Gobernabilidad democrática y heterogeneidad social: la crisis argentina de 2001

Abstract

Argentina’s Political crisis in 2001 inserts itself in an encompassing setting of massive popular mobilizations that led to the un-scheduled overthrow of governments in several South American countries. Altogether they witness to the failure of the institutional architecture designed to match representative democracy with Neoliberal macroeconomic policies. Much more than the governability of democracies, what is at stake in these events is the very political system as well its actual democratic character despite periodic appeals to elections,. The first section of this document displays in a very sketchy manner some theoretical propositions relating democratic governability to the substantive dimensions of political systems (i.e. the power structure it institutionalizes, the decisions made, the allocation of profits and loses…) as well to its articulations to the social environment. The following section discusses the way deep social inequalities conditions both the political performance of actors and the working-out of democratic political regimes. Subsequently the 2001 political crisis in Argentina is approached through the lens of the preceding theoretical propositions. The final section sums up the main conclusions.