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From Exclusion to Inclusion: Bolivia's 2002 Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2003

DONNA LEE VAN COTT
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Abstract

In Bolivia's 2002 national elections indigenous-movement-based political parties combined to capture 27 per cent of the vote, far surpassing their previous performance and constituting a major improvement in the representation of the country's excluded indigenous majority. Using a social movement theory framework, I attribute this result to five interacting factors: institutional changes that opened the system; the collapse of two competitive parties; the consolidation of indigenous peoples' social movement organisations; the unpopularity of the Banzer-Quiroga government and the intense anti-government mobilisations it provoked in 2000; and the ability of the indigenous parties to capitalise on growing nationalist, anti-US public sentiment.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Willem Assies, Kevin Healy, José Antonio Lucero and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for comments on a previous draft, and to acknowledge the receipt of funding from the University of Tennessee Cordell Hull Fund and a UT Professional Development Award, which supported field research in 2001 and 2002.