Integration and Common Goods

Abstract

The parliamentary option and the participation of non-state actors are two palliative treatments for the regional integration processes’ democratic deficit that are far from providing a perfect and permanent cure. True, there is no such thing as a yardstick to measure democratic deficit, and therefore it is not easy to evaluate the seriousness of the illness. The bottom line though is that much depends on the actors’ perceptions and as two previous chapters demonstrated, they are not satisfied with the level of representative or participatory democracy applied to regional integration in Latin America. This chapter raises a quite provocative question, and explores another way of studying the democratization of regional integration processes.