Democratic Governance in Latin America
440
Democratic Governance in Latin America
440Hardcover
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Overview
Two features of the volume stand out. First, whereas some analysts tend to generalize for Latin America as a whole, this group of authors underscores the striking differences of achievement among countries in the region and illustrates the importance of understanding these differences. The second feature is the range of expertise within the volume.
In addition to the volume editors, the contributors are Alan Angell, Daniel Brinks, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, José de Gregorio, Alejandro Foxley, Evelyne Huber, José Miguel Insulza, Juliana Martínez Franzoni, Patricio Navia, Francisco Rodriguez, Mitchell Seligson, John Stephens, Jorge Vargas Cullell, and Ignacio Walker.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804760843 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2009 |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Democratic Governance in Latin America
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6084-3
Chapter One
Measuring Success in Democratic GovernanceSCOTT MAINWARING, TIMOTHY R. SCULLY, AND JORGE VARGAS CULLELL
* * *
In this chapter, we present measures of democratic governance to give a sense of how Latin American countries have fared since the early 1990s. The rest of the book discusses reasons for success and failure in democratic governance, but first it is necessary to provide a descriptive map of which countries have been more or less successful on which dimensions of democratic governance. Our evaluation is concerned with the extent to which democracies enhance citizen well-being and protect citizen rights. We provide an empirical mapping of how Latin American countries have fared since the early 1990s on a wide array of governance issues that are infrequently brought together to provide a medium time perspective.
In addition to providing this descriptive map, we hope to stimulate thinking about how to conceptualize and measure democratic governance. The closest existing measures are of effective governance in general (e.g., Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) rather than specifically democratic governance, and of the quality of democracy based on its procedural ideals (Diamond and Morlino 2005; Levine and Molina 2006). Our enterprise is different, and we believe it merits an effort to create a systematic approach to measurement. A measurement of democratic governance allows researchers and policy makers to chart change over time in a given country and to compare across countries with some precision. It enables us to move from impressionistic assessments to more careful measurement.
We measure performance in nine dimensions of democratic governance: the level of democracy, ensuring respect for the rule of law, control of corruption, promoting economic growth, maintaining inflation under a reasonable level, reducing poverty, job creation, improving education, and providing citizen security. The basic assumptions underlying the analysis are twofold; that
1. these outcomes profoundly influence citizens' and societies' present and future well-being, and
2. governments and states significantly influence these outcomes.
We do not test these commonly held assumptions but rather provide a descriptive map to capture variance in the quality of democratic governance for twenty Latin American countries for the post-1990 period. Contrary to analyses that lump Latin America together as a more or less undifferentiated region with converging trends, we highlight differences across countries.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of different indices to measure the quality of governance and the "democraticness" (i.e., the level of democracy) of a political regime. In relation to the existing literature on these subjects, we hope to make four contributions. First, we measure success in democratic governance. This endeavor is new and, we believe, worth undertaking. The most significant effort to measure good governance focuses on perceptions about the quality of policy and policy implementation (Kaufmann et al. 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008). In contrast, we believe that success in governance is best measured by actual results. We do not examine the relationship between the quality of policies or institutions and outcomes, but we assume that in the medium to long term, good outcomes result to a significant degree from good policies and/or institutions. The work on quality of democracy is valuable, but because of its focus on procedural aspects of democracy, it is narrower than our purview.
Second, we incorporate more objective indicators about government performance and outcomes than most existing works on related subjects. Because we focus on success in democratic governance, primary attention to outcomes is in order, since they affect citizens the most.
Third, because citizenship is core to democracy, we focus on aspects of democratic governance that have a great impact on citizens. This is not a focal point of Kaufmann et al.'s work on good governance or of the work on quality of democracy. Finally, we focus on results over the medium term, which we operationalize as fifteen years. Year-to-year assessments of Latin America can be valuable, but sometimes the medium term perspective gets lost in the sea of immediate, short-term analyses. Many analysts have based their expectations about future performance on recent past performance, leading to exaggerated optimism or pessimism, depending on the case and year, and to dubious analytic framing of questions and answers.
CASE SELECTION OF COUNTRIES
Although the way we assess the quality of democratic governance might be useful for other regions of the world, we limit our selection of countries to Latin America. We include the twenty countries of the western hemisphere in which Spanish, Portuguese, or Creole is the official language or one of the official languages: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Among the 20 Latin American countries, two have consistently (Cuba) or usually (Haiti) had authoritarian regimes since 1990. We include them for purposes of comparison, but we do not regard them as cases of democratic or even semi-democratic governance. Therefore, we include 20 countries in the tables in this chapter, but we have 18 cases of democratic or semi-democratic governance.
NINE DIMENSIONS OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE
Democratic governance refers to the capacity of democratic governments to implement policies that enhance citizen well-being and rights. In turn, a democracy is a regime 1) that sponsors free and fair competitive elections for the legislature and executive; 2) that allows for inclusive adult citizenship; 3) that protects civil liberties and political rights; and 4) in which the elected governments really govern, the military is under civilian control, and other armed actors do not dictate policy.
