Conclusion
The last few units have detailed not only severe problems with the rule of law under democracy, but also the disillusionment that these deficiencies in state performance have produced across the region. It even looks like most of the attempts to fix the problem by reforming the courts or extending access to justice have failed. At the beginning of the course we insisted that any democracy must include a democratic rule of law. After all the readings we have done, we might question whether many of the countries in Latin America are democracies at all, but O'Donnell, in the reading for this unit, insists that they are. What do you think? Do these failures really mean these countries are at best semi-democratic, or is it only the legitimacy and stability of their democracies that is threatened? At minimum, we will have to acknowledge that the failure of the rule of law strikes at the very heart of democracy.
What then is the solution to the failure of the rule of law? Wherever we look in our readings for this course, we seem to run into two basic problems: deep socio-economic inequalities that make the task of extending full citizenship to everyone much more difficult, and weak states that are truly not up to the task of bridging these social and economic chasms. Neither of these problems has an obvious and immediate connection to votes, political parties, elections - all the things we think of when we think of democracy. Does democracy have anything to say to these issues? Is the basic solution to the problem external to democracy, even though its impact might be central to democracy? Can we look into the future and predict whether democracy will change either of these underlying conditions? O'Donnell seems to suggest that it might, just as we suggested that possibly the exercise of political rights changed public policy in Brazil beginning with President Cardoso. Can democracy help establish and maintain the rule of law, just as the rule of law can help establish and maintain democracy?