Frances Hagopian
Whether citizen interests and preferences are represented in government, and whether or not citizens can hold their governments accountable, is a critical defining feature of modern mass democracies. In Latin America, institutions of representation and accountability were historically weak. In what have been called “elitist democracies,” large segments of the population were excluded from political and economic life, popular interests went underrepresented, and mechanisms of accountability were nonexistent. In the past three decades as democratization has broadened access to national and local political life, loosened restrictions on association, and leveled the playing field for old and new parties to compete for constituents that in earlier periods did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship, the challenges to tried-and-true forms of political representation and accountability to deepen their reach and the opportunities for new ones to take root have multiplied. Whether these opportunities have always been realized, in what ways, and why, is the subject of this chapter.
Political representation and accountability can assume different forms. Citizens can be connected to government along multiple, sometimes parallel and sometimes intersecting, avenues and they can hold their representatives accountable in a variety of vertical and horizontal institutions or some combination of the two at different levels of the political system. Thus in order to accurately chart the landscape of political representation past and present, we must extend our scope of inquiry beyond national political elections, and to identify the processes and mechanisms by which political representation and accountability may have grown stronger or weaker, we need to recognize that the factors shaping political representation may exercise different impacts at different levels of national territory or in different institutional settings. The chapter focuses on two processes that stand out as critical in altering the terrain on which citizens either individually or in movements, associations, or parties, meet the institutions of accountability and representation: the decentralization of government and politics, and the liberalization of states and markets. Both prompted citizens to mobilize, old forms of representation to adapt or wither, and innovative experiments to fl ourish.
A recurring theme of the chapter is that if economic development strategies and even broad regime tendencies have moved in a common direction in recent decades, the paths that various citizen groups, constituents, and political leaders have pursued, and their destinations, have markedly varied across borders. In some party monopolies have crumbled and party systems have realigned to more closely express citizen policy preferences whereas in others, parties more closely resemble political machines and vote-buying is as pervasive as ever, subverting the possibility of accountability and representation. Moreover, the weakening of class organizations that were the bedrock of representation have brought different and at times diametrically opposite results. In some countries, they have been replaced by a patchwork of new associations whose members are mobilized politically where they live or along ethnic lines; the most successful of these serve as transmission belts to articulate citizen interests, pry open government books, and broaden considerably the venues of accountability beyond periodic elections. Elsewhere, the collapse of old institutions of representation, however restricted, has left a void in public associational life and a new generation of populist leaders has flourished in an institutional vacuum. Finally, sweeping away national authoritarian regimes has not guaranteed democratic representation and accountability for all. To the contrary, too frequent manifestations of subnational authoritarianism make a mockery of accountability and representation beyond the capital. The challenge is to explain this pattern of variation, especially when it is not easily predictable from the past. I argue that how economic liberalization took place affected the opportunities for reorganizing representation and creating new venues for accountability, trumping the otherwise powerful effects of socioeconomic modernization and the design of electoral institutions on forms of political representation.
The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I define political accountability and representation. Next, I review the evolution of political representation in Latin America and identify some early weaknesses. The third section examines the effects of neoliberalism, decentralization, and the organizing initiatives of civil society on the formal institutions of political representation. The fourth evaluates competing perspectives on why the forms of political representation and accountability vary, and briefly advances an alternative approach. The final section concludes with an agenda for future research.
Citizens in modern, mass democracies are not self-governing but delegate to political agents the task of representing their interests and preferences in government. Since the beginning of the era of modern, mass democracy, political theorists have debated whether the best outcomes are produced when superior men of wisdom and ability, a “natural aristocracy,” govern not according to popular wishes but to what they believe is in the best interests of the national good, as famously argued by Edmund Burke; when men and women are selected for office who are “like” the people they represent and act spontaneously as the people would have acted, the view championed by John Adams; or when elected officials do as their constituents direct them and are held accountable for their actions in government if they do not, the essence of what we understand today as mandate representation. Although accountability is superfluous to both Burke’s “trustee” representation and to “descriptive” or identity-based representation,1 “mandate” representation requires that representatives must be responsive and held accountable to the ordinary citizens who elected them. As principals, citizens hold even remote officeholders, or agents, accountable for their actions in government through retrospective judgments in elections; they reward representatives who were faithful to the diverse political ideas, programs, and policy proposals they put forward during election cycles as a basis for government action, and punish the violators for not keeping up their end of the electoral bargain.
