Why do some political institutions become strong, while others remain weak? Why do imported international legal norms remain aspirational rights in some countries, but are complied with and enforced in others? Why do institutions born out of similar conditions subsequently diverge in their levels of institutional strength? Social scientists have amply demonstrated that strong institutions are essential to economic and political development. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Max Weber (1978 [1922]) famously argued that capitalist development required the development of a strong, rational, state bureaucracy. More recently, political scientists and economists alike have highlighted the importance of strong political institutions for economic growth and development (Haggard 1990; North 1990). In political science, scholars have developed theories of why and how institutions originate and change (Knight 1992; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Thelen 2004). However, much less attention has been paid to the questions of why and how institutions strengthen or alternatively remain weak, which are at the center of this edited volume.

Major electoral reforms have been strikingly frequent in Latin America since the beginning of the third wave of democratization. Such reforms include the adoption of runoff formulas for the election of the president, changes in tenure and reelection rules, the replacement of proportional representation by mixed-member rules, alterations in the number and magnitudes of electoral districts, and the creation or elimination of legislative chambers as well as modifications to their size, to name a few important instances of electoral change. Such major reforms have not been simply the result of regime change, nor have they slowed down as democratic regimes have become more stable in the region. Instead, the rate of reforms has remained constant since the 1980s – the result of cyclical crises and weak institutions, features of day-to-day politics in Latin America. In this chapter, we seek to understand what determines the enactment of major electoral reforms in the region.

We began this book with the premise that what ultimately distinguishes strong institutions from weak ones is that the former matter more than the latter. The same institution, in two different contexts or at two different times, is stronger if it makes more of a behavioral difference in one instance than in the other. As the chapters in this volume make clear, however, it is difficult to evaluate exactly how much an institution “matters.” It is relatively simple to say that an institution is strong because, on paper, it possesses features that should make it matter – for example, it commands great things. But it is an altogether different – and, we believe, far more interesting – thing to say that an institution is strong because it actually produces an outcome that is substantially different from what we might have observed in its absence, and that it continues to produce that outcome even in the face of pressures to change it or avoid it altogether.

This book is based on the premise that formal institutions in several Latin American democracies are weak; they are unstable and their capacity to shape actors’ behavior is limited. Institutional strength not only varies across countries, but also at the subnational level, as many institutions are unevenly enforced within countries (Bergman 2009; Amengual 2013, 2016; Holland 2017, this volume). Focusing on why some institutions take root in some places and not in others, we address the enforcement of forest protection legislation, a domain of environmental rules that has experienced important innovations in Latin America since the early 2000s.

As it boosted economic growth across the region, the commodity boom of the 2000s also intensified environmental degradation and sparked conflicts over the regulation of mining (see Amengual and Dargent, this volume) and the protection of forestlands jeopardized by the expansion of the agricultural frontier.

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.