The nine dimensions of democratic governance that we examine are:
1. the level of democracy
2. rule of law
3. control of corruption
4. economic growth
5. inflation
6. job creation
7. poverty
8. education
9. citizen security
We chose these nine dimensions because citizens, social scientists, international institutions, politicians, and policy makers widely view them as very important. Our intention is not to be exhaustive, but rather to capture multiple important aspects of democratic governance. Because we wanted parsimony, it was important to select dimensions that were theoretically discrete. Of course, it is essential to focus on policy outcomes that are significantly affected by government and state policies and actions.
We focus on issues that citizens have identified as salient in public opinion surveys and those that have a profound impact on citizen well-being. This focus on citizen opinion and well-being is in order because more than their nondemocratic counterparts, democracies have obligations toward their citizens. According to democratic theory, the "demos"—the people—is the source of legitimacy for the regime (Sartori 1987). Stated in terms of principal/agent theory, the citizenry is the principal that elects public officials as its agents to carry out public responsibilities on its behalf.
The list of issues that one could include under the rubric of effective democratic governance is endless. We limit our attention to a few of the most important among them. We concentrate on policy outcomes more than policy processes. This decision enables us to exclude a wide array of issues and to concentrate on the ability of political systems to enhance citizen well-being and rights. Although processes are important in democratic life, citizen well-being is most affected by outcomes.
Following the distinction of Foweraker and Krznaric (2000), the first of these nine dimensions—how democratic the regime is—is intrinsic to the procedural ideals of liberal democracy. The second dimension, rule of law, is both intrinsic and partly extrinsic to democratic governance. Some nondemocratic regimes have well-functioning institutions of the rule of law, and in this sense, both democratic and nondemocratic governments can observe the rule of law. In a democracy, however, ensuring respect for the rule of law entails two distinctive tasks without which a democratic regime is severely hampered. The legal order must uphold the rights of citizens and noncitizens, and it must ensure that power holders are subject to the law (O'Donnell 2004). The other seven dimensions are extrinsic to democracy as a political regime. They refer to outcomes of all governments, whether or not they are democratic.
Although these measures could be used for shorter time periods, we are interested in how countries have fared over an extended period. For most dimensions, we therefore constructed country-level measures for a fifteen-year period since the early 1990s. We look at the medium term because it takes an extended period of time for governments to address most pressing issues. In addition, for some dimensions of governance, especially economic growth, there is a lot of "noise" in short-term performance.
The fifteen-year period has three advantages. Most important, it is long enough that the "noise" of short term economic fluctuations caused by idiosyncratic factors is considerably reduced. Second, in several countries (Chile, Haiti, and Panama), new and more democratic political regimes came into existence around 1990. Given our concern with democratic governance, we wanted to begin the analysis at a time when most regimes in Latin America were competitively elected even if not fully democratic. Third, by the early 1990s, market-oriented economic reforms were taking hold in most of Latin America. We measure democratic governance in the aftermath of the emergence of the "Washington Consensus." Otherwise, initial differences in economic policy attributable to antecedent authoritarian regimes could explain differences in performance.
Because there are solid existing indicators that effectively measure performance for these nine dimensions, and because of the advantages of comparability across research projects that accrue from using the same indicators, we rely on a new combination of existing measures rather than building new ones. Where possible, our measures focus on political, economic, and social outcomes rather than perceptions of the quality of government policies or institutions. This focus represents a departure from Kaufmann et al.'s (2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) governance indicators, which measure perceptions about government performance. Both approaches are useful, though for different purposes. As noted, the rationale for focusing on outcomes is that we are measuring success, not the perceived quality of policies. In addition, citizens care deeply about results and understand democracy partly in terms of substantive outcome (Camp 2001; Vargas Cullell 2004, 113–29).
IDENTIFYING CRITICAL DIMENSIONS : CITIZEN VIEWS
Citizen viewpoints were one consideration in selecting the nine dimensions. Table 1.1 presents survey data on what citizens identify as the most pressing problems in contemporary Latin America.
The seven surveys in Table 1.1 register some change over time, yet also show some consistency in citizen perceptions of their countries' most important problem. Unemployment, crime, poverty, economic problems, corruption, and inflation have consistently topped the list of citizen concerns. Corruption has become more salient over time as inflation has decreased in salience. Our nine dimensions cover all of these problems.
Three of these nine dimensions do not appear high on the list of citizen concerns: the level of democracy, the rule of law, and education. Most citizens weight the level of democracy and rule of law less significantly than substantive outcomes, but they are crucial in an assessment of democratic governance. Education provides citizens with greater economic, social, and cultural opportunities, and high levels of education position societies well for today's global economy.
