Abstract
Theories of democratic legitimacy argue that people who believe the government is well managed and represents their interests are likely to defend the democratic status quo. Principal-agent theory predicts, however, that these same groups are also more likely to support executive actions that threaten vertical or horizontal accountability. Citizens who feel represented by an ideologically sympathetic and competent executive may be willing to delegate the president additional authority to enact their agenda, even at the expense of democratic principles. Survey data from Latin America are largely consistent with the principal-agent hypothesis; those who voted for the ruling party in the previous election or who perceive that the economy is strong say they not only like democracy and oppose coups but also support limits on critical actors and opposition parties and are willing to let the president bypass the legislature and court. Thus to understand the breakdown of democracy, we must not only examine the conditions that leave the losers of political and economic processes satisfied with the process that culminated in their defeat but also identify conditions when winners tolerate electoral and institutional challenges and are willing to protect space for public criticism.
Keywords
Although there are many ways that democracies can break down, two types of breakdown are most common (Maeda, 2010; Slovik, 2015). The first comes from the rejection and overthrow of democratic institutions via a military coup or popular uprising and the instillation of an unelected leader. The second threat to democracy is from within, as elected leaders weaken democratic checks on their authority. A determined executive can limit the opposition’s ability to organize and speak freely, restrict media criticism, and, in the extreme, can restrict competition such that elections become meaningless (Levitsky & Way, 2002). This latter form of democratic breakdown has become increasingly common; more democracies have broken down by executives consolidating their authority than have been overthrown by a coup since 1991 (Ulfelder, 2010).
Public support for the aspiring dictator might not be necessary for democracy to be overthrown if powerful actors have sufficient repressive capacity. Yet many democratic breakdowns occur with popular support for the leaders who enact antidemocratic reforms. A large literature thus explores why some citizens reject democracy. Most scholarship argues that it is democracy’s losers who have come to view democracy as illegitimate that support its dismantling. Specifically, people (a) for whom democracy has not brought desired outcomes like economic prosperity, social peace, or clean government or (b) who are at the losing end of electoral struggles may become willing to support a coup or other interruptions of the democratic order.
Yet, I argue that the extant literature’s focus on bad performance and election losers explains support for interruptions of the electoral order but provides little leverage to explain why people might support the restriction of electoral checks on the executive, the harassment of political opposition groups, or weakening checks and balances. In fact, to understand how executives hollow out electoral or institutional democratic checks on their authority we might need to turn the extant literature on democratic legitimacy on its head. If democracy is threatened by public acquiescence to incumbent politicians attempting to consolidate their power, then the problem is not a lack of legitimacy but a surplus of it (Kenney, 2003). I propose that citizens who perceive benefits under the current balance of powers are those most likely to support the further consolidation of power and influence in the executive to prevent these gains from being eroded. Citizens who see the sitting executive as a representative of their interests or who observe positive policy outcomes under him or her may thus be less tolerant of the rights of opponents who would rock the boat and endanger the current prosperity while seeing few disincentives to empowering a leader that they support to override opposition from other branches of government. Although good performance and perceived representation may reduce the threats of coups, they may also create opportunities for actors within the regime looking for permission to restrict electoral and popular challenges and to marginalize the opposition.
I test my argument about the pernicious effects of good performance and winning using surveys conducted in Latin America between 2006 and 2012. I find that citizens who perceive the economy as strong or corruption to be rare and whose favored candidate won the previous election tend to be less tolerant of civil rights free speech and opposition political rights that underlie vertical accountability. Yet, consistent with delegation models, these same factors also make people more willing to let the president bypass other branches of government, weakening horizontal accountability, although good performance does not make people more likely to support self-coups (autogolpes). This is especially true when the stakes of competition are raised by weak democratic institutions or high levels of polarization and when the president has been in office long enough to develop a credible record. The sustainability of democracy in new democracies, where democratic values are weakly established, thus requires more than its losers consenting to its continuance; its winners must exercise self-restraint in exercising their powers.
Existing Theories of How Short-Term Performance Strengthens Democracy
Democracy is valued both as a good in itself and because citizens expect it may deliver tangible benefits (Easton, 1975). Democracy is strengthened when its basic principles are accepted, that is, if most citizens believe in fairness, equality, and political tolerance as broad principles (Inglehart & Welzel, 2003). These values are fostered by economic development (Inglehart & Welzel, 2003) and especially by the expansion of education (e.g., Ferrín & Kriesi, 2016; Mishler & Rose, 1999; Norris, 1999). Social capital can also buoy support for democratic norms (Booth & Seligson, 2009; Putnam; Almond and Verba).
Yet, citizens’ support for or rejection of democracy is also contingent upon the quality of governance that democracy produces. Democracy is valued because elections potentially allow voters to choose politicians based on their preferences and then hold them accountable for their performance, incentivizing them to deliver for their constituents (Manin, Przeworski, & Stokes, 1999). Many people support democracy because it promises an improved quality of life (Bratton, Mattes, & Gyimah-Boadi, 2005; United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2004), and when democracy fails to deliver these goods, disenchantment creates opportunities for challengers to the democratic system. For example, economic upheaval leads voters to initially punish the incumbent party but a sufficiently long or severe crisis can delegitimize all parties, the institutions of government, and basic democratic norms of using elections to select leaders (Easton, 1975; Norris, 1999) and so economic crises tend to make the collapse of democracy more likely (Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, & Limongi, 2000, p. 109; Feng, 1997), especially if the country is poor. Citizens demand more from democracy than economics, however; they also value good governance, honesty, and efficiency and if these are not provided in a democracy, its legitimacy falters (e.g., Bratton et al., 2005; Evans & Whitefield, 1995).
