Anibal Perez-Linan

University of Notre Dame | ND · Department of Political Science and Keough School of Global Affairs

Human rights bodies formulate highly specific orders to minimize the risk of State non-compliance. However, specificity comes at a cost, reducing State autonomy when local agents implement measures on the ground. This article develops the concept of specificity in human rights reparations and analyses the specificity formulas deployed by the Inter-...

This paper introduces the concept of dialogic oversight, a process by which judicial bodies monitor compliance through a combination of mandated state reporting, third-party engagement, and supervision hearings. To assess the effectiveness of this strategy in the international arena, we evaluate the supervision hearings conducted by the Inter-Ameri...

The Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) fosters structural transformations throughout the Americas. This collection of analyses builds upon the studies on Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina and Latin American transformative constitutionalism to map out both the ground-level human rights impact of the IAHRS and the institutional ch...

The Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) fosters structural transformations throughout the Americas. This collection of analyses builds upon the studies on Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina and Latin American transformative constitutionalism to map out both the ground-level human rights impact of the IAHRS and the institutional ch...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

In this research note we introduce an original database covering almost a century of legislative political parties (1925-2019) and reconstruct in the long term the evolution of the president's parliamentary support and coalition formation in Latin America. We identify some long-term perspectives that show that presidentialisms in the region have un...

Este artículo analiza los patrones que han presentado los regímenes políticos en América Latina en este siglo, con especial atención en México. Documenta casos de decadencia democrática (México, entre otros), un gran número de casos de estancamiento democrático y ausencia de profundización democrática. Tres factores dancuenta del estancamiento demo...

Este artículo introduce los principios del método comparativo e ilustra su aplicación en el contexto latinoamericano. La primera sección identifica cuatro funciones de la comparación: la formación de nuevos conceptos, la inferencia descriptiva, la formulación de hipótesis explicativas, y su verificación. El resto del artículo introduce tres estrate...

This chapter examines the key features of modern democracy, as well as its origins. It first explains what democracy means in the field of comparative politics, before discussing different models of democracy, including presidential democracy, parliamentary democracy, and democracies oriented towards consensus or majoritarian rule. It then describe...

This paper integrates the scholarship on compliance with international human rights courts to reflect upon how the literature approaches delays and compliance cycles. Building on this review, we propose a new analytical approach that helps distinguish between reparations prone to immediate or protracted implementation. We introduce two metrics to f...

El ciclo de videoconferencias LA DEMOCRACIA EN EL MOMENTO ACTUAL se ejecutó entre el 24 de julio y el 18 de diciembre de 2021, como una iniciativa del Tribunal Electoral de Panamá, a través de su Instituto de Estudios Democráticos, en colaboración con la Konrad Adenauer Siftüng (KAS) e IDEA Internacional.

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association (online session), May 22–23, 2020.

Can weak judicial institutions facilitate the advancement of women to the high courts? We explore the relationship between weak institutions and gender diversification by analyzing the consequences of judicial reshuffles in Latin America. Our theory predicts that institutional disruptions will facilitate the appointment of women justices, but only...

This chapter examines the key features of modern democracy, as well as its origins. It first explains what democracy means in the field of comparative politics, before discussing different models of democracy, including presidential democracy, parliamentary democracy, and democracies oriented towards consensus or majoritarian rule. It then describe...

Why do legislators introduce impeachment resolutions against the president, even though most of these resolutions never succeed? We explore two possible answers to this puzzle, which are linked to the legislative functions of oversight and representation. First, legislators initiate impeachment procedures to expose (real or alleged) presidential mi...

Are recall elections more legitimate than other procedures employed to dismiss elected executives? The first part of this chapter develops a typology of mechanisms employed to remove chief executives from office. This conceptual map includes constitutional mechanisms (recall elections, votes of no-confidence, and impeachments) as well as non-consti...

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 22, 2019.

Does the executive's institutional hegemony represent a risk to the survival of democracy? By hegemony, we refer to the president's ability to control other institutions, particularly the legislature and judiciary. To answer this question, we develop two indices of presidential hegemony and analyze the duration of democratic regimes in 18 Latin Ame...

Most studies of international courts analyze state compliance with court rulings by looking at the status of legal cases at a particular point in time. This “snapshot” approach ignores two important features of the compliance process. First, states often take a long time to comply with court rulings. Therefore, we need metrics that reflect not only...

