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Democratic Governance in Latin America

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Tables and Figures................................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments...........................................................................................................................................................................xiContributors..............................................................................................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully......................................................................................................................................11. Measuring Success in Democratic Governance Scott Mainwaring, Timothy R. Scully, and Jorge Vargas Cullell..............................................................................112. Economic Growth in Latin America: From the Disappointment of the Twentieth Century to the Challenges of the Twenty-First José De Gregorio........................................523. Does One Size Fit All in Policy Reform? Cross-National Evidence and Its Implications for Latin America Francisco Rodríguez.......................................................884. More Market or More State for Latin America? A Reflection for the Post-Crisis Alejandro Foxley........................................................................................1295. Successful Social Policy Regimes? Political Economy, Politics, and Social Policy in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens......................1556. Institutional Design and Judicial Effectiveness: Lessons from the Prosecution of Rights Violations for Democratic Governance and the Rule of Law Daniel M. Brinks.....................2107. Political Institutions, Populism, and Democracy in Latin America Patricio Navia and Ignacio Walker....................................................................................2458. Democratic Governance in Chile Alan Angell............................................................................................................................................2699. Limits to Costa Rican Heterodoxy: What Has Changed in "Paradise"? Mitchell A. Seligson and Juliana Martínez Franzoni.............................................................30710. Structural Reform and Governability: The Brazilian Experience in the 1990s Fernando Henrique Cardoso.................................................................................33811. Democratic Governance in Latin America: Eleven Lessons from Recent Experience Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully.................................................................36512. Postscript: Democratic Governance in Latin America José Miguel Insulza..........................................................................................................398Index.....................................................................................................................................................................................405

Chapter One

SCOTT MAINWARING, TIMOTHY R. SCULLY, AND JORGE VARGAS CULLELL

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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...