Peru is a multiethnic society whose postcolonial language regime was marked by the dominance of Spanish as the exclusive language of state bureaucracy up until recently. There are now forty-eight different Indigenous languages recognized by the state. The process of language regime transformation in Peru started with state traditions of monolingualism by defect, followed by incremental change in state recognition of Indigenous languages and the subsequent development of Indigenous language rights as manifested in constitutional and legislative norms. The adoption of a multilingual language regime based on linguistic rights for minorities was not the product of the Indigenous movement´s actions, nor those of ethnic parties. Institutional reforms that were not designed, and were not expected, to advance linguistic rights, allowed some actors the framework to accelerate incremental change.

Chile and Peru underwent ambitious neoliberal reforms in the early 1980s and mid-1990s that had many similarities in their design and goals. Their university systems were no exception. Both countries’ higher education reforms stressed the proliferation of private institutions and market competition as a solution for the alleged shortcomings of public higher education. Despite these similarities, the two reform projects also had many differences, leading to distinct outcomes and grievances in recent times. While Chile placed more emphasis on reforming both public and private universities based on neoliberal models and allocated state-sponsored student loans, in Peru, the reform left the public system untouched and did not create incentives for student recruitment in private higher education. These divergent paths, we argue, explain the different backlashes against the shortcomings of these neoliberal reforms. While the Chilean counter-reform is characterized by a bottom-up process that aims to bring back the state and guarantee more equality in the higher education system, in Peru, the top-down reform focuses on creating and strengthening regulatory institutions to ameliorate low-quality education. In both cases, neoliberal policy feedback processes enlighten why the outcomes are very much still part of the neoliberal framework.

The weak or selective enforcement of parchment rules is a widely recognized problem in Latin American and developing states. In Chapter 1, Brinks, Levitsky, and Murillo theorize institutional weakness as the gap between the way social interactions should be structured by institutions and the actual way social interactions occur. We define enforcement as the set of actions that the state takes to reduce the size of that gap. Our point of departure is that enforcement is often uneven and therefore constitutes a key element of the politics of institutional weakness; when rules are enforced is equally, if not more, important than the content of the rules themselves.

In this chapter, we build an account of the political and societal determinants of enforcement to elucidate why and how weak institutions gain relevance and how strong institutions might, or might not, emerge from state action.