Understanding Weak Institutions: Lessons from Latin America

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This author meets the critic roundtable will discuss Our volume Understanding Weak Institutions: Lessons from Latin America (edited by Daniel Brinks, Steven Levitsky, and María Victoria Murillo). The volume argues that institutions matter, but they do not all matter in the same way, or to the same degree. Indeed, while much of the institutionalist literature takes a minimum of institutional strength for granted, a growing number of scholars—and policymakers across the developing world—have decried the failure of institutions to accomplish their purpose. Yet scholars still lack the conceptual and theoretical tools for understanding not only when institutions are strong or weak, but also the political roots and consequences of institutional weakness.

The book seeks to fill that gap. It offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding institutional weakness, it causes, and its consequences. Drawing on a series of empirical chapters written by some of the foremost scholars of Latin American politics, this book presents a new typology of different forms of institutional weakness and examines the politics that lead to the creation and persistence of weak institutions. We define weakness as the failure to produce any meaningful change in behavior—that is, institutions are weak if the relevant actors would behave in the same fashion, relative to the institutional goal, with or without the institution. Institutions might fail to generate meaningful changes either because they do not really command any changes—what we call irrelevant institutions; or because they command changes but actors simply fail to comply with them; or because actors who find the institutions constraining simply change them. The book then disaggregates these broad categories of institutional weakness, showing, for example, that failures of compliance can be traced back to state weakness, but also either lack of interest in enforcement or social resistance despite state efforts to enforce. The volume’s introduction introduces this typology and theorizes the conditions that lead to the creation and persistence of institutions that do not matter, are not regularly complied with, or are too unstable to matter.

The empirical chapters by Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo, Matthew Amengual and Eduardo Dargent, Zachary Elkins, Tulia Falleti, Candelaria Garay and Belen Fernández, Gretchen Helmke, Alisha Holland, Mala Htun and Francesca Jensenius, María Paula Saffon and Juan González Bertomeu, and Andrew Schrank employ a variety of innovative methods to examine the sources of institutional strength and weakness. They examine institutions that range from constitutions to bureaucratic rules, from environmental regimes to statutes that prohibit violence against women, from property rights to indigenous rights. The case studies offer important insights into the causes of institutional strength and weakness that travel well beyond Latin America. The conclusion synthesizes the findings of the empirical chapters and examines a range of empirical strategies for measuring institutional weakness and its consequences.

This panel will bring together four leading scholars of comparative politics who have contributed to our understanding of how institutions work—and who work on five different regions of the world: Melani Cammett (Harvard), who works on the Middle East; James Mahoney (Northwestern), who works on Latin America; Dan Slater (Michigan), who works on Southeast Asia; and Kathleen Thelen (MIT), who works on Western Europe. The scholars will be asked to reflect on how well the book’s ideas travel to other regions of the world, both developing and industrialized, as well as possible next steps in advancing a research agenda on the study of institutions.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Chair

• Maria Victoria Murillo Columbia University

Presenters

• Daniel M. Brinks University of Texas at Austin

• Steven Levitsky Harvard University

• Melani Cammett Harvard University

• James Mahoney Northwestern University

• Dan Slater University of Michigan

• Kathleen Thelen Massachusetts Institute of Technology