Democratic double standards as a mutable political technology: A historical genealogy from Latin America

Abstract

This article argues that democratic double standards are not episodes of normative inconsistency but a mutable political technology for the differential distribution of legitimacy. The concept names a historically changing ensemble of institutional apparatuses, justificatory rationalities and material infrastructures through which the threshold of democratic legitimacy is unevenly allocated while its political function persists. It is distinguished from organised hypocrisy, ideology and discourse by four features: a function/mechanism distinction, institutional materiality, genealogical temporality and colonial asymmetry. The argument unfolds through a theory-generating genealogy organised around the Chile–Brazil axis – a historically dense dyad that condenses the technology in unusually legible form. Three moments of mutation are reconstructed: anti-communist destabilisation in Chile, the regionalisation of repression through Operation Condor and the reorganisation of political antagonism in Brazil. Integrating governmentality and the coloniality of power, it approaches Latin America as a theoretical archive for theorising the unevenness of democratic universalism.