Search

RESUMO Tendo acabado de completar sua segunda “década perdida” consecutiva, o caso venezuelano confirma que não há atalhos para uma boa gestão política econômica na era de alta mobilidade de capital e fluxos de capital securitizados. A manutenção de uma estratégia cambial atrapalhada triunfou, pelo menos por enquanto, e permitiu que uma coalizão de elite no nível executivo prevalecesse na busca de uma política macroeconômica menos do que ideal. O autor argumenta que a Venezuela evitou uma desvalorização total, do estilo mexicano ou brasileiro, em virtude da capacidade do Banco Central de gerenciar efetivamente a taxa de câmbio. No entanto, esse foi o único bolso da modernização, pois os formuladores de políticas de todo o resto da burocracia do estado rejeitaram os tipos de reformas de mercado que serão necessárias para reverter o desempenho altamente medíocre do país. Embora os altos preços do petróleo desde 1999 tenham proporcionado aos políticos e formuladores de políticas o “luxo” de ser um retardatário da reforma, os líderes venezuelanos parecem determinados a aprender da maneira mais difícil que as tendências internacionais podem voltar a balançar contra eles a qualquer momento. ABSTRACT Having just completed its second consecutive “lost decade”, the Venezuelan case confirms that there are no short cuts to sound political economic management in the era of high capital mobility and securitized capital flows. The maintenance of a muddling-through exchange rate strategy has triumphed, at least for the time being, and enabled an elite executive-level coalition to prevail in pursuing a less than optimal macroeconomic policy. The author argues that Venezuela has avoided a full-blown Mexican or Brazilian-style devaluation by virtue of the Central Bank’s ability to effectively manage the exchange rate. However, this has been the only pocket of modernization, as policymakers throughout the rest of the state bureaucracy have rejected the kinds of market reforms that will be necessary to reverse the country’s highly mediocre performance. While high oil prices since 1999 have afforded politicians and policymakers the “luxury” of being a reform laggard, Venezuelan leaders seem determined to learn the hard way that international trends could again swing against them on a moment’s notice.

Populism often emerges with a strong homo- and transphobic orientation. This is the result of an alliance between populism and conservative religion. Populist movements have incentives to reach out to religious voters and vice versa. We argue that the alliance between populism and religion is both a marriage of convenience and inconvenience. Populists can offer attacks on pluralism and liberal social policies (e.g., pro-LGBTQ laws), which conservative religious groups often welcome. In return, religious groups can deliver loyal acolytes across classes, which populists also welcome. Religion enables populist movements to expand their constituency beyond their base of economically anxious and nationalist voters. That said, this alliance works best only where the conservative religious electorate is growing (or, at least, not declining). Even then, this union can still incite internal frictions within populist coalitions. These frictions tend to be more salient within left-wing populist coalitions than right-wing ones. This explains why the populist-religion nexus is more resilient among right-wing populist movements, as cases from the Americas and Europe illustrate.

The first section of this Element reviews the history of LGBTQ rights in the region since the 1960s. The second section reviews explanations for the expansion of rights and setbacks, especially since the mid 2000s. Explanations are organized according to three themes: (1) the (re-)emergence of a religious cleavage; (2) the role of political institutions such as presidential leadership, political parties, federalism, courts, and transnational forces; and (3) the role of social movement strategies, and especially, unity. The last section compares the progress on LGBTQ rights (significant) with reproductive rights (insignificant). This Element concludes with an overview of the causes and possible future direction of the current backlash against LGBTQ rights.

Attitudes towards homosexuality and same-sex marriage in the Americas and Europe have been found to be tightly related to religion, and especially, how religion is practiced. However, religious individuals are not consistent in their rejection of homosexuality. We explore how religions and religious individuals differ among each other in attitudes towards not just homosexuality, but also other policy areas they consider sins, such as marihuana consumption, abortion, euthanasia, use of contraceptives, and pre-marital sex. Using data for Colombia, we find that Evangelicals are the most reliable opponents of LGBT rights in the country and reject homosexuality more deeply than other sins. They thus target homosexuality distinctively. We also find that attitudes toward homosexuality among Evangelicals seem unresponsive to education. Because of this more pronounced homophobia among Evangelicals, we thus conclude that countries like Colombia that are experiencing increases in the population and levels of organization of Evangelicals are likely to face greater backlash against the expansion of LGBT rights.

