Understanding Institutional Weakness: Power and Design in Latin American Institutions

Elements in Politics and Society in Latin America

by Daniel M. Brinks, Steven Levitsky, Maria Victoria Murillo

This Element introduces the concept of institutional weakness, arguing that weakness or strength is a function of the extent to which an institution actually matters to social, economic or political outcomes. It then presents a typology of three forms of institutional weakness: insignificance, in which rules are complied with but do not affect the way actors behave; non-compliance, in which state elites either choose not to enforce the rules or fail to gain societal cooperation with them; and instability, in which the rules are changed at an unusually high rate. The Element then examines the sources of institutional weakness.

75 pages, Paperback

Published June 27, 2019

Reviews

[Leslie S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Understanding Institutional Weakness” (Cambridge Elements – Politics and Society in Latin America, 2019), by Daniel Brinks (UT Austin), Steven Levitsky (Harvard) and Maria Victoria Murillo (Columbia), is a short booklet that synthesizes multidisciplinary research on institutional weakness in Latin America –exactly as the title promises. Throughout this book, institutions are defined as “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction” (following Douglass North’s conceptualization), and *strong* institutions are understood as institutions that set nontrivial goals and achieve them.

The authors offer a *typology* to explain three forms of institutional weakness: (1) Insignificance, when the institution has zero ambition; (2) Noncompliance, including (a) non-enforcement (when state officials choose not to enforce certain rules systematically), (b) non-punitive enforcement (when sanctions are too weak, thus creating meaningless incentives to follow rules), and (c) weak state capacity relative to societal resistance; and (3) Instability, when rules change at an unusually high rate (serial replacement).

The authors also offer possible explanations for institutional failure, which occurs when the costs of changing an institution (C) or of breaking the rules (V) are lower than the cost of maintaining the institution (s). These include: strategic adoption of weak institutions (for audience value, to gain international prestige), economic shocks, unstable coalitions, instability traps (self-reinforcing cycles), naïve institutional borrowing, implementation and enforcement gaps, socioeconomic inequality, low state capacity (understood as fiscal capacity), persistent economic and political volatility, and paradoxically… democracy, since it may generate pressure to design highly ambitious institutions which are then not well implemented.

This is an informative and clear book, I highly recommend it!