FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Despite the hard-won and often bloody battles fought to institute democratic elections throughout Latin America, voter turnout in these nations has plummeted over the past two decades. A University of Arkansas researcher suggests that the empty polls may have as much to do with economics as with politics.

Jeffrey Ryan, associate professor of political science, says nations across Latin America have sacrificed the robustness of their political systems in order to implement widespread economic reforms. As a result, voter participation has dropped drastically, and Ryan now fears that in trying to dig itself out of an economic hole, Latin America may have undermined the foundation of its democracies.

Latinobarometro, a dataset that records public opinion across 17 Latin American nations, claims that the number of Latin American citizens who support democracy over other forms of government drops at an average rate of 6 to 7 percent each year. "There are a lot of troubling signs," Ryan said. "And voter turnout is one of the canaries in the coal mine."

In a new study, presented at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in Washington D.C., Ryan used statistical analysis to show a direct link between "neoliberal" economic reforms and dwindling voter turnout.

In response to the sweeping recession that hit the region in the 1980s, most Latin American nations took the advice offered by such organizations as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and began fundamentally restructuring their economies. The resulting "neoliberal" reform policies privatized state-held industries, opened the nations to free trade and reduced government spending - mainly by cutting social welfare and public health programs.

Over the long term, such reforms will help Latin America keep pace with the global economy. But reaching that stable point is proving to be a painful journey, according to Ryan - one with staggering social costs over the short term.

Ryan traces three negative consequences directly back to the neoliberal reform system. The first is a widening rift between the social classes. According to Ryan, Latin America entered the 1990s with a distribution of wealth more disproportionate than that of any other region in the world. As governments sold off businesses to wealthy investors, and as those investors laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, the disparity only became more pronounced. Between 1980 and 1995, the region saw a 55 percent increase in extreme poverty.

Under most circumstances, rising levels of unemployment, poverty and crime drive citizens to become more politically active. But in Latin America, the necessity of economic reform has resulted not only in devastating social consequences but also in significant political consequences. The perception that countries have little choice but to follow IMF policy guidelines has left many with a sense that political participation is essentially futile.

According to Ryan, the second negative consequence of neoliberal reform is diminished debate - the severe narrowing of political opinions and options. The nations of Latin America so desperately need economic relief that they have no alternative but to follow the neoliberal reforms outlined for them by the World Bank and IMF. Therefore, distinctions between parties or candidates become meaningless. Regardless of who is elected, the same policies will result.

The third negative consequence compounds this problem by placing unilateral power in the hands of each president. Because neoliberal reforms cause immediate social suffering - aiming for eventual, long-term benefits - politicians directly responsible to the public are rarely willing to carry them out.

As a result, decision-making authority is concentrated in the hands of powerful presidents and their un-elected advisors, thus removing the most representative institutions in a democracy - legislatures and parties - from the policy-making process. At the same time, executive leaders cease to be accountable for the social consequences of their policies essentially because they see themselves as responsible to a "national interest" that supercedes the immediate political demands of the people.

"In this context it makes sense that people aren’t voting," Ryan said. "People vote to make change, but in many Latin American elections, there’s very little to debate, and it doesn’t matter which candidate wins. So why bother? If politics become irrelevant so too does the act of voting."

By comparing voter turnout between the first and the most recent democratic election in each Latin American country, the effects of this political irrelevance become evident. Between its first presidential election in 1985 and its latest election in 1997, Bolivia’s voter turnout dropped from 82 percent to 71 percent - a difference of 9.6 percent. Between 1985 and 1999 in Guatemala, turnout dropped 15.9 percent. And El Salvador showed the greatest loss of all - 41.7 percent between 1984 and 1999. In fact out of 17 Latin American nations, only Paraguay and Uruguay have managed to increase voter turnout since their first elections.

"The big concern is that voter turnout doesn’t come back after it’s experienced a truly significant drop," Ryan said. "In no country where they’ve lost more than five percent in turnout between one election and the next have they ever fully recovered that ground."

Using regression model analysis, Ryan found that those nations with the broadest scope of neoliberal reform suffered the steepest drops in voter turnout. Surprisingly, Ryan’s study also found that "new" democracies (those formed in the past two decades) and "uninterrupted" democracies (those with more than 30 years of democratic rule) show greater drops in voter turnout than "restored" democracies (countries in which democracy was temporarily displaced by authoritarian rule and then re-established). Ryan believes this result deserves more study.

"Part of the problem is that many Latin American countries adopted these reforms at the same moment that they were trying on democracy for the first time," Ryan said. "They’re being fed the idea that democracy is the greatest political system in the world, but at the same time, they’re hungry and unemployed, and there’s violence in the streets. That’s one heck of a mixed message."