Citizens may also expect that democracy will lead to increased representation of their interests and support democracy if they feel they are being well represented (Aarts & Thomassen, 2008). Yet, not all views are represented equally in a democracy because elections delineate winners and losers, especially in winner-take-all elections for the executive. Voters who supported a losing party suffer both the emotional blow of having been defeated and the real policy consequences of living under a government whose views and interests differ from theirs (Anderson, Blais, Bowler, Donovan, & Listhaug, 2005). Election losers are thus less likely to be satisfied with democracy or say democracy is the best system. If elections do not result in citizens’ views being represented, they may begin to look for nonelectoral ways to make themselves heard, especially in new democracies. As a result, some have argued that “the continued existence of the [democratic] system depends to a larger extent on the consent of the losers than on the consent of the winners” (Anderson et al., 2005, p. 7).
Thus existing literature on democratic values argues that support for the democratic status quo and rejection of coups should be increasing with education but is also contingent upon policy and election outcomes, with individuals who perceive the economy to be strong, governance to be good, and who support the sitting executive displaying highest levels of support for democracy. These basic patterns occur in Western (Ferrín & Kriesi, 2016) and Eastern Europe (Klingemann, Fuchs, & Zielonka, 2006), Latin America (Booth & Seligson, 2009), and Africa (Bratton et al., 2005). Yet, the degree to which these theories apply specifically to the weakening of democratic competition by political insiders remains, as I show in the next section, an open question.
Threats to Democracy From Inside the Regime
As scholars have considered ways in which democracy can become hollowed out in the absence of a military coup, one common concern is the weakening of checks and balances that are one source of horizontal accountability for the executive (Kenney, 2003; O’Donnell, 1998). Extreme cases of this occur when one branch of the government unconstitutionally closes another branch, although these cases are relatively rare (Helmke, 2017), recent events in Venezuela notwithstanding. Yet, the more common concern is that one branch can sideline opposition actors in other branches by ignoring their directives or using alternative policymaking processes to bypass legitimately selected opposition actors (e.g., Carey & Shugart, 1998; Cox & Morgenstern, 2001; Powell, 2004). Although checks and balances represent a tension between liberal and majoritarian conceptions of democracy (Coppedge & Gerring, 2011) and thus the relative strength of the branches are debated within constitution writing processes and vary across democracies, once those rules are set the sidelining of legitimate actors undermines democratic representation and weakens the rule of law. 1
Incumbent actors can also hollow out democracy by undermining electoral competition. Meaningful electoral contestation is a key element of nearly all visions of democracy (Coppedge & Gerring, 2011). Merely holding elections is not sufficient; the ruling party must face the meaningful possibility of defeat for elections to work as accountability mechanisms. Thus democracy requires that ruling parties not seek to limit who runs against them and that votes should be tabulated accurately. Competitive elections also require all political parties, including those critical of the regime, have the right to meet, organize, and speak publicly. Civil rights to speech and association also help promote accountability between electoral periods by empowering an independent civil society (Smulovitz & Peruzzotti, 2000).
Yet, self-interested political actors have incentives to manipulate the institutions that regulate this competition such that it can become imbalanced. Partisan gerrymandering, skewed campaign finance regulations, and the manipulation of government regulatory and policy frameworks to mobilize and benefit supporters are all examples of this kind of partisan self-dealing. Some regimes, however, go further and sufficiently restrict electoral competition via intimidation, harassment of opposition leaders, and fraud that they can establish an “electoral authoritarian” regime (Schedler, 2006) that insulate them from popular challenge. Regimes can also suppress opposition outside of elections by jailing opposition leaders under the guise of protecting public security and can stifle debate by restricting and harassing media outlets that criticize the regime by denying them licenses or prosecuting reporters for libel. Even if these governments do not establish fully authoritarian regimes, when civil liberties are suppressed, the possibilities for vertical accountability are weakened. Restricted civil liberties also weaken opposition actors in office, undermining horizontal accountability as well.
Horizontal and vertical accountability are under threat in many regimes. This article focuses on Latin America. A large literature analyzes the strength of horizontal accountability in Latin America, where threats to it range from executive-led self-coups (autogolpes) where the legislature or court is closed (Helmke, 2017) to the sidelining of the legislature (Cox & Morgenstern, 2001), over-reliance on decrees (Carey & Shugart, 1998), or manipulating the court (Helmke, 2005). Several Latin American governments have taken steps to restrict civil liberties and weaken elements of electoral democracy. Many governments restrict critical coverage by refusing to renew the license of several opposition-friendly radio and television stations, expanding their media, banning public agencies, prosecuting journalists under slander laws, and harassing, intimidating, and jailing critical media actors (e.g., Atwood, 2006; Kellam & Stein, 2016; Mainwaring & Pérez-Liñan, 2015; Mason, 2012). These tactics have become sufficiently widespread that 15 of the 18 countries had lower averages scores in the Press Freedom Index in 2011-2013 than in 2001-2003. Similar challenges to civil liberties have occurred as governments limit rights to association that can make it difficult to organize political or social movements by harassing leaders or restricting their access to public spaces. The CIRI data set codes the degree to which the rights of political parties, trade unions, and cultural organizations are subject to government limitations or restrictions in practice, and the average score for the hemisphere fell from 1.74 in 2000-2002 to 1.46 in 2009-2011, with nine of the 18 countries receiving lower rankings (Cingranelli, Richards, & Clay, 2014). Finally, several countries have seen active harassment of opposition candidates as governments selectively prosecute opposition party leaders, for example, while ignoring corrupt acts by members of their own party (Weyland, 2013). As a result of these kinds of pressures, 10 of the 18 countries in the region have lower average democracy scores in the V-Dem polyarchy index 2 between 2011 and 2013 than in 2001 and 2003 despite the general lack of successful coups in the hemisphere, with Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia experiencing the largest drops in measured democratic quality.
