Provost’s General Education Course Development Grant

Principal Investigator: Peter Kingstone, Associate Professor of Political Science

Department of Political Science, U-1024; Peter.Kingstone@uconn.edu; 6-3244

Project Title: Democratic Citizenship and Culture in Latin America

Course Objectives: This course seeks to develop students’ critical thinking and moral reasoning about the emergence of democratic society. Promoting democracy and human rights has become one of the most important themes in the global community today. But, how does one go about promoting democracy? What, in fact, is a democracy? These are actually much more difficult questions than activists, policy-makers, and well-meaning citizens often realize. Too often, attention focuses on specific laws or institutions, especially elections, as the solution. But, historical experience and extensive scholarship demonstrate that democracy is much more than a specific law or institution and that both defining and promoting democracy are exceptionally difficult tasks.

This course examines these issues by focusing on democratic citizenship and culture in Latin America. Latin America has been trying to develop and deepen democratic rule longer than any other region of the developing world. There have been some important successes: as of 2005, almost every country in Latin America is nominally democratic. For the most part, Latin American countries have developed democratic institutions and democratic laws. But very important challenges and limitations to democratic rule remain. These include widespread poverty, the world’s worst inequality, corruption, impunity, and various forms of social and political violence. In short, many of the laws and institutions are democratic, but in many ways society remains undemocratic. As one Mexican scholar phrased it, “the million dollar question is why isn’t democracy sinking in.”

Why a New Course? I am proposing a new course that will explore the question of democratic citizenship and culture drawing on various fields within political science and on other disciplines. Political science typically discusses and explains democracy in terms of institutions and laws, class structures, or economic development. That is the focus of the existing Latin American Politics survey course, Political Science 235. The focus of this course, though, is on individual behaviors and morals and the expectations citizens have of each other and of their own institutions. These issues are much harder to address through conventional political science approaches alone. Public opinion research is probably the most powerful political science tool for examining individuals. Public opinion research, however, mostly provides snapshots of attitudes, but is much less effective at explaining them.

To understand individual behaviors and beliefs, I would like to draw on a variety of disciplines. For example, work in anthropology, such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, provides a ground-level image of social relations and individual beliefs and expectations that political science does not and cannot develop. Literature also provides powerful insights into individual experience and attitudes that political science cannot. For example, the works of Mario Vargas Llosa, Jacobo Timmerman, or Alicia Partnoy shed light on violence and the role of individual experience, memory and testimony in countering violent legacies. I also intend to draw on history for an understanding of the emergence of modern nation-states and for accounts of the spread of democratic ideas and cultures. Finally, I intend to draw on political philosophy in order to foster critical thinking and exploration of philosophical and normative conceptions of how to order society, social interactions, and citizens rights and obligations.

Pedagogy: I am committed to using several different mechanisms of evaluation in my teaching. First, I require students to write. In this class, I would like students to write a research paper conducted in graduated steps with multiple opportunities for evaluation and feedback. Second, I believe that students benefit from working in groups. Group work forces students to develop skill at delegation of responsibility and coordination of effort and those are skills that are valuable in academic and work-world pursuits. I would require students to work together over the course of the semester in a group research project, again with multiple opportunities for evaluation and feedback. Finally, I believe that students benefit from oral presentations and I would require either a presentation or participation in a debate.

As I envision the course, the first part would be spent getting an overview of the dimensions of the issues facing Latin American democracies. In the second part, we would review political philosophy and historical discussions of the spread of democratic ideas and norms. In the third and final section, we would use an interdisciplinary approach to understand Latin American issues in depth and to contrast Latin America with Western nations and in particular the U.S. I envision having the students conduct semester-long group research projects that focus explicitly on comparing a Latin American country or countries with the U.S. on some important issue or policy area. The successive stages of the course are conceived to allow students to develop increasingly sophisticated appreciation of the concepts and causal hypotheses necessary to do the research work.

Work During the Period of the Grant: I intend to spend the period of the grant researching and reviewing material for the course. I am familiar with important works of political science on culture and democratic society. For example, I intend to use classic work such as The Civic Culture by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, as well as modern works such as the work on social capital by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone and Making Democracy Work. Similarly, I intend to use important works on Latin American public opinion attitudes such as Roderic Camp’s Citizen Views of Democracy or qualitative studies of attitudes such as Nancy Power’s Grassroots Expectations of Democracy. I am, however, less familiar with the best works of anthropology, literature, human rights, and political philosophy.

Relevant Background: This course builds on a question I have been asking more and more over time and is becoming a central research interest for me. In fact, I recently had a review essay accepted in one of the leading interdisciplinary Latin American journals (Latin American Research Review) in which I argued the central premise of this course proposal. Ultimately, I intend to focus my next book project around the question of what is a democratic culture and why it does not seem to be sinking in in Latin America.

Connection to GEOC Goals: This course has several objectives that connect directly to GEOC goals about competencies and content area, particularly Area 2 (Social Sciences) and Area 4 (Diversity and Multiculturalism). First, it will be offered as a W course with an emphasis on writing and research. Second, it addresses the content requirements of Areas 2 and 4 by applying Social Science methods and standards to the analysis of Latin America and to develop a nuanced understanding of the ways in which democratic society has developed and the ways in which it has not. And third, this course also addresses a number of the competency concerns of the GEOC guidelines. The highest goals of this course is for students to develop an understanding that no society is perfectly democratic and to recognize the ways in which “Western” and especially U.S. society may be similar to Latin American societies. It is for students to develop self-critical moral and intellectual reasoning through comparison of the U.S. and Latin America. Finally, it is to develop students’ capacity to be involved politically as informed and morally conscious citizens. I don’t believe that it is my role as a professor to promote a moral position. But, I do believe it is my role to challenge students to recognize their own normative beliefs and to critically assess themselves, their society, and their world. Exploring the nature of democratic society in developing countries and in comparison with our own is a powerful method for achieving those goals.

Departmental Support: I am very much in support of Professor Kingstone's proposal.  His course would enhance our offerings in the field of comparative politics, dovetail with his research, and fit in nicely with several GEOC aims.


Howard L. Reiter
Professor and Department Head
Department of Political Science
Box U-1024
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269-1024

Phone 860-486-2440
Fax 860-486-3347
E-mail howard.reiter@uconn.edu