Huge congratulations to the team at Latinno for creating the first comprehensive and systematic source of data on new institutions for citizen participation evolving in Latin America.
Latinno believes that citizen participation has become an important means to improve the quality of democracy in Latin America. Thousands of new institutional designs have been created in the previous years that aim not only to include more citizens in the political process, but also – through citizen participation – to make governments more responsive and institutions more accountable, in addition to strengthening the rule of law, and promoting social equality.
The team have collected data on democratic innovations evolving in 18 Latin America countries from the years of 1990 to 2016. The data is coded for 43 variables related to the context, institutional design, and impact of each innovation. Along with the quantitative data, qualitative information on each case has also been gathered and assessed. This prolifically rich content is now being analyzed in policy briefs and academic papers. This is not just a dataset. It produces new, comparative knowledge on democratic innovations, democracy, and citizen participation in Latin America.
Latinno seeks to emphasise that democracy in Latin America encompasses new forms of participation that go well beyond protests and demonstrations. It assumes that democratic innovations are new mediations between state and civil society, along with more traditional institutions like parliaments and political parties. Before the Latinno database, there was no systematic and comparative knowledge on democratic innovations across countries and institutional designs, since most information was widespread and difficult to gather.
Its data allows cross comparisons over more than 2,400 different institutional designs in 18 countries, and our research assesses their effectiveness and evaluates whether or not they contribute to and enhance the quality of democracy in Latin America. Check it out.
