Abstract
Studies on democratization have approached the question of time from the perspective of both representation and allocation. They invite political science, and the social sciences in general, to further address the temporal dimension and the issue of time in processes of political change. From this perspective, democratizations can be described as critical moments for the reconfiguration of time perceptions and temporal representations, moments in which the future is both uncertain and temporally limited. In this sense, from the East to the South, we are witnessing a sharp `fall' into the democratic present and a refocusing of politics on concepts such as `Democracy' and `the Market'. What we call the `fall into the present' refers to the presentist focus of politics and the extra-ordinary re-evaluation of the present in the modern era: the present becomes omnipresent and overrules both the past and the future as the referential horizon of politics. The changing nature of the perception of time is particularly acute in Latin America, where the future is being replaced by the present as the focal point of politics.
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