As we see next, for much of Latin American history a restricted franchise, state-imposed representational monopolies, and pervasive patron-client relations robbed the concepts of representation and accountability of much of their meaning. But since the “third wave” of democratization reestablished democratic procedures in the past three decades, institutions of representation and accountability have come under closer scrutiny as scholars have debated whether democracies are truly representative and officeholders accountable for the policies they have pursued in office, as well as which institutions hold the greatest promise for democratic representation.
During the days when politics consisted of what Alexander Wilde has called “conversations among gentlemen,” scholars took for granted that Latin American political parties were unrepresentative and exclusionary.2 The lucky few workers in urban industrial employment gained representation along with the middle and lower-middle classes, but the urban and rural poor were not so fortunate. Illiterates could not vote, and indigenous peoples were either made objects of attempted assimilation or excluded altogether.3 In Brazil and many other countries, a work card registering one in the formal economy—which half the population did not hold—was a passport to health care, title to one’s home, the right to a fair hearing before a judge, and in every meaningful sense of the term, citizenship.4 Accountability, it was often said in scholarly circles in the 1990s, could not be translated into Spanish (since then, “rendición de cuentas” has come into wider usage).
Political representation based on clientelism, the proffering of pork, state patronage jobs, or cash assistance in exchange for votes, was pervasive. Clientelistic networks that crisscrossed the Latin American countryside for much of its history and the urban periphery in the twentieth century were sustained in mass democracies by state employment, funding for construction and infrastructural projects, and discretion in the delivery of social services. Patrons in state and party offices channeled public employment and cash assistance as well as their own personal resources to mobilize votes for themselves and their parties. Traditional and labor parties alike divided, monopolized, and competed, respectively, for the spoils of state.
During the era of import-substituting industrialization from roughly the Second World War until the 1970s, without displacing these networks, states organized interests and regulated representation for those in the urban, formal economy along functional lines, and the intellectual development of the topic largely mimicked that reality. Philippe Schmitter’s 1971 landmark, Interest Conflict and Political Change in Brazil, introduced students of Latin American politics to the concept of corporatism, the philosophy that underpinned interwar fascism in Europe and was embraced by politicians in Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere in the 1930s and 1940s.5 Schmitter contended that in order to preempt labor radicalism, bind workers to the state, and ensure the smooth functioning of critical industries, states strictly regulated labor markets, created and conferred upon noncompetitive labor unions monopoly status, established avenues of representation leading directly from these unions to state institutions, and reserved the right to remove leaders that stepped out of line.6 Labor leaders accepted the incursions on union autonomy and the bargain that was offered to them in exchange for more generous wages and benefits than they could gain in collective bargaining with employers, and for the prerogative to dispense them.7 Schmitter’s thesis for why pluralist interest representation had not taken root became the received wisdom, triumphing over accounts that stressed the particular features of Iberian culture.8
Eventually, as more aspiring entrants beat on the doors of the polity, pressures for land and other forms of redistribution multiplied, and radical competitors to entrenched populist parties gained footholds among the poor, political systems were slammed shut by military coups. With democracies in recess, the study of political representation, along with other facets of democratic governance and institutions, fell out of vogue for many years. Even the literature on regime transitions and democratization, which was largely focused on the bargaining between authoritarian regime elites and the democratic opposition, did not pay much explicit attention to the study of representation, except to suggest overrepresenting conservative forces for the sake of stability.9 Yet even once democracies seemed safe from authoritarian regressions, a question lurking beneath the surface was what the cost might be of making officeholders more accountable to the median voter who might reject short-term policies necessary to produce good macroeconomic outcomes. In an important volume on the crisis of representation in the Andes, Scott Mainwaring did not dodge the hard question of whether institutional reforms that enhanced representation and accountability carried a tradeoff with governance, and he suggested not only that they had but that the resulting deficits in state capacity and performance, in turn, may have eroded citizen trust in representative political institutions.10
Political scientists returned to studying political representation and accountability because of a broader concern with the quality of democracy. One stream of research focused on the proliferation of new social movements, civil society organizations, and nongovernmental organizations, some of which were embedded in transnational networks,11 through which citizens sought the means to defend their living standards, human and cultural rights, and communities. Although many of their champions valued them as alternative avenues of representation that could substitute for unrepresentative political parties, paradoxically some compelling studies showed that local institutions of participatory democracy worked best as sites of deliberation as well as representation and accountability when they had the support of incumbent political parties.12 By supplying political parties and state actors with crucial information about citizen preferences, they effectively supplemented political representation, and when awarded power sharing and veto privileges, they also served as instruments of citizen accountability.