THE LEVEL OF DEMOCRACY
A high level of democracy is an important dimension of successful democratic governance. Through their policies and practices, governments and states help produce the level of democraticness of the political regime. Government action impinges on the degree to which political regimes meet the four defining criteria of democracy. Governments and states obstruct or facilitate the holding of free and fair elections. They make it easier or harder for citizens to exercise their right to vote. They hinder or promote freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the preservation and development of civil and political rights and liberties. Finally, governments affect the degree to which they have control over the military and other nonelected potential veto players. Some governments vigorously pursue greater control over these actors; others willingly cede more power to them.
To measure the level of democracy, we use mean Freedom House scores from 1994 to 2008. So that a high score registers a high level of democracy and vice versa, we inverted the scores by subtracting the combined Freedom House score from 14. With this inverted scale, 12 is the maximum possible value, and 0 is the lowest possible value. Table 1.2 shows the scores for twenty Latin American countries for our first four dimensions. The second column reports mean Freedom House scores for 1994 to 2008. The level of democracy has varied considerably across countries. According to Freedom House, Uruguay (11.5), Costa Rica (11.3), and Chile (10.8) have had the highest levels of democracy, followed at some distance by Panama (10.3), Argentina (9.3), and the Dominican Republic (9.1). In recent years, Chile (since 2003), Costa Rica (since 2004), and Uruguay (since 2000) have consistently had the best possible scores for both civil liberties and political rights, indicating a high quality democracy. In contrast, Haiti (even when it has had a competitive regime), Guatemala, and several other countries have had serious deficiencies in democratic practice. And Cuba, of course, remains steadfastly authoritarian.
The Latin American countries cover almost the entire range of the inverted Freedom House scores (from 0 to 12). Although there is much room for improvement in the level of democracy in many countries in the region, the period since 1990 has been by far the most democratic in the history of Latin America.
Freedom House scores are one of three exceptions to our preference for objective measures; they are based on expert assessments. They provide a better measure of democracy than assessments that rely exclusively on conventional objective data such as electoral turnout, electoral results, and turnover in office. Democracy also requires protection of civil and political rights, as well as the control of democratically elected officials over the military.
RULE OF LAW
Effective democratic governance entails effective rule of law. Without effective rule of law, citizen rights cannot be ensured (O'Donnell 1999, 2005), and citizen rights are integral to democracy. Some aspects of the rule of law are especially important for poor citizens because otherwise they cannot exercise their legal rights. Effective rule of law also entails holding elected officials accountable for transgressions of the law. In a region where corruption has had corrosive effects on democracy, this is important. In addition, without effective rule of law, patrimonial practices more easily permeate the state bureaucracy, thwarting efforts at universalism and undermining meritocracy and efficiency. Finally, effective rule of law is important to counter authoritarian moves by elected presidents because it implies the exercise of constitutional review by an independent judiciary.
For this dimension, we use Kaufmann et al.'s (2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) indicator for rule of law. It is a sophisticated composite indicator that in 2007 was based on an aggregation of 75 survey and expert opinion questions taken from 26 organizations. We use this subjective measure because of the great difficulty in obtaining valid objective measures for a large number of countries. Their indicator is the best available measure that covers a wide range of countries. Kaufmann et al. (2008, 76–77) detail the sources and the specific survey questions for the rule of law dimension.
The score for a given country is equal to the number of standard deviations it is away from the mean score for all countries in a given year. A positive score indicates that a country in a given year ranked above the world mean; a negative score indicates a ranking worse than the world mean. Kaufmann et al. (2008) have calculated scores for eight years: 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Tables and Figures....................viiAcknowledgments....................xi
Contributors....................xiii
Introduction Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully....................1
1. Measuring Success in Democratic Governance Scott Mainwaring, Timothy R. Scully, and Jorge Vargas Cullell....................11
2. Economic Growth in Latin America: From the Disappointment of the Twentieth Century to the Challenges of the Twenty-First José De Gregorio....................52
3. Does One Size Fit All in Policy Reform? Cross-National Evidence and Its Implications for Latin America Francisco Rodríguez....................88
4. More Market or More State for Latin America? A Reflection for the Post-Crisis Alejandro Foxley....................129
5. Successful Social Policy Regimes? Political Economy, Politics, and Social Policy in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens....................155
6. Institutional Design and Judicial Effectiveness: Lessons from the Prosecution of Rights Violations for Democratic Governance and the Rule of Law Daniel M. Brinks....................210
7. Political Institutions, Populism, and Democracy in Latin America Patricio Navia and Ignacio Walker....................245
8. Democratic Governance in Chile Alan Angell....................269
9. Limits to Costa Rican Heterodoxy: What Has Changed in "Paradise"? Mitchell A. Seligson and Juliana Martínez Franzoni....................307
10. Structural Reform and Governability: The Brazilian Experience in the 1990s Fernando Henrique Cardoso....................338
11. Democratic Governance in Latin America: Eleven Lessons from Recent Experience Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully....................365
12. Postscript: Democratic Governance in Latin America José Miguel Insulza....................398
Index....................405