As we consider issues of restricting free speech and opposition rights and the resulting consolidation of executive authority, we might ask why citizens support these steps either tacitly by not protesting or by continuing to support leaders who carry them out. The literature suggests four main individual-level variables to explain levels of support for democracy: education, levels of social capital, views of government performance, and electoral support for the ruling party. The first two variables are expected to correlate with acceptance of broad democratic norms and so they too should be correlated with support for contested elections and free-speech protections as well as the liberal democratic norms of checks and balances. Yet, should bad performance lead voters to support the sitting government acting to restrict vertical or horizontal accountability? Bad performance and being on the losing end of an election lead citizens to dislike the incumbent and in some cases to consider supporting a military coup to overthrow the existing order, but the establishment of an electoral autocracy or smaller steps to restrict speech and opposition rights seek to lock the status quo in place and thus seems an unlikely goal for those who dislike the current regime. Why would those who think that the system is performing badly or who do not support the incumbent want to make it more difficult to criticize and challenge him?
Instead, I argue that a strong economy that distributes benefits to the citizenry, institutions that enforce the rule of law, and elections in which people feel represented may provide leeway and leverage to foes of democratic procedures and horizontal accountability within the regime as they seek to consolidate their authority. In particular, I develop an argument that builds on principal-agent theories of delegation to understand when citizens might be willing to weaken democracy.
How Citizens View Delegation Risks
Principal-agent models start by recognizing that people are willing to give agents discretion to act on their behalf because delegation allows for efficiency gains due to the agent’s expertise and specialization (e.g., Vickers, 1985). However, most forms of delegation are also plagued by problems of preference divergence whereby agents can potentially betray the trust of their principals and work to pursue their own goals (e.g., Brehm & Gates, 1997). Thus, principals either need to (a) ensure that their representative has similar interests to them or (b) monitor and punish representatives who deviate from the principal’s interests. Thus, principals will monitor their agents’ performance and then delegate their continued authority or even increase it once they have credible information about a representative’s competence or if the agent can show they share the principals’ values. Actors who desire to receive greater authority thus have incentives to make their priorities relatively transparent and to make costly signals of their competence (Snyder & Ting, 2005).
Questions of executive authority overreaches can easily be thought of as a similar principal-agent delegation dilemma. The widespread concern with delegative democracy (O’Donnell, 1994), whereby leaders fulfill their mandates with few constraints, is that executives to whom power is delegated as agents of the electorate will be able to act without horizontal or vertical control and use those powers to benefit themselves while making their removal difficult. But this should be true of any arrangement, democratic or autocratic, where citizens weigh giving the executive increased authority. As Sartori (1987) reminded us “He who delegates his power can also lose it” (p. 30). Voters and elites contemplating delegating authority thus face risks of agency loss if presidents use those powers to enrich themselves or pursue policies that differ from their mandates. Elections provide voters with chances to assess potential representatives’ interests and abilities and sanction incumbents who mismanage their authority (Stokes, 2001; Strøm, 2000), but post hoc accountability does not reduce the difficulty in evaluating the incumbent nor can it make up for negative consequences of having delegated authority to an agent who mismanaged it (Fearon, 1999). Moreover, strong presidents may be able to manipulate elections in such a way that their removal becomes difficult; voters who support blocking the opposition today might regret that choice if they ever end up joining that opposition in wanting to defeat the current president, which makes the weakening of vertical accountability a risky proposition for the electorate.
Principal-agent theories of delegation imply that citizens, aware of the risks inherent in the concentration of power that weaken accountability mechanisms, should be more likely to take this risk under two general circumstances. The first is that voters should be more likely to delegate powers to executives that they believe share their interests. Citizens can assess politicians’ policy preferences through their campaigns, their public statements, and in the case of those in power by their policy agenda in office. Individuals who voted for the sitting executive have decided that this candidate is the one, out of the available options at least, who represents their interests and values and is the most competent. As a result, these winning voters may be more willing to delegate their preferred candidate additional powers than those voters who opposed him or her in the previous election. Similarly, electoral winners may have less tolerance for opposition to “their candidate” in the streets, media, or other institutions of government. These differences should become especially large when the stakes of the conflict between the winners and the losers are strong, either because of the scope of the policy differences between them or because the institutional circumstances allow the winner greater possibilities of achieving the proposed restrictions. As these stakes increase, winners have greater incentives to mobilize for increased control while the losers have greater motivation to oppose powers being given that will establish policy outcomes that they oppose.
The second condition which may increase citizen willingness to delegate authority is when policy outcomes demonstrate the sitting executive’s competence. Executives who have been able to preside over a strong economy, a clean government, or a low crime rate can make a more credible claim that increasing their power will result in further good outcomes. Moreover, they can portray those who would limit their authority or agitate against their policies as rocking the boat and threatening these good outcomes. This argument may not be completely credible; institutions that induce bargaining between the government and the opposition tend to achieve greater congruence between government outcomes and citizen preferences (e.g., Powell, 2000) and reduce economic volatility (Haggard & McCubbins, 2001). However, if a president claims that he or she needs greater authority, it will be those who think the incumbent will continue to produce good results that are most likely to believe such a claim. Citizens who evaluate the incumbent’s performance highly may be more tolerant of electoral manipulations that keep him or her in power while being less tolerant of the opposition or critical media or social actors.
So while electoral exclusion, a lack of ideological representation, and poor governance and economic outcomes may lead citizens to sour on democracy and perhaps even lead them to support an authoritarian alternative from outside the current administration, consolidation of power in the executive may be perfectly acceptable to those who are content with the direction of the country and who support the executive or his policies despite any authoritarian tendencies. Although bad times may facilitate the election of populist leaders who propose a new way forward and the adoption of risky policies, good times may smooth the rewriting of the constitution and other steps taken to expand prerogatives over other areas of the government from within the sitting executive.