After two and a half decades of progress, the struggle for LGBT rights in Latin America started to experience a new form of backlash in the mid-2010s. Backlashes against LGBT progress are not new, but the current backlash in Latin America has a new element: the entry of evangelical churches as powerful veto players. This chapter discusses how religious groups, in particular evangelicals, are taking advantage of institutions of liberal democracy to block progress on LGBT rights. It applies theories of collective action and social movement to demonstrate how evangelicals have become the most powerful actors blocking progress.

Since the late twentieth century, numerous Latin American nations have launched efforts to relax presidential term limits, often successfully. This article discusses the conditions under which countries succeed in relaxing term limits. Drawing from bargaining models and reviewing 36 cases, it makes three arguments. First, actors' preferences are fairly predictable on the basis of officeholding: presidents are the most prominent actors pushing for expansion of term limits; opposition parties lead the resistance. Second, power asymmetry, measured by presidential approval ratings, is the best predictor of success, better than ideology or share of seats in Congress. Third, the only hope for stopping popular presidents rests with ruling parties and the courts, but only when the latter are sufficiently independent.

In its first generation, the literature on the resource curse typically posited that resource dependence shapes a country's economy and politics. More recent work posits that the effects are mediated by institutions. We take this newer approach further by arguing that economic and political institutions not just mediate but actually shape resource dependence. Our focus is on performance across national oil companies (NOCs) in Latin America. We explain performance variation by invoking variations in regime and market features. NOCs that operate in contexts of greater independence from the Executive Branch (stronger checks and balances within and outside the sector) and greater market forces—though not necessarily private actor dominance—exhibit better performance. Institutions thus influence sector conditions, rather than the other way around. We advance this argument using original data from Colombia and Venezuela, and supplementary data from Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Our study focuses on the oil boom-bust cycle of 2003–2016.

This chapter looks at Bolivia in the 2000s to illustrate what happens when power asymmetry ends up being significantly lower than expected. The result is a negligible expansion of presidential powers. In addition, this chapter expands on the concept of power asymmetry by adding a different—more structural—type of power asymmetry: ethno-demographic and economic resource differences. When political cleavages follow ethnic or economic divisions, it matters how those assets are distributed. In Bolivia, the Opposition was able to counter the rise of the Incumbent’s power by mobilizing its own ethno-demographic and economic assets. The equal matching between the Incumbent and the Opposition forces nearly led Bolivia to civil war. Conflict was averted with the adoption of a final constitutional draft, which realigned table and at-large asymmetries.

The chapter presents a summary of main findings and discusses their implications. The book’s main finding is that extreme power asymmetry on behalf of the Incumbent creates the conditions for institutional change that empowers mostly the executive branch. A large power differential between the Incumbent and the Opposition encourages the Incumbent to seize the advantage to initiate bold, self-serving institutional change, sometimes even a constitutional overhaul. If the latter gets underway, and power asymmetry stays pro-Incumbent, chances are the new constitution will expand the powers of the Executive branch. This outcome, in turn, can spread discontent across Opposition forces and sometimes encourage the Incumbent to govern more unilaterally. This presents a potential threat to democracy. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of this finding for different literatures: democratization, constitution-making, presidential powers, and government-Opposition relations.

Chapter 2 lays out the book’s main argument on the importance of power asymmetry. It draws from three strands in the literature. From the literature on democratization, this chapter borrows the notion of constitutions as pact-making. From bargaining theory is borrowed the notion of self-dealing: Incumbents will seek to advance the powers of the office that they hold. And from the literature on elite theories of regime formation, the chapter develops the argument that power asymmetries among elite actors are the fundamental drivers of balanced constitutions. This book also seeks to explain the origins of an important institution: constitutions. It takes seriously the insight from institutionalists that institutions emerge from actors’ de facto power and bargaining outcomes. Yet, this book does not assume that actors’ preferences are exogenous, or exclusively ideological, and partisan; rather, those who negotiate a constitution have preferences that depend on whether they are Incumbents or Opposition forces, often regardless of their ideologies and partisan orientation.

