When Argentina's first democratically elected president took office after the violent 1970s, he campaigned with words that captured a nation's hope: "Con la democracia se come, se cura y se educa"—with democracy, we will eat, heal, and educate. That promise of democracy as a vehicle for shared prosperity resonated across Latin America's wave of democratization in the 1980s. But a new book by two Cornell scholars reveals a more complicated story about what happened when the left rose to power across the region decades later.
"Polarization and Democracy in Latin America: Legacies of the Left Turn," co-authored by Santiago Anria and Kenneth M. Roberts and published in 2026 by the University of Chicago Press, examines a historically unprecedented phenomenon: when leftist movements gained broad access to political power across multiple countries in the late 1990s. The book is grounded in a comparative historical analysis of seven countries and draws on public-opinion data to understand how these movements shaped democratic life.
Scholars had predicted sharply different outcomes for the region's two dominant leftist trajectories. The "social democratic left"—fiscally cautious and institutionally respectful—was expected to govern responsibly. The populist left, by contrast, was widely assumed to court authoritarianism. The reality proved more sobering. "Even the social democratic left, which bent over backwards to avoid polarization, experienced deepening polarization over time," Anria explains, "except for Uruguay." Both leftist models ultimately converged on polarized outcomes, with Venezuela's shift toward outright authoritarianism marking the region's darkest trajectory.
What surprised the researchers most was not the failure of particular governments, but the discovery that polarization itself became the defining story. Anria and Roberts initially set out to catalogue lessons the left could draw from its time in power. Instead, they found that deepening polarization—in varying forms—was the through-line connecting diverse national experiences. This realization reshaped their entire analysis, placing democratic tension front and center.
The book identifies a crucial source of that tension: Latin America's extreme social and economic inequalities, stratified along lines of class, gender, and race or ethnicity. Democracy, by design, gives citizens the constitutional right to challenge those inequalities. When leftist parties and their supporters exercised those rights, a fierce political backlash followed among those invested in the status quo. Managing that clash without destroying democratic institutions became the central challenge.
Importantly, the scholars distinguish between polarization as a symptom and polarization as a disease. "Disagreement is natural under democracy," Anria notes. The problem emerges when political actors weaponize democratic institutions for partisan gain and abandon the conflict-regulating mechanisms that democracy provides. The absence of polarization, they argue, signals something worse: either repression or the failure of marginalized groups to organize and challenge entrenched power. The question for Latin America—and democracies everywhere—is not how to eliminate polarization, but how to manage it responsibly within democratic bounds.
As leftist movements across the region reflect on their legacies, the book offers both a cautionary tale and an invitation: to think critically about past mistakes, and to grapple with the harder work of sustaining democracy amid deep social conflict.