The delegation model also suggests that citizens, aware of the risks inherent in delegation, are going to be interested in the quality of the evidence that agents provide of their abilities. In particular, they are going to want some assurance that the outcome was under the agent’s control and that it was not a fluke. This implies that the effect of performance and representation will vary over time. Voters, for example, have been shown to discount economic outcomes at the start of the incumbent’s term because those outcomes could be a function of the previous administration or optimistic honeymoon markets (Lebo & Box-Steffensmeier, 2008). Voters who are aware that presidents’ policy initiatives do not always match their campaign rhetoric (Stokes, 2001) might also have incentives to wait and watch the incumbent govern to establish that the president truly does represent them well before delegating him or her extra authority to block the opposition. Thus, the impact of performance on support for vertical accountability should be increasingly negative over time as should be the winner–loser gap.
These predictions diverge from extant theorizing on how bad performance creates demands for strong leaders, with an emphasis on economic and political crises. Traditional models argue that poor outcomes that delegitimize existing institutions can lead desperate citizens to accept political strongmen who promise electoral changes or to support political reforms that would otherwise be considered too risky (Weyland, 2013). Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe in Peru, for example, was popular because citizens held the traditional parties responsible for the economic crisis and did not feel represented by them and so citizens expected that his restriction of the opposition would lead to prosperity (Tuesta, 1999; Stokes, 2001). Yet, these initial mandates are only transitory. Fujimori’s autogolpe provided only a short-term increase in support (Morgan, 2003) but his constitutional reforms and reelection occurred because his success in restoring economic prosperity for the middle class, reducing the threat from Sendero Luminoso, and redistributing wealth to the poorest segment of the electorate convinced the public of his competence (Tuesta, 1999). Support for these steps ceased when he could no longer sustain his performance legitimacy; by 2000, the wavering economy made citizens question his competence and be less likely to delegate him further authority or tolerate corruption (e.g., Carrión, 2006; Weyland, 2000). Thus while frustration with poor performance may lead citizens to support a political outsider, my principal-agent approach implies that the continued and deepening delegation of that authority and institutional reforms depend upon successful policy outcomes and maintaining popular support.
Data and Methods
A handful of recent empirical studies provide some preliminary support for the argument that supporting the winning candidate and perceiving good performance outcomes can be associated with weak support for democratic principles. Moehler (2009) finds that African election losers are more willing to defend institutions from challenges from the executive. Carlin and Singer (2011) find that presidential approval is positively associated with a willingness to reduce horizontal checks and balances on the president. But this evidence is based on a limited number of questions and cases.
I thus test this argument using survey data from Latin America about support for civil liberties and horizontal accountability. The AmericasBarometer surveys, conducted biennially by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University, 3 not only contains the standard measures of democratic support but also contains questions on restricting free speech, the media, and the political opposition and on interbranch relations that are ideal for understanding why people might support weakening democratic protections.
The surveys are nationally representative studies based on stratified and clustered samples of 1,500 or more voting-age individuals interviewed in their homes. I focus on attitudes in 18 presidential Latin American countries from 2006 to 2012. 4 The sample differs across analyses, however, because topics differ across survey waves.
Measuring Support for Civil Liberties 5
I focus first on voter attitudes about actions that would allow the president to violate the basic tenets of electoral democracy by weakening vertical accountability. I measure tolerance for civil liberties from questions where respondents were asked to consider people who “only say bad things about the (country’s) form of government, not just the incumbent government but the system of government” in an attempt to make these questions about attitudes about free speech generally, not just for one’s partisan allies/enemies and to evaluate civil rights for these critics, expressing their agreement with these groups having protected civil rights on a 10-point scale (emphasis in original).
“How strongly do you approve or disapprove of such people’s right to vote?”
“How strongly do you approve or disapprove that such people be allowed to conduct peaceful demonstrations in order to express their views?”
“Still thinking of those who only say bad things about the (country) form of government, how strongly do you approve or disapprove of such people being permitted to run for public office?”
“How strongly do you approve or disapprove of such people appearing on television to make speeches?”
I combine the answers into an additive scale (Cronbach’s α = .86) where high values represent support for civil liberties.
The 2006 AmericasBarometer also asked about general protections of free speech. Respondents were asked whether they would agree with various actions on a 10-point scale. Some questions asked about laws generally while others specifically asked about “the government” acting to restrict forms of speech. 6
“To what degree do you approve or disapprove of
‘a law prohibiting public protests?’ ‘a law prohibiting the meetings of any group that criticizes the nationality’s political system?’ ‘if the government censored television programs?’ ‘if the government censored books in public school libraries?’ ‘if the government censored any of the media that criticized it?’”
I have recoded these questions so that high values represent protection of free speech and combine them in an additive scale (Cronbach’s α = .79).
Finally, I look at whether the respondent wants to protect the rights of opposition parties. In 2008-2012, respondents were asked their level of agreement or disagreement on a 7-point scale with the following statement: It is necessary for the progress of this country that our presidents limit the voice and vote of opposition parties; how much do you agree or disagree with that view?
These three sets of questions are coded such that high values represent support for democratic values that undergird vertical accountability. Although the existing literature suggests that good regime performance and supporting the winning candidate will build support for democratic norms, my delegation theory suggests that these forces will be correlated with delegating the executive authority to restrict speech and opposition rights.
Measuring Support for Horizontal Accountability
The AmericasBarometer asks two sets of questions on interbranch relations. The first asked respondents to consider whether the president should shut down one of the other branches of government.
Do you think that sometimes there can be sufficient grounds for the President to close down the Congress [Supreme Court] or do you think there can never be a sufficient reason to do so? (0) Yes, (1) No.
The question about the legislature was asked in the 2006-2012 waves while the courts question was asked in 2006 and 2008. Although the two questions are strongly correlated (r = .63), I model them separately to increase the number of survey-years on the legislature.
Respondents in 2008-2010 were also asked about the possible bypassing of these institutions:
“Taking into account the current situation of this country, I would like you to tell me how much you agree or disagree with the following statement: When the National Assembly (House of Representative and Senate) [Supreme Court] obstructs the work of our government, our presidents should govern without the National Assembly [Supreme Court]. How much do you agree or disagree?”
