Democratic politics in Latin America: Contributions from an institutionalist perspective

This article analyzes the contributions of the institutionalist literature to the understanding of democratic politics in Latin America. It first considers the debate about the institutional causes of gridlock and draws attention to key strengths of this literature. Thereafter, the article addresses the question of the quality of democracy, placing emphasis on the contributions of institutionalists to understand the relationship between citizens, policy makers and policy administrators in terms of the principal-agent model. In addition, it addresses some challenges in the analysis of the quality of democracy linked to the relationship between the preferences of politicians and state capacity, and the level of democraticness of the political regime.