A second body of research has examined the representation of historically underrepresented interests in Latin America through the prism of the potential for descriptive political representation. Of particular interest have been policies that reserve slots on party ballots for women and representatives of ethnic and racial minority groups. Political science research suggests that quotas are more likely to be adopted for women than for Indians, and are significantly more effective when they carry placement mandates with provisions for strict compliance and are applied in closed-list proportional representation systems such as Argentina and Costa Rica, where roughly two in five members of the national legislatures today are women, than in open-list and especially district systems.13
A third steam of research broadly addresses the relationship between parties and voters within the tradition of mandate representation. In one important volume on the quality of democracy Bingham Powell usefully defined democratic responsiveness as a causal chain that begins with the party preferences held by citizens, then moves “link by causal link through such stages as voting, election outcomes, the formation of policy-making coalitions, the process of policymaking between elections, and public policies themselves.”14 Specifically, governments are responsive when their composition reflects the outcome of elections, fulfilling the requirements of procedural representation, and when they implement policies that match citizen preferences, the essence of substantive representation.
By these measures, many Latin American democracies fell short in the first decade of democracy, and still do. Legislatures in Brazil and Argentina are marred by significant malapportionment of seats in their lower and upper chambers,15 and in Chile, administrative regions are governed by appointed intendants and non-elected councils. Substantively, in the mid-1990s political representation via ideological voting was weak throughout Latin America except in Uruguay and Chile, and “extraordinarily weak” in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. Some of the highest “representation gaps” between the mean ideological positions of voters and their parties were seen in Venezuela and Guatemala.16 Legislators also most closely shared the positions of their voters across “issue baskets” in Chile and Uruguay, as well as Argentina, and on economic issues—typically the most salient—in Colombia and Costa Rica, but the match was much weaker in nearly all countries on law and order issues.17 Complicating the lines of accountability was the fact that so many party systems were unstable, so many political parties did not have roots in the electorate, and so many politicians had the habit of changing parties after their election and the freedom to do so.
The match between voter preferences and policies in Powell’s “chain of responsiveness” was even more deeply problematic in the first decade of democracy. Susan Stokes’ influential work showed that from 1982 to 1995 “dramatic changes of policy took place after 12 of 42 elections,” and in three others, “campaigns were too vague for voters to infer much of anything about the future course of policy.” In each of the dozen cases of blatant violations of mandate, presidential candidates switched from a campaign message promising economic security to policies that promoted economic efficiency.18 Voters forgave policy switches that produced good outcomes in Argentina and Peru, but harshly judged the Acción Democrática government in Venezuela which did not. Citizen disaffection with incumbents across much of Latin America in the 1990s was reflected in high rates of electoral volatility, and the success of several presidential candidates who positioned themselves as political outsiders riding to the rescue to stabilize prices and create jobs. This new breed of politicians—widely referred to as the neopopulists—had success in the Andes as well as, at least temporarily, Brazil and Argentina.