Responses are coded on a 7-point scale. I analyze attitudes about the legislature and court separately; the results are consistent with those below if they are merged. For these questions, high values represent opposition to closing/bypassing other government branches. The principal-agent model implies that support for checks and balances should be higher among election losers and those who are dissatisfied with the state of the country.
Baseline: Modeling Support for the Democratic Status Quo
I expect that the correlates of attitudes about vertical and horizontal accountability will differ from those of standard democratic attitude questions. To check this intuition, I model support for two common measures of diffuse democratic support. In the first, respondents consider whether democracy is the best system of government. 7 High values represent support for democracy.
A second measure is opposition to a military coup. Specifically, respondents were asked about three separate scenarios where a coup could be justified if regime performance was bad (high unemployment, when crime is common, and when there is a lot of corruption) and were asked whether a military takeover would be justified or not. Although levels of opposition to coups differ across the three scenarios, individuals who reject coups in one scenario are likely to reject coups in other scenarios as well (Cronbach’s α = .78) so I create an additive scale where high values represent a rejection of coups. Extant theories suggest these two variables should have higher levels of support among election winners and those who think the country is doing well.
Independent Variables
Our main theoretical interest is in two sets of independent variables: perceived representation in the executive and evaluations of economic and governance outcomes. I conceptualize representation with the most commonly used measure (e.g., Anderson et al., 2005): voting for the incumbent. Respondents were asked, “For which candidate did you vote for President in the last presidential elections?” In two-round elections, voters were asked about the first round. From this closed-ended question, I generate a dummy variable for those who voted for the incumbent and a dummy variable for abstaining or casting a blank vote, 8 making the baseline supporting a losing candidate. 9 Individuals who do not remember their vote are excluded. In Online Appendix 8, I show other measures of feeling represented by the incumbent, such as self-identifying with his party, being close to him in the left-right space, or approving of him or his policies, have the same effect.
I measure government performance on three dimensions: economic performance, crime, and corruption, three issue Latin Americans consistently rank as the most pressing problems facing their countries. The extant literature argues democratic attitudes tend to reflect good governance more than economic performance (Bratton et al., 2005; Evans & Whitefield, 1995). Yet, in Latin American elections, the impact of corruption or crime is mitigated when the economy is good (e.g., Carlin, Love, & Martinez-Gallardo, 2015; Zechmeister & Zizumbo-Colunga, 2013), suggesting that in this region citizens value economic successes more than good governance. Thus, we might expect the economy to have the most consistent impact in this sample.
To measure perceived performance, I look at both how respondents perceive general trends and their personal experiences. We might expect that evaluations of general trends to have the more consistent effect because society-wide outcomes can have system-level causes while personal experiences might have idiosyncratic causes, a common finding in the performance voting literature (e.g., Carlin, Singer, & Zechmeister, 2015). Yet perceptions of general performance levels might be endogenous to respondent partisanship (e.g., Kramer, 1983) while egotropic perceptions reflect respondents’ tangible experiences and might be more exogenous to their political attitudes. Thus, I control first for sociotropic evaluations and then egotropic ones to try to tease out the endogeneity, separating them because we expect sociotropic evaluations to reflect, at least in part, respondents’ personal experiences. 10
For economic performance, citizens where asked how the national economy and their personal finances have changed in the past year. The specific question wording for the control variables is in Online Appendix 1, but the sociotropic and egotropic economic indicators are coded such that high values represent a positive view of the economy. To measure crime, I first look at whether respondents feel safe in their neighborhood, with high values representing good security outcomes. Then I also measure whether respondents avoided being a crime victim in the last year. Avoiding crime is the high value. Finally, corruption is measured by looking at the perceived frequency of corruption in a country, with high values representing good governance while personal experiences with corruption are measured by a dummy variable that designates whether the respondent was not asked for a bribe by a government official in the last year. I expect that all of these variables should be positively associated with support for the democratic status quo and negatively associated with support for vertical or horizontal accountability.
As I focus on the effect of representation and perceived performance on attitudes toward the democratic system, I control for demographic factors that should shape commitment to democratic principles. The most important of these is education, which should lead to greater demand for the personal free-speech rights that undergird democracy as well as tolerance for others exercising those rights. Respondents report the number of years of education they completed, which starts at 0 (4% of respondents) and is capped at 18. I measure the respondent’s wealth by looking at household ownership of a series of goods 11 and then conducting a factor analysis to identify which goods distinguish the most well-off households from other households while incorporating differences in the kinds of wealth that are possible in urban and rural areas. 12 From this factor analysis respondents are divided into quintiles of wealth within their country. I control for the respondent’s gender with a dummy variable for being female. For age I include five dummies for age cohorts (26-35, 36-45, 46-55, 56-65, 66+), using 25 or younger as a baseline. For ethnicity, the question available on all survey waves asks, “Do you consider yourself White, Mestizo, Indigenous, Black, Mulatto, or of another race?” with the added category in Venezuela of “moreno.” I create dummy variables that differentiate respondents from “White.” Finally, I include a variable for living in a rural area based on each country’s census definitions. I omit from the tables the age, ethnicity, and urban–rural controls about which we have inconsistent expectations and also the constants/cut points to conserve space-the full models are in Online Appendix 3.
In crafting these models, I have tried to keep them (relatively) parsimonious, excluding variables like political knowledge and political participation that may reflect democratic attitudes rather than causing them. I follow Booth and Seligson (2009), however, and control for whether individuals believe other people can be trusted 13 as a measure of interpersonal trust that is a component of social capital but whose association with democratic attitudes is debated (see Cleary & Stokes, 2009). Online Appendix 4 has models without this variable or the demographics variables as robustness tests; the results are consistent with those presented here.
