Polarization is often created by political elites aiming to gain popularity, but it can also be caused by social conflicts rooted in extreme inequalities, according to a new book about Latin America politics co-authored by two Cornell professors.

The book also points out that polarization can be driven by a government failing to uphold democratic principles, even if it seems justified in the short term.

“Polarization and Democracy in Latin America: Legacies of the Left Turn” (2026, University of Chicago Press) was co-authored by Santiago Anria, associate professor in the Department of Global Labor and Work in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations; and Kenneth M. Roberts, the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences. The book is based on the authors’ comparative historical analysis of seven countries, and draws from public-opinion data.

The Chronicle spoke with Anria and Roberts about their book. 

Question: How did promises made by the Latin American wave of democratization in the 1980s work out?

Anria: Those new democracies brought about a lot of expectations. In the country where I grew up, Argentina, the first democratically elected president, after a period of violent politics in the ’70s, campaigned with a speech that became famous. He said, “Con la democracia se come, se cura y se educa,” which means that with democracy, we’re going to eat, cure and educate.

Years later, when democracy was more firmly established and the left rose to power in several countries in the late 1990s, people were thinking that one model of the left was going to be much more resilient and successful, politically and economically, and that’s what we call the “social democratic left.” Many scholars expected the other one, the populist left, was going to lead to all sorts of distortions and quite likely become authoritarian.

We found empirically that even the social democratic left, which bent over backwards to avoid polarization, experienced deepening polarization over time, except for Uruguay. Many years later, both leftist trajectories converged on polarized endings – with Venezuela making a clearly authoritarian turn. 

Q: What did you hope to accomplish when you began the book?

Anria: We wanted to tell the story of how the left turn ended in Latin America, why it ended badly for both types of left, and what lessons can be drawn from the experiences of the left in power. This was a historically unprecedented phenomenon where the left gained broad access to power. 

Politics has changed dramatically, and we felt that there was no real theoretical guidance to understand where we are now and what explains deepening patterns of polarization. 

We also wanted to encourage the left to think critically about that experience in power and about its mistakes.

Q: Did anything surprise you as you researched the topic?

Anria: What the left can learn from these failed experiences was supposed to be the second part of the book. But we realized that it all led to patterns of deepening polarization, even if those patterns vary. The end of the story became the beginning. We turned polarization into a central theme.

Roberts: Our analysis led to a deeper exploration of challenges to democracy in Latin America. This is a region of extreme social and economic inequalities, along lines of class, gender, and race or ethnicity. Democracy provides citizens with opportunities to challenge those inequalities – and constitutional rights to do so. When leftist parties and the social groups that support them exercise those rights, a political backlash is sure to follow among those who are comfortable with the status quo. This tension is a major source of polarization in Latin America today, and our study sheds light on the ways that democratic institutions try, and sometimes fail, to manage those tensions.

Q: Most people assume polarization is bad. Do you agree?

Anria: We argue that polarization can be bad, but not because people disagree. Disagreement is natural under democracy. Polarization is pernicious when political actors weaponize institutions to their political advantage and abandon the conflict-regulating mechanisms of democracy.

What is always bad is lack of polarization. It means people are either too repressed in a system that does not allow them to express dissent, or they are incapable of organizing and challenging entrenched interests.

We need to figure out how to manage, rather than eliminate, polarization within a democracy.

Tonya Engst is a writer for the ILR School.