When political parties and politicians compete by proffering public goods and services in exchange for friendship, loyalty, or votes, as is so often true in Latin America, it is even harder for ordinary citizens to hold representatives to account. They also cannot hold parties collectively accountable for policy outcomes if candidates for legislative office do not commit to a national party program, leadership, and decisions; parties do not cohere, or if they vanish from one election to the next. At best, such representation can be effective when “clientelist politics establishes very tight bonds of accountability and responsiveness” given the direct exchange relation between patrons and clients that makes “very clear” what politicians and constituencies have to bring to the table to make deals work.19 But more often, it is in fact inherently difficult for voters to “throw out the bums” that fail to deliver the goods but show up at every election cycle promising anew that they will. Incumbents have the advantage of being able to offer access to resources not available to their opponents, and voters who vote against the patron run a great risk. As scholars have aptly noted, a voter can elect or vote out a given politician only if many other voters in a district act in the same way.20 But herein lies the problem: “the voter who votes against him when a majority of others does not risks suffering the patron’s retaliation. Each voter minimizes her risk and maximizes her payoffs when she votes for the unpopular patron but all other voters (or at least a majority) vote against him. Yet because all voters face this same incentive, the unpopular patron remains in power.”21 Moreover, accountability can be worse than weak: as Susan Stokes contends, when parties buy votes, they know, or can make inferences about, what individual voters have done in the voting booth and reward or punish them conditional on these actions, making a “mockery” of democratic accountability and engendering perverse accountability.22
Of course, the accountability that citizens exercise at the ballot box at election time is only one manifestation of the sort of accountability that is critical for democracy. Gravely concerned about the power-aggrandizing strategies of the neopopulist presidents elected in Latin America in the 1990s, Guillermo O’Donnell highlighted the need for “horizontal accountability,” or the sorts of checks and balances that other branches of government and a free press could exercise on the presidency.23 At best, the newly created Office of the Ombudsman in Peru, Ministério Público in Brazil and similar institutions elsewhere, could serve as agents of accountability to investigate abuses of power by state actors on behalf of ordinary citizens and society at large.24 But more generally, Latin American legislatures can only react to the initiatives of far more powerful executives,25 and courts lack the requisite independence to make accountability work.
In a particularly influential article, Catalina Smulovitz and Enrique Peruzzotti introduced the concept of “societal” accountability to describe the ways in which popular mobilization could trigger the mechanisms of horizontal accountability that could investigate abuses and prosecute them. They illustrated their important argument with the poignant case of the Argentine teenager, Maria Soledad, who was raped and murdered in 1990 by a son of a provincial congressman in her home province of Catamarca, long the dominion of the powerful Saadi family. Local “marches of silence” organized by her family and nuns to press for an investigation and trial in the face of an obvious cover-up grew in number, size, and stature over the course of six years, and provoked other civil society actions including strikes by professional associations. Eventually, the attention of the provincial and national press forced an investigation, a nationally televised trial, the appointment of new judges, and ultimately a conviction in 1998.26 More dramatically, elsewhere popular mobilizations resulted in the resignations of sitting presidents in Ecuador and Bolivia, though whether or not such mobilizations are evidence of a democratic accountability is questionable.
Political representation and accountability from the 1990s onward were profoundly shaped by two processes—decentralization and economic liberalization. The decentralization of power and resources raised the stakes of winning local office and created possibilities of new forms of citizen participation and institutions of accountability. Economic liberalization that deregulated markets emptied corporatist associations of their representative function, and made organizing to influence political parties and legislatures all the more important. The received wisdom is that decentralization had a salutary impact on political representation and accountability, while neoliberal reform endangered fragile institutions of democratic representation and accountability and disorganized society, snuffing out promising civil society associations. Yet, decentralization also strengthened less-than-democratic subnational elites, and neoliberal reforms also created the possibility of better political representation by restricting politicians’ access to state patronage, creating new forms of citizenship, and opening new avenues for programmatic contention. In fact, the impact of these economic and political processes was uneven. In some cases, they transformed existing parties, interest groups, and institutions in ways that allowed representation takes shape; in others, they resulted in their substitution in favor of new and even traditional forms of representation and accountability.