The age of military coups has ended, but democracy still confronts major challenges in the early twenty-first century. What are the new threats for democratic survival? Is impeachment a functional equivalent to old-fashioned military coups? Using comparative data for Latin America, this paper shows that the institution of impeachment has been “stre...

Among the many scholarly attempts to reckon with the causes and consequences of Donald Trump’s rise, few have attracted popular attention on the scale of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die. Seldom do books by political scientists make it onto the New York Times best sellers list, but this one has, a testament to its broad infl...

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20, 2018.

More than one million Cubans, representing thirty percent of the country’s labor force, currently make up the nonstate sector. These include self-employed workers and micro-entrepreneurs, sharecropping farmers, members of new cooperatives, and buyers and sellers of private dwellings. This development represents a crucial structural reform implement...

Los institucionalistas han identificado un patrón de "reemplazo en serie", distintivo para los países de América Latina, en los cuales el cambio institucional se ha vuelto frecuente y radical. Los patrones de reemplazo en serie son la base de las conocidas “trampas" de la des-institucionalización: los golpes militares generan más golpes, los quiebr...

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Lima, Peru, April 27, 2017.

Students of judicial behavior debate whether justices time their retirement to allow for the nomination of like-minded judges. We formalize the assumptions of strategic retirement theory and derive precise hypotheses about the conditions that moderate the effect of partisan incentives on judicial retirements. The empirical implications are tested w...

¿Representa la hegemonía institucional del ejecutivo un riesgo para la supervivencia de la democracia? Por hegemonía institucional entendemos la capacidad del presidente para controlar otras instituciones, en particular el legislativo y el judicial. Para responder a esta pregunta, desarrollamos dos índices de concentración de poder presidencial, y...

Nesta secao, trazemos a opiniao de tres renomados professores acerca do tema "Crise Politica Brasileira", que buscam expor os desafios e as situacoes que as instituicoes brasileiras se deparam diante das experiencias recentes.

We develop a unified theory of presidential instability to explain why presidents are removed from office through military coups or through legal procedures. While some causal factors motivate opponents to overthrow the president irrespective of the specific mechanism employed, other factors expand the relative capabilities of groups inclined to pu...

Under what conditions does public opinion support the president’s impeachment and under what conditions does it create a popular shield to protect the executive? The probability that citizens will support the executive depends not only on presidential approval, but also on the legal culture prevailing in a certain historical context. Beliefs indica...

Este trabajo integra los resultados empíricos de cuatro estudios cuantitativos para analizar las consecuencias de la radicalización política para las democracias latinoamericanas. La primera sección define la idea de radicalización y su operacionalización. Las secciones siguientes exploran las consecuencias de la radicalización del gobierno y de la...

Why do democracies survive or break down? In this paper, it returns to this classic question with an empirical focus on Latin America from 1945 to 2005. The argument deviates from the quantitative literature and a good part of the qualitative literature on democratic survival and breakdown. It is argued that structural variables such as the level o...

This article examines the impact of presidential approval and individual minister profiles on minister turnover. It claims that in order to prioritize sustainable policy performance and cabinet loyalty, government chiefs protect and remove technocrats, partisans, and outsider ministers conditional on government approval. The study offers an operati...

Under what conditions should presidents reshuffle the cabinet in response to critical events? We propose a model that underscores the interplay of political shocks, the electoral calendar, and constitutional term limits to explain cabinet turnover in presidential regimes. Our theory indicates that mass protests and media scandals represent critical...

Since 2000, democratization trends across the twenty sovereign countries that make up Latin America have been mixed. Democracy has eroded in three Andean countries (Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia) plus Nicaragua. Honduras experienced a coup and democratic breakdown in 2009. Democracy remains feeble in other countries including Guatemala, Haiti, an...

Legal scholars frequently advocate institutional reforms to modernize the judiciary and promote judicial independence. However, constitutional reforms also offer an opportunity for politicians to reshuffle the high courts. The negative consequences of constitutional change for judicial stability are explored using an original database of Supreme Co...

This paper advances the use of political variables in cross-national studies of political instability. It systematically assesses whether open political competition reduces the likelihood of a coup and moderates the legacy of political instability. We employ an original dataset of coup reports, electoral returns, and socio-economic data spanning th...

Bejarano’s work offers a thorough historical explanation for the rise and decline of democracy in Colombia and Venezuela. The two Andean countries experienced successful transitions to democracy almost simultaneously in 1957–1959, and here they are considered together as examples of effective elite pacts in the literature about “modes of transition...

