Between success and survival : devolution and concentration in Latin America

Several recent administrations in Latin America have implemented significant reforms that alter the relative balance of power between central and subnational governments. Some have devolved power to subnational governments, while others have concentrated power in the hands of the executive. This divergence is puzzling, especially since the reforms have appeared in similar circumstances, namely in democratic and presidential political systems and under the constraints of marketoriented economies. This project tackles the question of why governments facing similar macro-level constraints would pursue radically divergent paths of state reform. Since devolution can strengthen representative democracy whereas concentration weakens it, answering this question contributes to our understanding of the conditions for democratic institutional development. In this dissertation, devolution and concentration are analyzed side-by-side, as different values of the same dependent variable. Doing so highlights a critical gap in vii the literature: analyses of devolution and concentration are unnecessarily separated, and thus talk past one another. In other words, each of the literatures concerns reforms in one direction or the other, but not both. By contrast, this project offers an explanation of the range of reforms to central-subnational government relations. Bolivia and Peru provide the principal cases of devolution and concentration, respectively, while Colombia and Venezuela provide secondary cases. Nine administrations in these four countries changed the institutional arrangements affecting central-subnational government relations. The comparative analysis of these cases reveals that devolution and concentration can be understood as strategic responses by traditional and outsider parties, respectively, to low levels of political class legitimacy. Declining public confidence in the political establishment creates constraints and opportunities that vary according to party type. Traditional parties have a distinct incentive to resolve the legitimacy problems, in part through devolution, in order to curtail its negative impact on their electoral prospects and capacity to govern. Political outsiders, by contrast, have a strong incentive to pursue an anti-system strategy, including the concentration of power, in order to undercut their opposition and reap undivided political benefits