Improving democracy? Party dominance and mechanisms of popular participation in Latin America

In recent years, a massive wave of constitutional changes has increased institutional opportunities for autonomous citizen participation in Latin America. The literature on the adoption of popular initiatives in Western Europe and the US proposes that these reforms are likely to been acted by declining majority parties under the pressure of minority parties. This argument does not apply well to an environment where low levels of citizens ’trust in representative institutions are combined with high levels of electoral volatility and party system change.