This article analyzes the conditions that facilitate the ousting of Latin American presidents and the mechanisms that prevent their downfall. Drawing lessons from the impeachment of Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo, it extends previous arguments about the “legislative shield” to show that the same forces that sometimes conspire to terminate an ad...

RESUMEN Este trabajo analiza bajo qué condiciones los presidentes logran dominar la agenda legislativa. Para abordar esta cuestión analizamos los períodos gubernamentales de 30 presidentes latinoamericanos, desarrollando un análisis cualitativo comparativo (QCA). El análisis destaca que la combinación de un diseño institucional favorable y una divi...

This paper analyzes the conditions under which presidents dominate the legislative agenda. To address this issue we analyze the governmental period of 30 Latin American Presidents, developing a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The analysis highlights that the combination of a favorable institutional design and a division of Congress in diffe...

Jorge Lanzaro, ed., Presidencialismo y parlamentarismo América Latina y Europa Meridional: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, España, Italia, México, Portugal y Uruguay. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2013. Tables, notes, bibliography, index, 383 pp.; paperback €21.15. - Volume 56 Issue 3 - Aníbal Pérez-Liñán

During the third wave of democratization, all Latin American countries except Cuba have had competitive political regimes, but the quality or level of democracy has varied significantly across countries and over time. One of the best predictors of this variance across countries and time is each country's experience with competitive politics before...

Why do democracies survive or break down? In this paper, we return to this classic question with an empirical focus on Latin America from 1945 to 2005. Our argument deviates from the quantitative literature and a good part of the qualitative literature on democratic survival and breakdown. We argue that structural variables such as the level of dev...

Bearce, David H. et al. (2013) Has the New Aid for Trade Agenda been Export Effective? Evidence on the Impact of US AfT Allocations 1999–2008. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12027 © 2013 International Studies Association After a decade of Aid for Trade (AfT) allocations, we can now begin to assess whether this new development st...

This book presents a new theory for why political regimes emerge, and why they subsequently survive or break down. it then analyzes the emergence, survival, and fall of democracies and dictatorships in Latin America since 1900. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez–Liñán argue for a theoretical approach situated between long–term structural and cultura...

This paper analyzes constitutional design as it pertains to the powers, composition, selection procedures, and duration of the mandate of supreme courts and constitutional tribunals in 17 Latin American countries between 1900 and 2009. The analysis is based on an original database that contains the text of all constitutional articles in the central...

This paper analyzes constitutional design as it pertains to the powers, composition, selection procedures, and duration of the mandate of supreme courts and constitutional tribunals in 17 Latin American countries between 1900 and 2009. The analysis is based on an original database that contains the text of all constitutional articles in the central...

To what extent do courts in Latin America protect individual rights and limit governments? This volume answers these fundamental questions by bringing together today's leading scholars of judicial politics. Drawing on examples from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Bolivia, the authors demonstrate that there is widespread...

¿Qué determina la capacidad de los países para diseñar, aprobar e implementar políticas públicas efectivas? Para abordar esta pregunta, este libro analiza el proceso de formulación de políticas en ocho países latinoamericanos en base a una metodología común con fundamentos en la teoría de juegos y el análisis institucional. Este análisis sistemátic...

Las ponencias académicas compiladas en esta publicación dan cuenta de los debates actuales que se vienen dando en la ciencia política acerca del porqué después de casi 30 años desde que se reestablecieron las democracias en América Latina (lo que Huntington denominó la tercera ola de la democratización) hoy día nos seguimos preguntando por su viabi...

En este artículo analizamos la relación que existe entre el grado de modernización y la democracia en una región concreta del mundo, América Latina entre 1945 y 1996, apoyándonos en datos cuantitativos. Los argumentos que defendemos son tres. En primer lugar, mostramos cómo el nivel de desarrollo ha tenido una influencia relativamente débil en la p...

This article explores the problem of conceptualising and measuring the quality of democracy in Latin America. The first part discusses the use of the concept and the need for an operational measure. It explores three dimensions of the quality of democracy: civil rights, participation and effective competition. The second part develops an indicator...

This paper analyzes the procedures for the selection and the removal of justices, the duration of their terms, and their powers of constitutional review for Supreme Courts and Constitutional Tribunals in 17 Latin American countries between 1900 and 2009. The analysis is based on a novel database containing the text of all constitutions specifically...

