Chapter 4 traces the development of the Police of Buenos Aires Province since Argentina’s transition to democracy and accounts for its institutional persistence in the face of extensive extralegal violence and predation of the citizenry. Despite the integral role of police in the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, the transition to democracy in 1983 did not entail efforts to reform the country’s police institutions in accordance with democratic principles, as occurred with the military. As crime rates and societal demands for improved security increased, structural police reform was not on the agenda, and countless short-term efforts to root out corruption largely floundered. While other provincial institutions, such as the judiciary, underwent structural reform, the police strategically used its control over coercion to raise the cost to politicians of constraining police authority. The resulting accommodation between police and politicians largely kept police reform off the public agenda and allowed the provincial police to thwart external accountability efforts. I demonstrate that societal demands regarding policing and security were largely fragmented and often contradictory, such that politicians saw little electoral incentive to address police violence, corruption, and poor performance.

Ideas provided the ballast for the continuity of the economic policy commitments of this era. Developmentalism – the notion that underdevelopment can be overcome “through capitalist industrialization, planned and supported by the state” (Bielschowsky, 1988) – served as a long-term constraint within institutions, pointing toward particular equilibrium outcomes, prioritizing between conflicting alternatives, and providing guidance that drove diverse and uncoordinated actors toward particular preferences and behaviors.As a consequence, even under the most reformist of governments, including at the height of the “Washington Consensus,” Brazilian policymaking was far more gradual, inward-looking, and accepting of an active role for the state in regulating and shaping markets than its large Latin American peers. Using Argentina and Chile as comparisons, the chapter illustrates how developmentalist ideas remained relatively embedded in Brazilian policymaking, academia, and popular thought, even as the “old’ developmentalism was supplanted by a “new” variant.

The Brazilian developmental state changed significantly after 1985, with new rhetoric about equality, a commitment to fighting inflation, and a three-pronged policy set combining fiscal responsibility, a floating exchange rate, and inflation targeting. Yet many elements of the “old” developmental state remained intact, including a large state role, a complex monetary regime, muscular industrial policies, low economic integration, and a segmented labor market. The fight against inflation generated incentives for politicians to employ “fiscally opaque” policy instruments drawn from the tool kit of the developmental state. The fiscal imperative combined with fiscally opaque instruments contributed to the high cost of credit and low investment, driving firms to demand state succor. The fiscal imperative and the power of interest groups meant that the burden of balancing the fiscal accounts fell disproportionately on the less well-off. The ensuing demand for social spending meant that economic growth, by default, became a residual.

Alberto Piotti, the former secretary of security of Buenos Aires Province, emphasized in an interview the dilemma posed by security, a policy area he viewed as producing few political benefits even when things go well. As Piotti put it, “inaugurating a jail is not the same as inaugurating a hospital.” For this reason, Piotti described his mandate from the governor as “plugging holes, not searching for fundamental solutions.” While Piotti is especially pessimistic about his time as security secretary (see Chapter 4), his remarks are illustrative of the broader hesitation of political leaders to undertake police reform, resulting in the high degree of institutional persistence documented in the preceding chapters. When faced with police forces implicated in politicized coercion and a range of conduct that systematically contravenes the rule of law with negligible external accountability, political leaders across the three cases, like Piotti, routinely sought to “plug holes” rather than “search for fundamental solutions.” Over the course of three decades, successive leaders in São Paulo State, and more broadly at the federal level in Brazil, contemplated similar reform strategies – including demilitarization, unification of the two police forces, and strengthening civilian oversight – but have consistently avoided structural reform of a highly violent and unaccountable police (Chapter 3).

Chapter 2 introduces a two-stage theory of institutional continuity and reform, laying out how societal preferences over the distribution of protection and repression shape politicians’ decisions between the status quo of authoritarian coercion and reform to promote democratic coercion. Far from constituting a failure of democratic processes, politicians’ decisions to either maintain the status quo of authoritarian coercion or undertake police reform both result from ordinary democratic politics. I argue that, even under the constraints posed by the structural power of police, shifts in the convergence of societal preferences over policing and security and a robust political opposition can serve as key drivers of reform by raising the costs to the incumbent of not reforming the police. The theory yields two key predictions. When societal preferences over policing and security are fragmented, politicians have incentives to pursue accommodation with the police, wherein they grant police greater autonomy in exchange for cooperation in the selective distribution of coercion. This favors the persistence of institutional weakness and authoritarian patterns of coercion. On the other hand, incumbents are likely to pursue democratic police reform when societal preferences converge and when they face an electoral threat from a robust political opposition.

Because the cases of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia eventually resulted in ambitious structural police reforms, Chapter 7 presents a detailed sequential analysis of the events that brought about reform in each instance, leveraging changes over time in societal preferences and the strength of the political opposition. The sequential analyses presented in this chapter elucidate the factors that shape politicians’ incentives when choosing between continuity and reform, demonstrating how those incentives changed in response to short-term shifts in societal preferences and political competition. The accounts of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia complement one another well, demonstrating that neither of these conditions is sufficient to bring about reform on its own. In each case, we observe an explicit decision by the executive to maintain the status quo when faced with the convergence of societal preferences (Buenos Aires Province) or a robust political opposition (Colombia) on its own. After both conditions were present, however, the two executives chose to enact comprehensive structural reforms just months after opting for the status quo. By analyzing politicians’ choices before and after the joint occurrence of these conditions, we obtain a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying institutional persistence and change among police forces.

The concluding chapter explores the often-contradictory relationship between democracy and enduring state violence and the intervening role of inequality. It builds on the book’s key findings to further elucidate the problem that policing poses for democracy, in theory and in practice. The repertoires and distribution of protection and repression in the cases analyzed in this book – and indeed, in many other democracies – are antithetical to what some scholars view as the substantive principles and outcomes of democracy. Yet, these practices are often reinforced by the electoral and participatory processes other scholars have identified as constitutive of democracy. This book’s analysis of three police forces therefore lays bare a tension between procedural and substantive dimensions of democracy. In order to elucidate this tension, the concluding chapter disaggregates democracy and considers how these two dimensions may come to be at odds with one another. The chapter considers how the input of democracy – citizens’ preferences and demands – is channeled through democratic processes such as elections and participatory institutions to produce substantive outcomes that are antithetical to democratic principles. Key to understanding how quintessentially democratic processes result in authoritarian policing practices and structures is the distortions introduced by inequality to each dimension of democracy.