Over the past 30 years, democratic freedoms and competitive electoral processes have taken hold as never before in Latin America. How Democracy Works takes a detailed look, from an institutional perspective, at each of the main actors on the policymaking stage in Latin America, emphasizing the...

Over the past 30 years, democratic freedoms and competitive electoral processes have taken hold as never before in Latin America. How Democracy Works takes a detailed look, from an institutional perspective, at each of the main actors on the policymaking stage in Latin America, emphasizing the...

There is a rich literature in comparative politics discussing what makes democracies fragile and more likely to break down. The question has stimulated a substantial amount of research focusing on the fate of specific countries as well as on large cross-national comparisons over long periods of...

In this paper we introduce an innovative method to diagnose electoral fraud using vote counts. First, to circumvent data availability problems and to study a particular type of fraud, we create synthetic data using Monte Carlo methods. Next, we build a supervised machine learning tool and use a...

This paper revisits one historical event that has been repeatedly discussed by the literature on democratic breakdown: the rise and fall of Argentine democracy between 1916 and 1930. First, we demonstrate why socioeconomic factors are not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup. Instead, we...

Veto player theory argues that a higher number of veto players lowers the likelihood of change; in turn, policies that do not change help to sustain commitments but may prevent adaptation to changing circumstances. This paper challenges that claim of veto player theory by arguing that policy...

The understanding of the economic effect of formal institutional rules has progressed substantially in recent decades. These formal analyses have tended to take for granted that institutional arenas such as Congress are the places where decision-making takes place. That is a good approximation...

This paper uses data from the Argentine House of Representatives to study the relationship between legislative effort and political success, as measured by reelection, becoming a leader of the House, and moving to higher political positions. It is found that more effort is associated with a...