After a decade of Aid for Trade (AfT) allocations, we can now begin to assess whether this new development strategy has been effective. Focusing on the short-term goal of export growth, we examine whether AfT from the US government promoted exports within recipient national economies over the period 1999-2008. Our results suggest that a $1 dollar i...

This paper analyzes the professional structure of political science in the US, emphasizing the challenges that this model poses for Latin American Studies. The first section discusses the general process of institutionalization of political science as a discipline, comparing two poles - a weakly institutionalized and a highly institutionalized disc...

Este ensayo analiza la estructuración profesional de la ciencia política en los Estados Unidos, enfatizando los desafíos que este modelo presenta para los estudios latinoamericanistas. El texto explora las normas profesionales, formales e informales, que regulan la producción de este debate.

Este trabajo ofrece una introducción a la lógica del método comparativo, destacando las limitaciones de los métodos de similitud y diferencia (Mill) para enfatizar el análisis de configuraciones causales. Utilizando un ejemplo sencillo, el texto presenta a los lectores el procedimiento de Análisis Cualitativo Comparativo (QCA), resaltando los conce...

¿Pueden los sistemas electorales apoyar o entorpecer la consolidación de la democracia? Sostenemos que las elites políticas han seleccionado sistemas electorales que maximizaron sus posibilidades de mantenerse en el poder. Por lo tanto, los titulares del cargo autoritarios han preferido sistemas mayoritarios que minimicen los costos de eliminar a l...

The chapters in this book are focused on two broad themes. First, should democracy be promoted? Second, how should democracy be promoted? This paper asks and attempts to answer a third question: Does democracy promotion work? In many ways, this is really the prior question, because if democracies cannot be promoted, if their emergence, consolidatio...

In many Latin American countries the executive branch manipulates the composition of the Supreme Court, and judicial independence has remained elusive. Because high courts can exercise judicial review and influence lower courts, incoming presidents often force the resignation of adversarial justices or “pack” the courts with friends. One indicator...

En este artículo ofrecemos una defensa de los estudios regionales en política comparada. Se debaten dos problemas que requieren un foco detallado en regiones específicas: la heterogeneidad causal y las pautas de difusión intra-regionales. La primera sección sostiene que las tres estrategias analíticas clásicas en política comparada (estudios de cas...

John M. Carey, Legislative Voting and Accountability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Figures, tables, appendix, bibliography, index, 199 pp.; hardcover $80, paperback $24.99. - Volume 51 Issue 4 - Aníbal Pérez-Liñán

This book presents a new framework for analyzing the political economy of budget processes in Latin America that is based on the following premises: i) the budget process must be considered as part of the overall policymaking process rather than in isolation; ii) budget outcomes cannot be fully explained on the basis of only one or two political or...

This paper develops a computational model to explore the effect of veto players in presidential regimes. We discuss the relationship between the legislative powers of the president and the configuration of veto players, and analyze how the number of legislative parties and their cohesion affect policy stability we develop a computational model to e...

This paper assesses the transformation of Latin American ruling elites using a database of 566 presidents in 19 countries between 1900 and 2007. The paper introduces four types of elite dynamics (replacement, renovation, reconversion, and stagnation) and employs two simple indicators--the age of the president and the age of the ruling party--to ope...

This paper develops a computational model to explore the effect of veto players in presidential regimes. We discuss the relationship between the legislative powers of the president and the configuration of veto players, and analyze how the number of legislative parties and their cohesion affect policy stability we develop a computational model to e...

En las últimas dos décadas, trece presidentes electos han sido removidos del cargo en América Latina. ¿Cómo debemos conceptualizar este nuevo patrón de inestabilidad política y cómo explicarlo? En la primera sección de este artículo se identifican una serie de categorías (renuncia anticipada, juicio político y golpe legislativo) que permiten delimi...

While the opposition is clearly defined in a parliamentary system, the definition is murky in multiparty presidential regimes. As a result, the role of opposition parties is not always clear. In this chapter, therefore, we evaluate coalition politics in Latin America to first analyze the presidents' legislative support. We then consider the role of...

In this paper we analyze the level of democracy achieved by 19 Latin American countries after 1977, in the period between the transitions from authoritarian rule and 2004. Our study shows enduring regime legacies: despite authoritarian interruptions in the past, the best predictor of the current level of democracy is the country's experience with c...