Finally, I add country dummy variables that capture omitted factors that make some countries have deeper levels of commitment to democratic principles than others do that are not reflected in individual-level variables. These dummy variables make the regression analyses within-case analyses while also controlling for clustering at the country-level in the standard errors. There is additional clustering within countries at the level of country years, so I use robust standard errors that adjust for that clustering. In Online Appendix 2, I use hierarchical models that nest individuals inside countries and years; the conclusions are consistent across specifications.
Results
I hypothesized that while education and social trust will be correlated with all forms of pro-democratic attitudes, supporters of election winners and those who perceived good government performance would be more likely to say they like democracy and to oppose coups (Table 1) but be less likely to express support for vertical accountability (protecting free speech and civil liberties or preserving opposition party rights; Table 2) or horizontal accountability (Table 3).
Support for the Democratic Status Quo.
Country dummies, demographics, and constants/cut points in Online Appendix 3. Robust standard errors in parentheses account for the complex clustering of the AmericasBarometer design.
p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Protection of Civil Liberties.
Country dummies, demographics, and constants/cut points in Online Appendix 3. Robust standard errors in parentheses account for the complex clustering of the AmericasBarometer design.
p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Support for Checks and Balances.
Country dummies, demographics, and constants/cut points in Online Appendix 3. Robust standard errors in parentheses account for the complex clustering of the AmericasBarometer design.
p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
The data in Tables 1 to 3 confirm that the main demographic correlates of support for vertical and horizontal accountability are comparable with those of the more commonly studied measures of support for the democratic status quo. As expected, individuals with higher levels of education express higher levels of support for nearly all democratic values, with education positively correlated with a belief in democracy as the best system (Models 1-2) and opposition to coups (Models 3-4), with support for civil rights (Models 5-6), free-speech rights (Models 7-8), opposition party rights (Models 9-10), and opposition to bypassing the legislature or courts. Trust in other people is positively correlated with almost all the democratic norms in Tables 1 to 3, with the exception being the measures of protecting free speech in Models 7 and 8. Looking at the other controls in these tables and in Online Appendix 3, levels of diffuse support for democracy tend to be higher for the wealthy and for men while the effects of age, location, and ethnicity vary across dependent variables. Democratic values in Latin America are rooted in education, in socioeconomic status, and in a strong community.
Yet, the correlations between political loyalties and diffuse democratic support strongly diverge across Tables 1 to 3. In Table 1, we see that election winners are more likely to accept democracy as the best system (Models 1-2) and also to reject a military coup (Models 3-4). This is consistent with the evidence compiled from other regions where election winners supporting the democratic status quo more than losers do.
Yet, winners evaluate vertical accountability in Table 2 differently than they do the democratic status quo. Winners are less likely to support civil liberties (Models 5-6) or free speech (Models 7-8) than losers are. Winners are also less likely to oppose steps that would formally limit the voice and vote of opposition parties (Models 9-10). Instead, it is the losers who are more likely to stand up for the rights of speech, association, and contestation that make vertical accountability possible. To put these effects in perspective, we can compare the effects of winning an election with the effect of education (Table 4). 14 The difference between election winners and election losers in their support for vertical accountability in Table 2 is equivalent to the predicted effect of a drop of between 4 and 7.5 years of schooling, a substantial drop.
Predicted Marginal Effects of Short-Term Considerations Compared with the Predicted Marginal Effect of Education.
Estimates the average marginal effect within the sample on the probability of giving the highest level of agreement with the democratic attitude. b. Estimates the average marginal effect for the sample. c. This row contains the average effect from the two models of each dependent variable.
Election winners are also more likely to oppose horizontal accountability (Table 3). Election winners think that the president should be able to bypass the legislature and courts when necessary (Models 15-18) and are less likely to oppose autogolpes (Models 11-14). The effect of political loyalties on attitudes about horizontal accountability is quite large; the difference between winners and losers on bypassing institutions is equivalent to a drop of 9 years or more in schooling. 15 Taken together, the results in Tables 2 and 3 show that the president’s supporters are willing to weaken vertical and horizontal checks on their preferred candidate, delegating him or her the freedom to enact their preferred agenda.
Although we see that election winners are more likely to delegate power to the executive to restrict vertical and horizontal accountability, the delegation model also suggests that presidents should be more likely to receive this power when they are perceived to be performing well. This implies that performance variables should have a positive association with the democratic status quo in Table 1 and then negative associations with attitudes about vertical and horizontal accountability in Tables 2 and 3 and, as an additional robustness check for endogeneity, in the models using aggregate perceptions in Online Appendix 5. With the exception of the questions about closing the legislature/courts (discussed more below), the results are largely consistent with the delegation model.
Starting with economics, positive views of the economy are positively associated with a belief that democracy is the best system and an opposition to coups in Table 1. Yet, individuals who say that the economy is strong or that their finances are improving are significantly less likely to hold pro-democracy attitudes with regard to tolerating civil liberties, protecting free speech or advocating for opposition rights in Table 2 and are less willing to oppose presidential actions that bypass the legislature/courts in Table 3. This is true if the economy is measured sociotropically, egotropically, or (in Online Appendix 5) by using the subnational regional average perceptions of those measures, suggesting this outcome is not a result of endogenous sociotropic perceptions. 16 The effect of a 1-point change in these measures is smaller than is the difference between winners and losers in Table 4, ranging between 4 years of schooling down to 1.5 years. Yet, these results suggest that positive views of the economy are associated with lower support for vertical and horizontal accountability.
We also see in Table 1 that low levels of perceived corruption or personal avoidance of being asked for a bribe are associated with higher support for democracy generally. Yet, individuals who perceive that corruption is rare (Tables 2 and 3) or who live in areas where corruption is perceived to be rare (Table A15 ) are less likely to object if the government then limits the civil rights of critical groups, regulates the media, or suppresses opposition party voices or bypasses other institutions. 17 The significant regional effects in Online Appendix 5 suggest the results do not entirely reflect endogenous corruption perceptions. This effect is large: a 1-point increase in corruption perceptions decreases support for vertical accountability the same as withdrawing from school 1.5 to 3 years earlier. Although personal experiences with avoiding corruption do not have a consistent association with these attitudes and, when that association is significant, is often a slight positive association with support for vertical and horizontal accountability, people who perceive good governance are willing to allow the president to limit vertical or horizontal checks on his authority.
