Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how the presidencies of Alemán and Ortega have affected Nicaragua’s quality of democracy. Both have had deleterious impacts, especially since 2000. Ortega’s first administration had positive effects and his latest may yet have.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1984, Nicaragua has held six presidential elections, returning four presidents, each with a distinct governing style that affected the country's quality of democracy in terms of both institutional performance and citizen participation, whether positively or negatively. This paper considers two of those presidents—Arnoldo Alemán (1996-2001) and Daniel Ortega's first and second term (1984-90; 2006-11)—to assess their impact on the quality of Nicaraguan democracy. Both are personalistic leaders, the architects of the Liberal-Sandinista power-sharing pact of 2000, which lessened presidential accountability and turned key governmental institutions into partisan tools. Thus the two actively collaborated to undermine the quality of democracy. Further, in his second term Ortega continued centralising authority in the presidency and strengthened personalistic, caudillo-style politics in Nicaragua.

However, Ortega's first term furthered political pluralism and his second developed the Consejos del Poder Ciudadano (CPP), that offer a restricted opening for citizen participation. Though a plainly clientelistic mechanism, the CPPs recall the mass organisations of the 1980s that were the foundation for the formation of civil society organizations in the 1990s. The paper thus will analyse the quality of democracy through the operation of the usual democratic institutions and processes, as well as via the nature of citizens' political engagement. It gives particular attention to Ortega's shift and to explaining his changed behaviour.