This article presents the case for steering clear of electoral outcome-based regime classifications. It advocates focusing instead on the systemic character of the formal and informal institutions that govern access to power as a more appropriate way to draw electoral regime boundaries. The case study of Ecuador under the presidency of Rafael Correa is offered as an example of this approach. Both electoral outcomes under Correísmo (2006-2017) as well as the procedural context in which elections occurred are examined. But the regime is here analyzed and categorized on a procedural-centered basis. The analysis of the slope of the playing field in the electoral arena reveals that political competition was fundamentally unfair, placing the regime in the competitive authoritarian category. This conclusion is reached on grounds of the incumbent's capture of the electoral management body, as well as highly discriminatory electoral laws drawn by the incumbent, among many other factors that rendered Ecuadorean electoral contests unfair.
The 2011 presidential elections in Peru was the third one held in the post-Fujimori era. A perusal of the campaign's political dynamics reveals pervasive anti-democratic behaviours, attitudes and rhetoric on the part of key political actors, showcasing the degree to which Peru remains an unconsolidated, precarious democracy. The second round presented a moral and political dilemma insofar as two unsavoury candidates of highly dubious democratic credentials vied for the presidency: Ollanta Humala, a former army lieutenant burdened by accusations of human rights violations who, additionally, led or supported two military uprisings; and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a convicted and jailed dictator who unabashedly touted the legacy of her father's authoritarian regime and surrounded herself with tainted fujimoristas. The paradox of this undesirable electoral outcome, which can be read as a popular rebuke of the status quo, is that it took place in the Latin American country posting the fastest economic growth over the past decade.
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The attempt to classify Bolivia under Evo Morales has yielded a bewildering range of regime labels. While most scholars label it a democracy with adjectives, systematic appraisals of the regime have been scant. This article aims fill this gap by providing a more systematic evaluation, putting special emphasis on features of Bolivia’s electoral playing field. It evaluates the slope of key fields of competition (electoral, legislative, judicial, and mass media), finding abundant evidence that all four were substantively slanted in favor of the incumbent. During the MAS reign, political competition was genuine but fundamentally unfree and unfair, because the ruling party benefited from a truncated supply of electoral candidates; much greater access to finance; a partisan electoral management body; supermajorities in the legislature, used to dispense authoritarian legalism; a captured and weaponized judiciary; and a co-opted mass media ecosystem. Contrary to most extant characterizations, the regime is best categorized as competitive authoritarian.
While Latin America has augmented its tax effort significantly since 2000, tax revenues remain below the global norm given the region’s income per capita. Indirect taxes constitute a disproportionate portion of overall revenues, a manifestation of the political and technical difficulties inherent to taxing Latin American elites. Several structural factors characterizing the region hamper revenue collection, including mediocre economic performance, a large informal sector, high income inequality, the rentier status of some economies, and weak state infrastructural power, alongside feeble tax administration agencies, among other factors. Political scientists have deployed three main paradigms for understanding tax policy outcomes and tax reform: interest-based, ideational, and institutional accounts. Interest-based accounts, centered on the political power and resources that interest groups can wield, provide a useful first approximation to understanding tax outcomes; nevertheless, this theoretical lens under-predicts the prevalence of observed tax reform in Latin America. The ideational lens is indispensable to account for the overall contours of the taxation system in the region, because tax reform was informed by the neoliberal paradigm. In recent years, moderately progressive tax policy changes have been enacted by left- and right-wing governments alike, reflecting the increasing centrality of addressing inequality (the vertical equity objective) in the realm of ideas. Democracy, qua a system of institutions geared to enhance the public interest, has not spawned the taxation systems that the median-voter theory predicts in the context of high societal inequality, however. Democracy has not fulfilled the taxation and fiscal policy expectations placed upon it. Nonetheless, structural factors may yet produce a salutary fiscal result. The recent increase in the size of the region’s middle class has translated into greater societal pressures to enhance the quality and quantity of public services, which may portend the development of a more encompassing state–society fiscal pact.
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