Content area
Full Text
In recent years, the state of democracy in Latin America has been the topic of much debate. Some observers believe that a democratic reversal is underway due to the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism. Others argue that democracy has become so deeply entrenched that even leaders with authoritarian leanings must exercise power through ballots and constitutions, not bullets and coups. The preceding essays seek to shed light on the matter by examining how six Latin American political regimes have evolved over the last two decades.
These essays all draw upon the late Guillermo O'Donnell's classic 1994 Journal of Democracy essay on ?delegative democracy,? and in particular the ideas of ?horizontal? and ?vertical? accountability that he sketched there. What can they tell us about how power is wielded in Latin America today? Horizontal accountability means the ability of other state agencies (the legislature, courts, and so on) to check presidential power. Vertical accountability refers to something that is imposed ?from below? by the voters. According to O'Donnell, representative democracy features both kinds of accountability: Both state institutions and citizens restrain presidents.
For O'Donnell, ?delegative democracy? results when vertical accountability is strong but its horizontal cousin is weak: A popular president, likely chosen during an economic crisis, rules as a ?savior of the nation? empowered by emergency and the people's trust to brush off normal democratic ?checks and balances.? Yet this is only one of several possible scenarios. After O'Donnell's essay appeared, scholars fo- cused on horizontal accountability and left the notion of vertical accountability relatively untheorized.
Several democracies in Latin America today suffer from the kind of imbalance that O'Donnell identified back in 1994. Specifically, they feature strong presidents with strong electoral mandates and social legitimacy, and their problem is poor horizontal accountability. Catherine Conaghan describes this dynamic in the case of President Rafael Correa's Ecuador. The directly elected leader now overshadows liberal institutions to such a degree, she argues, that the regime has turned authoritarian. Correa faces little pressure to respond either to other branches of government or to citizens. In the same vein, Alberto Vergara and Aaron Watanabe confirm O'Donnell's observation that the regime headed by Alberto Fujimori in Peru during the 1990s was authoritarian and featured low levels of accountability, even if...