Cecilia Martínez-Gallardo

TL;DR: The authors examine the stability of individual ministers across parliamentary democracies and show that this stability is only loosely related to the stability in cabinets, making it impossible to rely primarily on arguments about cabinet duration to explain patterns of individual stability.

Abstract: This report examines the quality of public policies in Latin America and the Caribbean after more than a decade of political and economic reform. A wide variety of examples and case studies are presented in an analytical framework to help explain why policies that work in certain institutional environments may not work in others. The focus of this report is not the content of policies, or their effects on major economic and social variables, but rather the process by which these policies are discussed, approved, and implemented. In presidential democracies like those in the majority of the Latin American countries, the process of adopting and implementing public policy occurs in political systems in which a variety of actors participate, ranging from the president to voters in small rural communities and including congressmen, judges, public opinion leaders and businessmen.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that political competition generates incentives that affect the pace of adoption of market reforms in the context of policy convergence, and that the relative ideology of challengers did shape the incentives of policymakers.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that there is wide variation in the durability of governing coalitions across these regimes and develop a theory of the incentives of parties to participate in the government and the circumstances under which scholars might expect to see the existing governing coalition break down.

TL;DR: The authors proposed a theory of conditional accountability by which the public most consistently punishes presidents for scandals when the economy is weak, while scandals do not tarnish presidents’ public standing under strong economic conditions.