A motley set of political forces in Latin America converged to push decentralization in the 1980s and 1990s. Democratic forces demanded the decentralization of power and elections for previously appointed mayors and governors, and were backed by regional elites who thought they would have a better chance of defending their policy interests—such as stopping land reform—in the polities they dominated. Governors and mayors sought ever more resources to distribute, while international financial institutions and local economists favored the decentralization of resources and responsibilities to local governments as a means to improve the efficiency of resource allocation on the logic that citizens could better restrain government officials if they were closer to those spending their tax dollars and could threaten credibly to take their business elsewhere. Parties about to lose power in national elections but who retained some regional strength embraced decentralization schemes as political insurance against electoral oblivion,27 and central government officials who had to cut payroll to make ends meet were all too content to offload their commitments to provincial governments. Between 1985 and 1996, decentralizing reforms instituted the direct election of mayors in Brazil’s state capitals, Colombia, Chile, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City and of governors in Colombia and Venezuela; municipal autonomy in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico and the Law of Popular Participation (LPP) in Bolivia (1994); fiscal decentralization in the four federal countries—Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico; and the transfer of administrative responsibilities for education and health services throughout the region. In all, the devolution of revenues and expenditures in Latin America doubled between 1980 and 2000.28
Decentralization did not always produce unambiguously good economic or political outcomes. In Brazil and Argentina, profligate state and provincial governments drove up public sector deficits to alarming levels. The effects of decentralization on political representation were also not uniformly positive. Rene Mayorga has suggested that the Bolivian Law of Popular Participation that invested power in local communities enhanced local democracy and indigenous participation also undermined the connections between those communities and national political parties.29 Kathleen O’Neill concluded that at best, the crisis of democratic representation in Bolivia and four other Andean countries “seems to have occurred despite decentralization, rather than because of it.”30 In Argentina, the same process of decentralization that produced gaping public sector budget deficits also lined the pockets of patronage-seeking politicians, thus undermining the model of representation based on programmatic mandates. In recent work, Carlos Gervasoni even raises the specter that federal fiscal transfers and a high percentage of public employees dependent upon political patrons has led to “subnational authoritarianism” in several, electorally noncompetitive Argentine provinces.31
At the same time, some of the most promising new institutions of accountability in the region have arisen in decentralized settings. An important forthcoming work contends that decentralization in Mexico laid the groundwork for the metamorphosis of Mexico’s poverty assistance programs.32 The world famous participatory budgeting institutions of Brazil that allow local communities to arrive at a set of priorities for public funding and examine the books to hold officeholders to account took shape as a local alliance of civil society organizations and the local Workers’ Party administration of the city of Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Although participatory budgeting does not work nearly as well across Brazil, citizens’ health councils and other local assemblies with the right to veto city master plans have clearly enhanced the accountability of local administrations to citizens across a wide range of policy areas,33 and national conferences have put new issues on the agenda, extended rights, and made them meaningful.
The economic crisis of the 1980s delivered a shock to systems of political representation in Latin America. Debt service and fiscal insolvency prompted neoliberal reformers to sell off state enterprises, liberalize trade, court foreign investment, and loosen the restrictions on labor markets, thus making state corporatism anachronistic. Moreover, the deindustrialization that accompanied trade liberalization jettisoned workers to the informal sector, thereby loosening their attachments to those vehicles of representation to which they had been bonded for decades—unions and labor parties—and made them available for new options.
The effects of this transformation on political representation were uneven and subject to change over time. Initially, political representation appeared to scatter. Parties linked to unions saw their electoral bases erode, and rates of electoral volatility spiked upward in Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, and elsewhere as voters abandoned established parties for political newcomers and outsiders.34 In Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, existing parties were able to ride out the storm, but in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, new political forces effectively challenged the old and redrew the electoral maps, and in Peru and Venezuela, once proud parties collapsed altogether in favor of radical partisan alternatives.
Many held the view in the 1990s that neoliberalism was destroying whatever political representation there was. At the level of institutions, Adam Przeworski famously warned that neoliberalism by stealth devalued representative institutions by instructing citizens and political actors alike that they did not matter.35 Neoliberalism indeed bred a new generation of “neopopulist” leaders,36 who claimed to rule on behalf of the majority. Particularly vulnerable to what amounted to the abrogation of republican principles of separation of powers, a model which Guillermo O’Donnell famously branded “delegative” democracies,” were countries that did not have prior histories of strong democratic institutions.37 At the level of society, scholars contended that neoliberalism destroyed union, class, and community solidarities along with the impetus to and capability for collective action to defend living standards, a claim initially supported by data showing that strikes and protests declined in the 1990s.38 It was also claimed that impoverished and dislocated workers who were no longer encapsulated by unions and other social organizations and who lost protection from unemployment, ill health, and old age, and drove up the demand for clientelism.39 During their presidencies, Carlos Salinas (Mexico) and Alberto Fujimori (Peru) introduced funds (PRONASOL and FONCONDES) to compensate victims of neoliberal policies with public projects targeted for political gain, with strong results in the 1991 midterm elections in Mexico and the 1995 presidential elections in Peru.40 The Peronists in Argentina degenerated from a party with a platform of distributive justice to a political machine.41 Voter dealignment coupled with individualistic material and political exchanges thus became the new way of doing business in neoliberal times.
