When do Voters Weaken Checks and Balances to Facilitate Economic Reform?

Alvaro Forteza and Juan Pereyra ()

Economica, 2019, vol. 86, issue 344, 775-800

Abstract: Strong checks and balances aimed at protecting citizens from government abuse of power are key features of well‐performing democracies. Nevertheless, some presidents have enjoyed strong and often explicit popular support when they undermined these controls. We present a formal model of the trade‐off between control on the executive and delegation to analyse voters’ decisions on the strength of checks and balances. We argue that voters may support their loosening, even when this allows rent extraction, if they are convinced that checks on the executive are blocking necessary reforms. We discuss several cases of strong presidents in Latin America who, alleging that radical reforms were necessary, obtained popular support that allowed them to loosen checks on the executive. Some of these presidents had a pro‐market and some an anti‐market reform agenda so, as our model suggests, voters’ willingness to remove checks and balances can emerge under both right‐ and left‐wing executives.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12290

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:econom:v:86:y:2019:i:344:p:775-800

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0427

Access Statistics for this article

Economica is currently edited by Frank Cowell, Tore Ellingsen and Alan Manning

More articles in Economica from London School of Economics and Political Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().