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79 results

Page 1 of 4

  • Electoral Revolution or Democratic Alternation?

  • María Victoria Murillo, Virginia Oliveros, Milan Vaishnav
  • Journal:
    Latin American Research Review / Volume 45 / Issue 3 / 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 September 2022, pp. 87-114
    • Article
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  • Over the past few years, a burgeoning literature on Latin American politics has developed, focusing on explanations for the renewed success of the left in the region. Building on electoral trends and public opinion analysis, we argue that the region is experiencing the normalization of democratic politics rather than a backlash or a revolution. Furthermore, we believe that electoral support for the left reflects the disenchantment of voters with underperforming right-wing governments. Using a unique data set covering eighteen countries in the region, our statistical analyses demonstrate that retrospective voting provides a powerful explanation of the recent electoral success of the left in Latin America. Thus, the central implication of our argument is that electoral accountability is still the primary mechanism of controlling the executive in the region's young democracies.

  • 12 - Conclusion

  • Edited by Daniel M. Brinks, University of Texas, Austin, Steven Levitsky, Harvard University, Massachusetts, María Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America
    Published online:
    06 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020, pp 277-298

  • Summary

    We began this book with the premise that what ultimately distinguishes strong institutions from weak ones is that the former matter more than the latter. The same institution, in two different contexts or at two different times, is stronger if it makes more of a behavioral difference in one instance than in the other. As the chapters in this volume make clear, however, it is difficult to evaluate exactly how much an institution “matters.” It is relatively simple to say that an institution is strong because, on paper, it possesses features that should make it matter – for example, it commands great things. But it is an altogether different – and, we believe, far more interesting – thing to say that an institution is strong because it actually produces an outcome that is substantially different from what we might have observed in its absence, and that it continues to produce that outcome even in the face of pressures to change it or avoid it altogether.

  • 1 - The Political Origins of Institutional Weakness

  • Edited by Daniel M. Brinks, University of Texas, Austin, Steven Levitsky, Harvard University, Massachusetts, María Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America
    Published online:
    06 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020, pp 1-40

  • Summary

    The third wave of democratization transformed Latin America. Across the region, regime transitions triggered a plethora of institutional reforms aimed at enhancing the stability and quality of both the new and the few long-standing democracies. Most states adopted new constitutions. Many of them extended new rights to citizens, including unprecedented social rights, such as the right to health care, housing, and a clean environment (Klug 2000; Yashar 2005; Brinks and Blass 2018). Electoral systems were redesigned – at least once – in every Latin American country except Costa Rica; judicial and central bank reforms spread across the region (Jácome and Vásquez 2008); and governments launched far-reaching decentralization initiatives and experimented with new institutions of direct or participatory democracy (Falleti 2010; Cameron, Hershberg, and Sharpe 2012; Altman 2014; Mayka 2019).

The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America
  • Edited by Daniel M. Brinks, Steven Levitsky, María Victoria Murillo
  • Published online:
    06 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020
  • Analysts and policymakers often decry the failure of institutions to accomplish their stated purpose. Bringing together leading scholars of Latin American politics, this volume helps us understand why. The volume offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying weak institutions. It introduces different dimensions of institutional weakness and explores the origins and consequences of that weakness. Drawing on recent research on constitutional and electoral reform, executive-legislative relations, property rights, environmental and labor regulation, indigenous rights, squatters and street vendors, and anti-domestic violence laws in Latin America, the volume's chapters show us that politicians often design institutions that they cannot or do not want to enforce or comply with. Challenging existing theories of institutional design, the volume helps us understand the logic that drives the creation of weak institutions, as well as the conditions under which they may be transformed into institutions that matter.
Understanding Institutional Weakness

Understanding Institutional Weakness
  • Power and Design in Latin American Institutions
  • Daniel M. Brinks, Steven Levitsky, Maria Victoria Murillo
  • Published online:
    04 July 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019
  • This Element introduces the concept of institutional weakness, arguing that weakness or strength is a function of the extent to which an institution actually matters to social, economic or political outcomes. It then presents a typology of three forms of institutional weakness: insignificance, in which rules are complied with but do not affect the way actors behave; non-compliance, in which state elites either choose not to enforce the rules or fail to gain societal cooperation with them; and instability, in which the rules are changed at an unusually high rate. The Element then examines the sources of institutional weakness.

  • 6 - Voters’ Preferences and Parties’ Electoral Offers

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 107-130

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the determinants of vote choice, which are crucial to assessing the heterogeneity on voters’ sensitivity to parties’ policy and non-policy offers. We provide evidence that ideological proximity, competence for managing the economy, distributive expectations, and connections to partisan networks shape electoral behavior in both countries. Subsequently, we introduce a utility function that models the weight that voters attach to the policy and non-policy determinants of their vote choice. We then present a model that estimate separate parameters for voters in each socioeconomic category. We show that richer voters care more about ideological distance in both countries, although Chilean voters allot more weight to this dimension than their Argentine counterparts. Whereas Chilean better-off voters value macroeconomic competence more than poorer voters, poorer Argentine voters care more about parties’ ability to manage the economy than their richer counterparts. Even for distributive expectations, we show different patterns across countries in terms of the weight assigned by poorer and richer voters to public-sector job expectations in their electoral decision, which are more salient for poorer Argentine voters and middle-class Chilean voters.

  • 4 - Mapping Voter Preferences in Argentina and Chile

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 64-81

  • Summary

    This chapter describes the political attitudes of Argentine and Chilean voters based on the data collected in our original surveys. We provide evidence here of socioeconomic heterogeneity in voters’ policy views and perceptions of parties’ ideological positions, managerial competence, and capacity to generate expectations of targeted distribution in each country. Our survey results provide evidence of large asymmetries in the perceived non-policy endowments of Argentine parties. Argentine voters perceive the Peronists as having significant non-policy advantages in terms of macroeconomic competence and capacity to deliver selective incentives, which provides the party with opportunities not available to its rivals. More importantly, these non-policy endowments are perceived in a similar fashion irrespective of voters’ ideological position. By contrast, Chilean voters perceived the policy location and non-policy endowments of parties as intertwined, with voters on the left and right of the political spectrum perceiving parties that are ideologically closer as more competent managers of the economy, but without significant cross-party differences in non-policy endowments.

  • 10 - Non-Policy Politics and Electoral Responsiveness

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 214-228

  • Summary

    Non-policy politics is critical for electoral success. Parties routinely signal managerial competence, mobilize their activists, and deliver selective incentives to win elections. Here, we illuminate our conceptualization of electoral responsiveness with empirical information about voter preferences and politicians’ strategies in Argentina and Chile to show that voters’ demands constrained politicians in the short term but that supply politics matters as well in the long term. We assume that democracies with working political parties, which allow free flows of information, generate the incentives that make vote-seeking politicians operate as our framework suggests: combining distinct strategies to attract diverse groups of voters. In doing so, we seek to bridge the divide between the literature on advanced democracies, more focused on policy and competence, and the scholarship on new democracies, more centered on targeted distribution. Our broader conceptualization of electoral responsiveness can be extended to widely different democracies, adapting the dimensions of non-policy politics used to explain the incentives generated by electoral competition on politicians as well as the categories of voters they identify for targeting their offers. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of this broader conceptualization of electoral responsiveness.

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