But almost as soon as a consensus emerged that neoliberalism had deleterious effects on political representation, deeply unpopular economic reform gave birth to new left parties and sparked vibrant public protests, suggesting that the decline in representation may have been temporary, or a prelude to a more fundamental reorganization.42 Neopopulism disappeared quickly in Brazil, evolved in Argentina, and although the quintessential populist Hugo Chávez did best Venezuela’s political parties, in Peru a viable center-right alternative coalesced at least temporarily to stem the populist tide. In Bolivia and Ecuador, existing parties were arguably supplanted not by neopopulism but by parties that mobilized voters on the basis of ethnic identities. Paradoxically, indigenous mobilization was sparked, Deborah Yashar explains, by neoliberal reforms that dismantled the corporatist citizenship regimes under which indigenous communities had gained rights to communally held land and social services.43
Because describing how representation takes place is neither straightforward nor obvious, and so much of the debate has focused on characterizing what is (and what should be), less attention has been paid to explaining variation in the emergent patterns of representation and accountability, as well as to why representation is sometimes “successful”—supported by citizens’ beliefs and behaviors—and sometimes not.
Scholars are divided over the relative importance of incentives generated by the rules under which politicians gain office and the poverty and isolation of their constituents in explaining the lines of representation, but most seem to agree about the particular institutional features and socioeconomic conditions that engender parties of clientelism or program. They expect candidate-centered electoral systems, those in which party leaders do not control ballot access, to engender an “electoral connection” by giving politicians incentives to serve their constituents, not their party leaders, which makes programmatic politics next to impossible and clientelistic politics most probable. They also expect that where voters are poor, live in rural isolation, and are preoccupied with survival and heavily discount the future, they are more likely to demand such immediate, tangible benefits as a free lunch, a job, or a paved road for themselves, their families, and their communities (clientelism) over potentially better, but slower to be delivered global policy outcomes (program). Both explanations expect that since the socioeconomic foundations of social cleavages change slowly and political institutions are rarely reformed, systems of representation should be fairly stable. Indeed, in an important new work, Herbert Kitschelt and others contend that parties structure programmatic representation today only in those countries where electoral cleavages formed over socio-economic divisions, such as those between workers and employers, that emerged from import-substituting industrialization decades ago. Where these linkages either broke down or did not previously exist, new ones have not been formed. In other words, where programmatic representation was historically weak, it had little chance of emerging.44
Yet from the late-1990s forward some indications of new programmatic cleavages taking root, most notably in Brazil but also in Uruguay and perhaps in Mexico, belied this interpretation. We have also seen dramatic collapses and hopeful signs of new constructions of local and national institutions of accountability and representation in Latin America. In short, scholars underestimated the effect of successful neoliberal reform on the possibilities of representation.
Why this is so may be attributed to two salutary developments accompanying state and market reform under democratic auspices. First, consistent with a quintessentially liberal view that extols the possibilities for democracy of scaling back the tentacles of a parasitic state—a view more popular among economists and policy makers than among political scientists45—state reforms that trimmed public payrolls, removed discretionary resources for pork-barrel spending, and depoliticized access to public services threatened patronage politics to the point of extinction. Of course, where politicians effectively protected these besieged assets and state reform sprang leaks, as in Argentina, the impact of state reform was obviously attenuated. Second, the need to debate weighty economic reforms in the public eye and on the floor of the Congress prompted partisan delegations to cohere and provided parties such as the Brazilian Party of Social Democracy, the Uruguayan Colorado and National Parties, and the Mexican National Action Party the opportunity to develop new brands in the electorate, allowing programmatic competition to crystallize. Whether this monumental a transformation could have taken place without grassroots organizing and sharper competition with electorally viable parties of the left (the Workers’ Party [PT], Broad Front [FA], and Democratic Revolutionary Party [PRD], respectively) is an open question.
Keeping pace with the multiple venues in which political representation and accountability have been organized across Latin America in the past two decades requires ways of studying accountability and representation that can bridge different institutional and associational forms of accountability and representation. We need to know not just the mechanisms by which leaders are chosen and deselected in parties, but whether citizens’ associations plead their cases to agencies of local, provincial, or national states, or to local councils, provincial assemblies, or national legislatures, and with what effect.