The effects of crime are slightly less consistent with the delegation model than was economy or crime. In Table 1, low fear of crime and avoiding crime victimization are associated with higher support for the democratic status quo. In Table 2, in contrast, levels of fear are not associated with democratic stability but it is crime victims who say they would stand up for opposition rights and free speech, and the aggregate models in Online Appendix 5 show that living in low crime areas makes people more willing to let the president limit opposition parties’ voice. Crime avoiders have drops in support for vertical accountability that are equivalent to a decrease of between 2 and 3 years of school (Table 4). Crime victims are also slightly less likely to support the executive taking steps to bypass other institutions (Models 15-18), although this pattern does not hold in the aggregate level (Online Appendix 5).
Although most of the performance variables in Tables 2 and 3 have effects broadly consistent with the argument that good performance empowers delegation, attitudes about autogolpes follow a different pattern. Individual-level views of the economy have no association with this question and individuals who perceive that corruption is common or who fear crime/have been victims are more likely to support the incumbent shutting down these other democratic branches. Thus while respondents are willing to delegate the president authority to bypass these institutions when times are good, they do not support the entire elimination of the democratic status quo. This rare, drastic step is more likely to be supported in times of crisis, although the president’s supporters will support it more than other groups.
But with the exception of autogolpes, the results in Tables 2 and 3 suggest that attitudes toward vertical and horizontal accountability reflect respondent’s short-term evaluations of the incumbent and his performance. Although educated and connected citizens recognize vertical and horizontal accountability as core democratic values, those who support the incumbent or who believe that things are going well oppose coups but might be willing to delegate the president authority to weaken vertical accountability and horizontal accountability. Although delegating the president this authority is risky, these citizens should perceive fewer risks in these actions because they believe that empowering the president will bring good ideological and policy outcomes. Many respondents are willing to trade off democracy for power arrangements that best support their short-term interests.
Contextual Effects on Delegation
The results in Tables 1 to 3 systematically differ from each other in a way that is generally consistent with a delegation model of democratic support. Yet, citizen willingness to consider delegating authority to the incumbent should vary by context. I expect the winner–loser gap should increase with the stakes while the importance of performance and perceived representation should increase over time as respondents have more data on which to base their evaluation of the incumbent.
I test the first intuition by interacting the winner and abstention variables with two measures of the stakes. The first is the level of democracy. When democracy is strong, winners might not consider it a viable option to consolidate authority while losers might not credibly believe that winners can fully undermine democracy and thus not feel the need to actively oppose it. Yet, when democracy is weak, winners might see this as a possibility and be supportive of it while losers may be more on their guard. Thus the winner–loser gap should be smaller in the more established democracies. The V-Dem polyarchy indicator 18 measures the freedom of elections, with high values representing stronger democracy, and expect the winner–loser gap will decrease as this measure increases. The second contextual measure is the degree of ideological polarization, as high levels disagreement should raise the stakes as election winners and losers seek to make/block policy initiatives. Under these conditions, losers should be more likely to advocate for expanded vertical and horizontal accountability while winners should be most keen to restrict their opponents to achieve their policy outcomes. To test this hypothesis, I use Singer’s (2016) measure of elite polarization, coded from University of Salamanca’s elite surveys and where high values represent greater levels of disagreement. This measure excludes Venezuela because it is not included in the Salamanca surveys in this time period. 19 I model these interactions separately due to limited country degrees of freedom.
To explore the role of time, I measure the months the president was in office when the survey occurred. I natural log this variable because when voters have had time to observe the president in office, each additional month provides less new information. I interact it with the performance indicators, expecting the negative effects to deepen over time. I also interact the winner/abstained variables with it because even those who voted for the president might want to see him govern before delegating authority.
The full results of the multilevel models with the interaction terms are in Online Appendix 7. I exclude the autogolpe questions from the analyses because the performance variables were less consistent with the delegation model, although the results in Online Appendix 7 show that the winner–loser gap on closing branches of government increase over the president’s rule. Figures 1 and 2 graph the estimated coefficients for the variables of interest across contexts along with their estimated confidence interval for interaction terms that are statistically significant (p < .05).
The winner–loser gap across contexts.
Performance or winner–loser status over time.
The gap between losers and winners grows with the political stakes. The gap between winners and losers is smaller in the strongest democracies for all five dependent variables. In fact, in the strongest democracies there is no difference between winners and losers in their willingness to support civil liberties and opposition rights. In Online Appendix 6, I extend this analysis by focusing on the cases where leaders have most strongly curtailed vertical accountability and we see that the gap between winners and losers is particularly high in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Although this gap does not necessarily explain why these four countries have seen democratic protections weaken, they do suggest that winners in these contexts are supportive of the changes that have occurred.
Figure 1 also shows that the gap between winners and losers is smaller in countries where the parties are relatively not polarized ideologically and then increases with polarization. As parties become divided, the suppression/protection of vertical and horizontal accountability becomes more combative. Taken together, the data in Figure 1 show as the stakes become higher, winners and losers increasingly divide over the importance of horizontal and vertical accountability tin a way that is consistent with the delegation model.
The support for the hypothesis that performance’s impact deepens over time is mixed because there is no significant interaction between the time that the president has been in office with any of the crime measures or the corruption victimization measure although several of these variables did not have an effect in an average country. But for economic factors, there is a consistent pattern whereby economic performance has a weak correlation with citizen attitudes about supporting vertical or horizontal accountability at the start of the president’s term but the marginal effect of good performance becomes increasingly negative as the president’s record accumulates. 20 A similar pattern emerges for corruption perceptions, although in one of the five models there is no significant interaction term. Finally, the winner–loser gap also increases as the president has been in office for longer and his supporters/detractors have had time to see if his or her policies have been put into action. For the majority of the interaction terms, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that supporting/opposing delegation becomes less risky after having time to observe the executive in office and to more easily attribute policy outcomes to that executive and not his or her predecessor.