This first case study offers more proof of the book’s argument for power asymmetry by controlling for country (while testing the argument across time). Three major constituent assemblies and an aborted case in Venezuela are compared. In all, the best predictor of resulting presidential powers is power asymmetry. Furthermore, this chapter draws on the Venezuelan experience to offer two additional insights about the politics of constitution-making. First, inclusionary processes are crucial for constitutional legitimacy. Second, refined measurements of inclusion are needed to determine the effects of power asymmetry on stability. It is important to measure not just how much the Incumbent wins in terms of formal presidential powers, but also whether the Opposition’s pivotal issues are accommodated. The Opposition can accept a high degree of presidentialism if some of its pivotal issues are accommodated. However, the Opposition will feel threatened if formal presidential powers expand and pivotal issues are rejected.

This chapter explains the conditions under which constituent assemblies emerge. As others have argued, more than one condition seems necessary, mostly having to do with pressures on the state to address a governance crisis. And yet, new constituent assemblies are more likely to emerge when the Incumbent feels he or she has the power advantage. The chapter makes two points. First, compelling structural conditions (exceptional circumstances) triggered constitutional assemblies in combination with the rise of the Opposition. Second, a strong desire by the Incumbent to seek new powers also triggered constituent assemblies, but only when the Incumbent anticipated a large power. This chapter offers as well a discussion of several cases of aborted constituent assemblies to further illustrate the role of power asymmetry as an explanatory factor.

This book explores the origins of presidential powers in new constitutions. Much is known about the effects of different presidential powers—less on the conditions that lead to their emergence. The book focuses on the origins of these powers. It argues that the most important predictor of whether a new constitution will expand (instead of restrict) presidential powers is power asymmetry, or more specifically, the difference in power assets between the Incumbent and the Opposition. These power assets can include electoral results, seats at key institutions such as the negotiating table, and even approval ratings. This argument draws from bargaining theories on self-dealing. Power asymmetry is a more powerful variable in explaining variations in presidential powers than others, such as the president’s ideology, class differences, or overall economic conditions. To make the case for this argument, the book reviews all the constituent assemblies from Latin America since the late 1980s, as well as several failed assemblies, and thereby provides one of the most comprehensive reviews of constitutional overhaul in Latin America thus far. The book also examines constitutional amendments that affect presidential powers, especially term limits. The conclusion is that to get more balanced constitutions (i.e., those that strengthen checks on presidential powers), neither side of the debate should have a huge power advantage over the other.

The case-study chapters looked at all presidential powers within a given constitution. This looks at one presidential power—term limits—across all constitutions to provide one final test for the book’s power asymmetry argument. I conduct a statistical test to show how power asymmetry, this time measured by approval rates, lead to presidential success in relaxing term limits. Across Latin America since the 1980s, term limits became one of the most active and contentious areas of constitutional change. The chapter reveals, first, that not all popular presidents pursue efforts to change term limits, but those who do have a higher chance of prevailing the more popular they are. Second, the only political actors capable of preventing the expansion of term limits, other than the courts, is the ruling party. Popular presidents interested in expanding presidential power thus face incentives to weaken the same political machine that brought them to office.

This chapter introduces the book’s two central puzzles: what explains Latin America’s obsession with fixing democracy via constituent assemblies, and what explains variations in outcomes of constituent assemblies? It introduces the key argument: power asymmetries between Incumbents and Opposition forces—in the form of variations in the relative strength of the Incumbent vis-à-vis the Opposition, more so than other factors such as economics, ideology, or partisanship—lead to constitutions that offer weaker checks and balances. Power asymmetries, the book argues, influence to some extent the incidence of constitutional change and to a large extent the content of resulting constitutions. The book illustrates these points by examining twenty-four constitutional moments in Latin America since the 1980s, including eleven drafted new constitutions and thirteen aborted constituent assemblies. Finally, this chapter offers a justification for the book’s case selection and explains the research design pursued therein.

This paper contributes to the literature on dynamics of hybrid regimes, i.e., whether these regimes stay stable, or instead, turn more democratic or more autocratic with time. Venezuela since the mid-2000s is an example of the latter. I first focus on how this happened in Venezuela. I posit that the turn toward greater authoritarianism occurred through autocratic legalism. This refers to the use, abuse, and disuse of the law to disempower veto players. I then focus on the “why” question. The main cause of Venezuela’s regime dynamics is a combination of external factors (increasing tolerance from abroad) and the ruling party’s declining electoral competitiveness at home and institutional path dependence.