As I write, scholars of Latin American politics have become more sophisticated in their treatment of representation and accountability in national political institutions, especially the legislative branch of government, than ever before. They have also creatively reached beyond the legislature to research policy making and accountability in other branches of government. The judiciary, for example, can in addition to its constitutional purpose to check the executive and legislative branches of government, also provide ordinary citizens a venue for challenging policy and holding government accountable. The judicialization of politics, however, can cut both ways as the powerful can take cases to court to vacate the decisions taken by political majorities. There is clear evidence, at least in Brazil where the judiciary is less conservative and more independent than in most Latin American countries, that the cases that are taken up by higher courts cater to the privileged, while the only recourse of the poor is the lower courts, where the dockets are hopelessly backlogged.46
Also beyond the legislature at the level of parties and voters, some truly excellent work has focused on clientelism. Thanks to careful empirical research and innovative field experiments, we know more about who buys votes and who sells them than ever before. We know not only that voters that are poor and lack political information are more susceptible to such appeals, but also when parties and politicians are likely to invest in buying votes, which voters they are likely to target, and with what type and size of payoff. We are also learning when voters can be persuaded through civic education campaigns not to sell their votes. As programmatic politics becomes possible, it now seems particularly important to explore more deeply the gap between voter preferences and party offers. Although some fine work (referenced in this chapter) has been done on matching the preferences of parliamentarians to public opinion, the study of matching policy outputs to public preferences is in its infancy.
Finally, a new generation of research is focused on local experiments in participatory budgeting, popular participation, and citizens’ councils, of which there are more than ever before. On the surface, it appears these sites of deliberation can serve many important functions: they can engage the citizenry in public life and deepen their attachment to democracy; inform public policy in such a way that improves its design and outputs; and serve as a way to build consensual solutions to pressing problems. What we know less about is whether or not these experiments are “scalable,” and can become templates for national policies and policy processes.
In short, though we have learned much about accountability and representation in Latin America, there is much still to be discovered. Fortunately, the diversity of approaches and creativity of political science research examined here signals a bright future ahead.
1 As Adams expressed it, the members of a “true” representative legislature, one that is “an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large,” will “think, feel, reason, and act” like the people, understand the issues of concern to them, and elevate those concerns once in office, thus rendering accountability at once inherent and superfluous (quoted in Hannah Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, p. 60).
2 Alexander Wilde, “Conversations among Gentlemen: Oligarchical Democracy in Colombia, in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 28–81.
3 Deborah Yashar, “Indigenous Politics in the Andes: Changing Patterns of Recognition, Reform, and Representation,” in Scott Mainwaring, Ana María Bejarano, and Eduardo Pizarro Longómez, eds., The Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 259–260.
4 Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
5 Philippe C. Schmitter, Interest Conflict and Political Change in Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971).
6 Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism” in Frederick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), pp. 85–131.
7 See also Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, “Inducements versus Constraints: Disaggregating ‘Corporatism,” American Political Science Review 73, 4 (1979): 967–986.
8 Howard Wiarda, “Corporatism and Development in the Iberic-Latin World: Persistent Strains and New Variations,” The Review of Politics 36 (January, 1974): 3–33.
9 Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 61–64.
10 Scott Mainwaring, “State Deficiencies, Party Competition, and Confidence in Democratic Representation in the Andes,” in Mainwaring et al., The Crisis of Democratic Representation, p. 26.
11 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in Interna tional Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
12 Leonardo Avritzer, Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil (Washington, DC/Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
13 Mala Htun, “Is Gender like Ethnicity? The Political Representation of Identity Groups.” Perspectives on Politics 2, 3 (2004), p. 439; Mark Jones, “Gender Quotas, Electoral Laws, and the Election of Women: Evidence from the Latin American Vanguard,” Comparative Political Studies 42, 1 (January 2009): 57–58, 68, 76.
14 Bingham Powell, “The Chain of Responsiveness,” in Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino, The Quality of Democracy: Improvement or Subversion? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 62.
15 Richard Synder and David J. Samuels,“Legislative Malapportionment in Latin America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” in Edward L. Gibson, ed., Federalism and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 131–172.
16 Scott Mainwaring, Ana María Bejarano, and Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez, “The Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes: An Overview,” in Mainwaring et al., The Crisis of Democratic Representation, pp. 26–28.
17 Elizabeth Zechmeister and Juan Pablo Luna, “Political Representation in Latin America,” in Herbert Kitschelt, Kirk Hawkins, Juan Pablo Luna, Guillermo Rosas, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Latin American Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 131–138.
