The Democracy Action Lab (DAL) brought its research and its practitioner-facing work to this year's Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA2026), held in Paris under the theme “Republic and Revolution.” The May 2026 gathering gave DAL an opportunity to lay out, in one place, both sides of what the Lab does: rigorous research into how democracy is eroding across the region, and the applied, on-the-ground initiatives it is building in response.

Three members of the DAL team presented. Beatriz Magaloni, DAL's co-director and the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, presented survey research examining how citizens across Latin America experience and evaluate democracy — work that underpins her broader argument that popular approval and democratic legitimacy are not the same thing, and that satisfaction with a government can rise even as the institutions meant to hold it accountable are dismantled. Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, DAL's co-director, presented on the Democracy Garage, the Lab's new accelerator program supporting frontline democracy defenders across Latin America and the Caribbean, walking the room through its three-track model of hands-on advisory support, structured training, and platform-building for coordinated civic action. Hector Fuentes, a research affiliate at CDDRL, presented virtually on the Lab's Venezuela agenda, addressing the country's evolving political landscape and the questions it raises for democratic institution-building going forward.

The congress theme, “Republic and Revolution,” proved a fitting frame for conversations DAL had been having internally. Díaz-Cayeros argued in discussions around the congress that the field needs to move past treating democracy as a procedural checklist and start asking what democratic life actually feels like for the poor, the excluded, and those still living in the shadow of civil conflict and structural inequality. His point was that the rules of democratic life are not neutral since they carry hierarchies inherited from colonial and civil-conflict-era structures and that liberalism's claim to universalism can obscure that fact rather than resolve it. He pushed further still: democracy alone, he argued, is not enough. When it produces an unequal distribution of opportunity and liberty, the missing frame is a republican one, this is, a commitment to non-domination, public reason, and civic standing that goes beyond simple majority rule, paired with a state and a market theorized together rather than treated as separable problems. And against the fatalism of the “backsliding” literature, he insisted on a more agentive reading: Latin America's publics, in his words, are the most promising resource for democratic renewal, not merely the potential victims of democratic erosion.