A Middle-Quality Institutional Trap: Democracy and State Capacity in Latin America

Description

Latin America is currently caught in a middle-quality institutional trap, combining flawed democracies and low-to-medium capacity States. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, the sequence of development - Latin America has democratized before building capable States - does not explain the region's quandary. States can make democracy, but so too can democracy make States. Thus, the starting point of political developments is less important than whether the State-democracy relationship is a virtuous cycle, triggering causal mechanisms that reinforce each other. However, the State-democracy interaction generates a virtuous cycle only under certain macroconditions. In Latin America, the State-democracy interaction has not generated a virtuous cycle: problems regarding the State prevent full democratization and problems of democracy prevent the development of state capacity. Moreover, multiple macroconditions provide a foundation for this distinctive pattern of State-democracy interaction. The suboptimal political equilibrium in contemporary Latin America is a robust one. Cover Title page Copyright page Politics and Society in Latin America Contents 1 A Research Agenda and Strategy 1.1 Latin America’s Middle-Quality Institutional Trap 1.2 Building High-Capacity Democracies: What Do We Know? 1.3 Toward a New Theory 2 The State–Democracy Interaction 2.1 Mechanisms and Mechanism Types 2.1.1 State-Centered Pro-democracy Mechanisms 2.1.2 State-Centered Anti-democracy Mechanisms 2.1.3 Democracy-Centered Pro-State Capacity Mechanisms 2.2 Combinations of Mechanisms 2.3 Paths to High-Capacity Democracy 2.3.1 General Implications 2.3.2 Implications for Latin America 3 Paths and Outcomes 3.1 Measurement and Data 3.2 Coercive Capacity and Democracy 3.3 Administrative Capacity and Democracy 3.4 Conclusions 4 Mechanisms and Outcomes 4.1 Advanced Countries 4.1.1 France 4.1.2 Great Britain 4.1.3 United States 4.2 Latin America 4.2.1 Brazil 4.2.2 Mexico 4.2.3 Argentina 4.3 Conclusions 5 Macroconditions of the State–Democracy Interaction 5.1 Why the Status Quo Persists 5.1.1 The Legacy of State Formation 5.1.2 The Political Economy of Twenty-First-Century Populism 5.1.3 The Political Economy of the Global Drug Trade 5.2 Why No Progress? 5.2.1 Socioeconomic Inequality 5.2.2 Hierarchical Capitalism 5.2.3 Dependence on International Finance 5.3 Why No Regression? 5.3.1 The New International Democracy Regime 5.3.2 The New Economic Globalization 5.4 Conclusions 6 Concluding Remarks Appendix: Concepts References Acknowledgments