18 Susan Stokes, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 12–13, 14–15.
19 Herbert Kitschelt, “Linkages between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities,” Comparative Political Studies 33 (2000): 851–852.
20 Mona Lyne, “Rethinking economics and institutions: the voter’s dilemma and democratic accountability,” in Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson, eds., Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 162.
21 Susan C. Stokes, “Political Clientelism,” in Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, eds., Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 607.
22 Susan C. Stokes, “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina,” American Political Science Review 99, 3 (August 2005): 316.
23 Guillermo O’Donnell,“Horizontal Accountability: The Legal Institutionalization of Mistrust,” in Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna, eds., Democratic Accountability in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 34–54.
24 The Ministério Público in Brazil with broad powers and 1,300 federal and state-level members with life-tenure, for example, has charged and convicted hundreds of mayors and ex-mayors for misuse of public funds and even investigated members of Congress. Maria Tereza Sadek and Rosângela Batista Cavalcanti, “The New Brazilian Public Prosecution: An Agent of Accountability,” in Mainwaring and Welna, eds., Democratic Accountability in Latin America,” pp. 209, 210–211, 213–215, 225.
25 Gary W. Cox and Scott Morgenstern, “Epilogue: Latin America’s Reactive Assemblies and Proactive Presidents,” in Scott Morgenstern and Benito Nacif, eds., Legislative Politics in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 446–468.
26 Catalina Smulovitz and Enrique Peruzzotti, “Societal and Horizontal Controls: Two Cases of a Fruitful Relationship,” in Mainwaring and Welna, eds., Democratic Accountability in Latin America, pp. 309–331.
27 Kathleen O’Neill, Decentralizing the State: Elections, Parties, and Local Power in the Andes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
28 Tulia Faletti, Decentralization and Subnational Politics in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 6–11.
29 Rene Mayorga, “Bolivia’s Democracy at the Crossroads,” in Frances Hagopian and Scott Mainwaring, eds., The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 168–170.
30 Kathleen O’Neill, “Decentralized Politics and Political Outcomes in the Andes,” in Mainwaring et al., The Crisis of Democratic Representation, p. 197.
31 Carlos Gervasoni, “A Rentier Theory of Subnational Regimes: Fiscal Federalism, Democracy, and Authoritarianism in the Argentine Provinces,” World Politics, 62, 2 (April 2010): 302–340.
32 Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Federico Estévez, and Beatriz Magaloni, Strategies of Vote Buying: Social Transfers, Democracy, and Poverty Reduction in Mexico (unpublished manuscript).
33 Avritzer, Participatory Institutions.
34 Kenneth M. Roberts and Erik Wibbels. “Party Systems and Electoral Volatility in Latin America: A Test of Economic, Institutional, and Structural Explanations.” American Political Science Review 93, 3 (1999): 575–590.
35 Adam Przeworski, Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
36 Kurt Weyland, “Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: Unexpected Affinities.” Studies in Comparative International Development, 31, 3 (1996): 3–31, and Kenneth M. Roberts, “Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin America: The Peruvian Case,” World Politics 48, 1 (1996): 82–116.
37 Guillermo O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5, 1 (January 1994): 55–69.
38 Marcus Kurtz, The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy: Lessons for Latin America,” World Politics 56 (January 2004): 262–302.
39 Kenneth Roberts, “Social Inequalities without Class Cleavages in Latin America’s Neoliberal Era,” Studies in Comparative International Development 36 (2002) 4: 3–33.
40 Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
41 Steven Levitsky, Transforming Labor-based Parties in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
42 Moises Arce and Paul T. Bellinger, Jr., “Low-Intensity Democracy Revisited: The Effects of Economic Liberalization on Political Activity in Latin America,” World Politics 60, 1 (October 2007): 97–121, and Kathryn Hochstetler and Albert Palma, “Globalization, Social Mobilization, and Partisan Politics in Latin America,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 2–5, 2009.
43 Deborah Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
44 Latin American Party Systems, pp. 47–52.
45 An important exception was Joan Nelson, ed. Intricate Links: Democratization and Market Reforms in Latin America and Eastern Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), pp. 150–51.
46 Matthew M. Taylor, Judging Policy: Courts and Policy Reform in Democratic Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 160.