Elites, Redistributive Threats, and Democratic Breakdown in Latin America

• In Event: Polarization, Populism and Threats to Liberal Democracy

Abstract

A rich literature has long argued that political parties are essential for the well-functioning of democracy. Not only are political parties instrumental for the birth and growth of democracy itself (e.g. Ziblatt 2017), they solve innumerable voting and legislative logistical issues (e.g. Aldrich 1995), but perhaps most importantly, they are the defacto representional political institution capable of aggregating individual and societal demands into policy-making at scale (e.g. Dalton and Wattenberg 2002). There is little reason to question these axioms – modern democracy without political parties remains, famously stated, “unthinkable” (Schattschneider 1942, 1). Yet, there are reasons to suspect that, particularly in highly unequal countries, political parties are a double-edged sword: not only are they indispensable for political representation, but they also pose democracy's most dangerous threat. That is, where elites possess a high degree of economic wealth and political power, but are unable to effectively control political parties that seek to significantly alter the socioeconomic status-quo, strongly organized political parties can actually perform the role of undermining rather than enhancing democracy.

In highly unequal societies, elites have particularly strong incentives to protect their advantageous economic positions. Contrary to some assumptions made in the literature (e.g. Meltzer and Richard 1981; Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006), democracy does not necessarily pose a disadvantageous situation to the economic well-being of elites. Elites have a wide array of strategies at their disposal to lay the institutional groundwork to prevent the widespread redistribution of their wealth (Albertus and Menaldo 2017). In other words, elites are particularly adept at ‘locking in’ formal and informal institutional rules during democratic transitions that serve their interests, and place barriers on the ability for competing interests to wield power. I argue that when redistributive threats are able to effectively bypass or overcome the barriers placed by elites, there remain two paths – ‘stock’ and ‘barrel’ politics – that eventually both lead to the breakdown of democracy. Whether redistributive threats are effectively prevented from competing in elections (stocking elections) or are removed from office following electoral victories (barrel politics), the rise of redistributive threats has deleterious effects on Latin American democracies.

With a primary goal of theory-building, I draw on eclectic sources of empirical evidence to develop a novel theory of democratic breakdown. First, I employ time-series cross-sectional observational data to show that political parties are indeed one of the largest determinants of redistribution in Latin America - countries with more organized and institutionalized parties are significantly more likely to redistribute than those with weaker counterparts. To more deeply probe the underlying processes behind redistributivist theories of breakdown, I then analyze the deviant case of Brazil. Embedded within this case study, I draw on survey experiments conducted on a sample of economic elites in contemporary Brazil, showing that elites have strong perceptions of certain parties being detrimental to their economic well-being, and their rise in power has weakening effects on their democratic values. Finally, I do a preliminary external validity check by qualitatively categorizing all 48 democratic breakdowns among 19 Latin American countries since 1990, showing that nearly two-thirds of all democratic breakdowns in the region have coincided with the emergence of a clear redistributive threat.

Author

• Vincent Mauro, Cornell University