Strong property rights tend to be considered a crucial condition for almost all that is good, including economic growth, peace, state capacity, even democracy. However, not all types of property rights institutions are considered capable of achieving these purposes. It is often assumed or argued that property rights – or at least the right kind of property rights – are liberal ownership rights, which can only be held by individuals, are transferable and allocable only through market forces, and are secure from state expropriation or intervention.

In this chapter, we chronicle the “activation” (Levitsky and Murillo 2014) of individual property rights in Mexico, driven by liberal ideology and enabled by increased state capacity, with indigenous groups resisting the elimination of their collective rights and wealthy landowners (hacendados) pushing to turn the process to their advantage through biased enforcement.

The third wave of democratization transformed Latin America. Across the region, regime transitions triggered a plethora of institutional reforms aimed at enhancing the stability and quality of both the new and the few long-standing democracies. Most states adopted new constitutions. Many of them extended new rights to citizens, including unprecedented social rights, such as the right to health care, housing, and a clean environment (Klug 2000; Yashar 2005; Brinks and Blass 2018). Electoral systems were redesigned – at least once – in every Latin American country except Costa Rica; judicial and central bank reforms spread across the region (Jácome and Vásquez 2008); and governments launched far-reaching decentralization initiatives and experimented with new institutions of direct or participatory democracy (Falleti 2010; Cameron, Hershberg, and Sharpe 2012; Altman 2014; Mayka 2019).

In the past four decades, governments around the world have embraced principles of gender equality. Democratic transitions, feminist movements, international norms, lobbying by politicians, partisan competition, technocratic decision-making, regional and global diffusion, and varying combinations of these and other factors have pushed countries to grant women and other marginalized groups equal rights and greater recognition. Governments have reformed laws and adopted policies in many areas, including violence against women, maternity and parental leave, presence in political decision-making, egalitarian family law, abortion, reproductive health, and workplace equality. Still, there is significant cross-national variation in the timing and extent of change (see Htun and Weldon 2018).

A substantial body of literature holds that imported institutions are innately inferior to their indigenous counterparts (Evans 2004; Rodrik 2007; Weyland 2009; Stiglitz 2013), and developing country civil service laws have frequently been invoked by way of example. Civil service laws that are adopted at the behest of foreign powers are at best likely to go unenforced, the literature implies, and at worst likely to insulate not the “specially trained officials” (Gerth and Mills 1946: 370) anticipated by Max Weber but their ill-qualified predecessors (Shepherd 2003; Longo 2005; Schuster 2012).

Are imported institutions really likely to bomb or backfire in this way? I address the question by examining data on the recruitment and management of the inspectors responsible for the enforcement of labor and employment law in the Dominican Republic (DR) and find no cause for concern.

Institutions that require the use of coercion to enforce create political headaches. In these settings, enforcement involves fines, jail sentences, and asset seizures that are unpopular with those affected. This chapter highlights how coercive sanctions can generate social and electoral reactions against institutions, even when there is broad support for the underlying institutional aims. Intentional decisions not to enforce the law, or what I call forbearance (Holland 2016, 2017), is an important source of the institutional weakness studied in this volume.

Applying coercive sanctions is a challenge in any democracy. But in highly unequal societies, such as those in Latin America, enforcement challenges are compounded by both the power and poverty of those affected by institutional rules. On the one hand, the wealthy often stand above the law, using their money and connections to bend formal rules in their favor and forgo sanctions.

The weak or selective enforcement of parchment rules is a widely recognized problem in Latin American and developing states. In Chapter 1, Brinks, Levitsky, and Murillo theorize institutional weakness as the gap between the way social interactions should be structured by institutions and the actual way social interactions occur. We define enforcement as the set of actions that the state takes to reduce the size of that gap. Our point of departure is that enforcement is often uneven and therefore constitutes a key element of the politics of institutional weakness; when rules are enforced is equally, if not more, important than the content of the rules themselves.

In this chapter, we build an account of the political and societal determinants of enforcement to elucidate why and how weak institutions gain relevance and how strong institutions might, or might not, emerge from state action.

Most countries in the world operate under authoritarian constitutions. Historically, Latin American countries have been overrepresented in this group. Many of these authoritarian constitutions have proven remarkably sticky. The most long-lived ones not only govern the authoritarian regimes that pen them but subsequently constrain democratic successors long after the end of dictatorship.

On average, these constitutions are relatively strong as defined in this volume: they achieve their statutory goals and produce outcomes their authors and bequeathers intended them to produce. Historically, their authors and bequeathers have used them to satisfy a narrow set of objectives: secure the safety and welfare of outgoing dictators as well as safeguard the political and economic interests of their core supporters. These constitutions are also consequential, distorting democracy in favor of these former dictators and supporters.

Presidential failure and Latin America have long been synonymous. Although the specter of military coups that replaced elected leaders with generals largely receded during the 1980s, presidential crises, like the one that engulfed Brazil’s political class and resulted in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, continue to grab headlines. Following the Venezuelan Supreme Court’s ruling to strip the opposition-led legislature of its authority in 2017, Congress voted to put President Nicolás Maduro on trial for plotting a coup against the constitution. A little more than a year later, Peruvian president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned rather than be impeached on graft charges related to the widening Odebrecht scandal.