Crisis of Democracy in the American Continent:

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a broad theoretical debate on a concept of democracy which is ideal for governments that correspond to the expectations of citizens. It is also possible to observe that in the present, the traditional political alternatives have demonstrated a progressive downfall, which has given way to parties or political figures that challenge the established system. In this chapter, the emblematic cases of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and the United States are presented, with special emphasis on the electoral processes held in those countries between 2016 and 2018, in where candidates who promised to change the state of affairs in their respective countries had a positive electoral outcome. These cases exemplify, on the one hand, institutionalism in some of the continent’s most important countries, in where the transfer of power occurs peacefully and through supervised electoral processes. But for the other, it is also evidence of the exhaustion of the traditional political class and the rise of new actors, who take advantage of the new channels of representation. This is showing both a crisis of Western democracies and the transformation of the electoral