratic political stability, but also whether the country’s basic territorial integrity would survive the sharp regional antagonisms that burst to the surface.

[83a] The nearly two decades that followed Bolivia’s transition to democracy highlighted a period of new exceptionalism. Rather than a perennial South American basket case, Bolivia was an unexpected democratic success story. During the 1990s, some scholars even argued that Bolivia was a case of successful democratic consolidation. During this period of optimism, René Antonio Mayorga lauded what he called Bolivia’s “silent revolution”, built around its institutions of “parliamentarized presidentialism” (1997). Other analysts also looked to Bolivia’s unique quasi-parliamentary institutional design to explain the country’s nearly two decades of democratic political stability.

[83b] Beyond mere stability, Bolivia was also notable for a remarkable degree of governability not found in other countries, especially in the Andes. Unlike many of their neighbors, Bolivian presidents governed with support from majoritarian multi-party coalitions. Conventional wisdom suggested that the country’s institutional design was, in great measure, responsible for both the country’s striking political stability and its governability (by consistently producing majoritarian multiparty coalition governments). Support for centripetal coalition politics also came from a shared elite consensus on key political issues (most notably neoliberalism), but especially on the basic question of what the Bolivian polity, the political community, should look like (an argument pursued in Chapter 3).

[82a] This study does not seek to explain what factors contributed to Bolivia’s nearly two decades of political stability. Such a question is methodologically difficult to test, since factors one believes contribute to stability may, in fact, be products of stability, or may be both product and reinforcement mechanism. In short, it is much more difficult to explain stasis than kinetics, especially in social science. It is important to note that this study also makes no claim about whether Bolivia’s democracy has broken down, though the political system is most likely going through a process of “deconsolidation”. Nor does this study claim to predict the future of Bolivia’s political system; there is far too much uncertainty at this time to allow for reliable forecasts.

[82b] The collapse of an institutionally and democratically elected government marked a dramatic turning point in Bolivia’s political history. The inability of the Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada government to successfully manage the September-October 2003 “guerra del gas” made it glaringly obvious that something had failed in the Bolivian political system. The previous mechanisms of moderated bargaining and majoritarian coalition politics were no longer able to channel, address, or restrain social demands. Thus, the research question this study pursues is simple: What happened? How did Bolivia’s stable political system give way to the subsequent period of chronic instability? More importantly, what led to the unraveling not only of Bolivia’s democratic institutions, but even the core belief in a common political community?