Taken together, the results in Figures 1 and 2 provide additional evidence that support for horizontal and vertical accountability is viewed through the prism of delegation, with citizens considering the risks as the stakes vary and the quality of the evidence on which they judge their agent. Citizens weighing the weakening of electoral checks or allowing the executive to bypass the other government branches need to weigh the potential gains/costs and need time to be fully convinced that they are delegating to a high-quality agent.
Conclusion
Sartori (1991) observes that “Democracies are difficult, they need to be nurtured and believed in” (p. 118). Short-term performance is supposed to build democratic support, as good governance and representation generate support for the existing democratic institutions. Threats to the democratic ideal come from economic recessions or electoral processes that lead election losers to attempt to overthrow the system. This essay, suggests that democracy may be even more “difficult” than previously thought. Although weak performance may undermine support for the current democratic institutions, positive outcomes may embolden would-be dictators to attempt to consolidate their authority vis-à-vis political opponents. As they look to empower their elected agents, election winners oppose changes to the status quo that displace elected officials but are willing to support changes to the status quo that delegate increased power to their faction by disempowering the opposition or by silencing criticism. Moreover, when the economy or governance is good, citizens oppose coups but may become willing to endow government actors’ greater authority and influence to enact their agenda, even at the expense of existing institutions and rights. Leaders who have not delivered, in contrast, will not receive support for these actions beyond their core base.
Support for electoral authoritarianism is thus at least in part a process of delegation to a representative who has convinced citizens of his or her competence. People are willing to make exceptions to principles of tolerance and restraint if they believe the government will use those powers to deliver additional policies the citizen prefers. Previous work that warns of the dangers of election losers and bad performance for democratic attitudes should be turned on its head and focus on the danger of winners with a strong performance mandate if the threat is electoral authoritarianism. Winners and losers must both consent to the democratic system as both can undermine it, although in different ways.
These dynamics imply that strong performance can open opportunities for governing parties to propose modifications to the existing power structure, and some emerging work on aggregate democratization outcomes are consistent with this logic. Parties are more likely to amend electoral rules to make it harder for small parties to win seats when the economy is good (Remmer, 2008). Popular leaders can amend the constitution to consolidate control over their party and to strengthen their powers while unpopular leaders who attempt this step risk outrage (or even removal as in Honduras; Corrales, 2016; Negretto, 2014). Elections following economic growth are more likely to see electoral manipulation by the incumbent, because under those conditions they are more likely to get away with it (Birch, 2011). Finally, a growing economy in countries where institutional checks on the executive are weak makes it particularly like that the incumbent translates that strong support into an institutional reform that disempower the opposition (Pérez-Liñán & Altman, 2017).
Thus democracy requires winners be willing to exercise forbearance and self-restraint. The question is also when do these consolidating demands emerge and how can they be prevented-most elected leaders do not try to restrict the political opposition, close an unfriendly media, or bypass political institutions. One possible answer is strong institutions; electoral autocracies have tended to emerge in countries like Venezuela, Russia, and Turkey where institutions are already weak, allowing popular leaders to consolidate their rule. In strong democracies, the winner–loser gap on horizontal and vertical accountability does in fact shrink (Figure 1). Yet, even in strong democracies government officials may attempt to discredit media actors and manipulate the political process, and tolerance for ideological opponents’ rights to speak is not universally supported in the United States or other established democracies (e.g., Peffley & Rohrschneider, 2003). 21 The threat of losing office in the future may motivate some winners from attempting to manipulate institutions (Geddes, 1994), but aspiring electoral autocrats may sufficiently consolidate their power over electoral practices to sufficiently remove the threat of defeat. Maintaining democratic institutions may be best enhanced by distrusting citizens who question their representatives (Cleary & Stokes, 2009), or by the vigilant activism of elections’ and society’s losers. Or it may depend upon winners having a deeper commitment to democratic norms of tolerance and competition than they do to their short-term partisan advantage (Mainwaring & Pérez-Liñan, 2015). Finally, restraint may be more likely when politics are less polarized, lowering the stakes of making concessions to opponents. But the data in this article remind us that aspiring electoral autocrats may find ready pockets of public support for attempts to bend the system to their personal advantage.
Supplemental Material
Final_Supplemental_Appendix – Supplemental material for Delegating Away Democracy: How Good Representation and Policy Successes Can Undermine Democratic Legitimacy
Supplemental material, Final_Supplemental_Appendix for Delegating Away Democracy: How Good Representation and Policy Successes Can Undermine Democratic Legitimacy by Matthew Singer in Comparative Political Studies
Supplemental Material
Singer_replication – Supplemental material for Delegating Away Democracy: How Good Representation and Policy Successes Can Undermine Democratic Legitimacy
Supplemental material, Singer_replication for Delegating Away Democracy: How Good Representation and Policy Successes Can Undermine Democratic Legitimacy by Matthew Singer in Comparative Political Studies
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for feedback from the reviews and editors, from Ryan Carlin, Carole Wilson, Liz Zechmeister, Padmini Coopamah, Ceci Martínez-Gallardo, Tom Mustillo, Peter Kingstone, and James McCann as well as from attendees at seminars at University of Connecticut, Brigham Young University, Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute, Purdue University, and Harvard’s Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. A previous version of the article was published by the Kellogg Institute’s Working Paper series (No. 420). The author thanks the Latin American Public Opinion Project for making the data available.
Author’s Note
Replication materials and supplemental analyses are available on the journal’s and author’s webpages. All mistakes are the responsibility of the author and all views expressed here are his own.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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