Presidents without Roots: Understanding the Peruvian Paradox

Seventeen Years of the Peruvian Paradox

Since returning to democracy in 2001, Peru has been home to Latin America’s most unpopular politicians. Aggregate measures of public opinion from Latinobarómetro surveys between 2001 and 2017 show an average presidential approval rating of 26.7 percent and similar low levels of trust in Congress (16.5 percent), the courts (16.7 percent), and political parties (13.6 percent). The corresponding averages for the rest of Latin America are 47.8, 27.2, 29.2, and 19.2 percent, respectively, and Peru ranks last in the region on all four indicators. Low public approval has been a feature of all four democratic presidential administrations. Toledo’s approval rating bottomed out at 8 percent (IPSOS, 2006), García’s at 19 percent (IPSOS, 2008 and 2011), and Humala’s at 13 percent (IPSOS, 2016). When Kuczynski resigned the presidency, his rating had fallen as low as 18 percent (IPSOS, 2018). Once out of office, presidents become no more popular; attempting to return to the presidency in 2016, ¹ García took less than 6 percent and Toledo just 1 percent. Legislators fare little better; more than 70 percent of the members of Congress in 2011 were serving in the chamber for the first time (Mainwaring, 2018). Political parties hold little mass appeal. Only Brazil averaged a lower proportion of the public that feels close to a political party.

The public’s attitudes toward politicians are puzzling because of Peru’s strong institutional and economic performance. After President Fujimori dismantled Peru’s democratic institutions in the 1990s, Peru’s contemporary political leaders restored and respected them. The judiciary, the legislature, and other traditional institutions of constitutional liberalism are strong and independent. While presidents retain preeminent formal powers as in other Latin American democracies, they have accepted constraints on their authority from Congress, the Constitutional Tribunal, and even supranational bodies like the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Vergara and Watanabe, 2016). Congress was especially active under President Kuczynski. With opposition forces in charge, the legislature blocked executive initiatives, censured ministers, and attempted to remove the president from office. Obstruction was so extensive that Kuzcynski implored Congress to “let us work, don’t create intrigue, and don’t sack ministers every two weeks” (RPP Noticias, 2017a). Peru does not lack meaningful checks and balances on the exercise of power. Furthermore, in contrast to the uneven playing field that existed under Fujimori, observers such as the European Union and the Carter Center have declared elections since 2001 to be free and fair. Open competition for access to power is perhaps the essential feature of democracy (Mazzuca, 2010). In institutional terms, Peru is clearly a democracy. Not only did Peru’s democratic leaders navigate “the extraordinary uncertainty of the transition” (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 3) but they have preserved democracy for over 17 years, the longest democratic period in Peru’s history.

Democracy has coincided with an economic boom. Between 2001 and 2016, data from the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) show that the real gross domestic product (GDP) more than doubled, increasing from US$86 billion to US$193 billion at 2010 prices. GDP per capita doubled, from just over US$3,000 to US$6,000, during the same period, averaging 4.2 percent growth per year (ECLAC, 2017). The only Latin American country to grow faster during this period was Panama. According to the Central Bank of Peru (BCRP, 2017), inflation averaged 3 percent per year between the beginning of 2001 and the end of 2017. Social indicators collected by ECLAC also improved. The poverty rate fell from 54.7 percent in 2001 to 22.7 percent in 2014 and extreme poverty from 24 percent to 4.3 percent. Economic inequality decreased, with the Gini index declining 16 percent, from 0.525 to 0.439, during the same period. Health indicators improved markedly. Between 2001 and 2016, infant mortality fell from over 27 deaths per 1,000 live births to fewer than 12. Peru now has the fifth-lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America, having improved six places since 2001. Life expectancy at birth has risen by more than three years over the past decade and a half.

A booming economy strengthened Peru’s state. Social programs received new infusions of resources. For example, the Peruvian conditional cash transfer program Juntos (Together) expanded from a few thousand beneficiaries in 2005 to three-quarters of a million a decade later (Figure 1). According to ECLAC (2017), spending on social programs doubled, from US$282 per person in 2001 to US$599 in 2015. The increase was particularly notable for spending on health (from US$51 per person to US$129) and education (US$92 to $204). While spending remains low relative to Latin America as a whole, it is comparable to levels in neighboring Bolivia and Ecuador, where leftist governments are widely seen as having increased social programs. The scope of Peru’s state also increased. One example is the expansion of the country’s paved road network, which grew from 8,500 kilometers in 2000 to almost 20,000 kilometers in 2016 (Figure 2). Another indicator is the size of the Peruvian police force. The number of police increased from approximately 90,000 in 2003 (UNODC, 2007) to almost 125,000 in 2016 (RPP Notícias, 2017b). While the state’s performance is lacking in many areas, it has clearly improved during Peru’s democratic era.

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Figure 1.

Expansion of households in Juntos program, 2005–2014 (Sánchez and Rodríguez, 2016).

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Figure 2.

Peruvian national highway system, 1990–2016 (Ministerio de Transportes y Comunicaciones, 2018).

In summary, Peru’s politicians are exceptionally unpopular, but their popularity does not reflect poor performance. In the words of Cynthia McClintock (2006: 96), the post-Fujimori era has been “the first time in its history [when] Peru simultaneously enjoyed economic growth, political peace, and one-person-one-vote democracy.” Few Peruvians, however, approved of their performance. We argue that performance has failed to generate popularity because of a lack of vertical accountability. Political leaders have not been accountable to the public for programs that they offer to voters, running on promises to reform the status quo but protecting it once in office. Each of Peru’s four most recent presidents has followed this pattern. The unresponsiveness of Peruvian politicians to the public’s desires undermines citizens’ trust in their leaders.

The Fujimorato

For scholars working on a range of issues in Peruvian politics, the early 1990s constituted a “critical juncture” (Roberts, 2014). The forces driving change across the entire region during this period were particularly intense in Peru, where they had produced a full-blown crisis by the late 1980s (Vergara and Encinas, 2018). The Peruvian economy was in shambles. Industrial output collapsed, particularly in important sectors like manufacturing and construction (BCRP, 1995). Incomes fell by 50 percent between 1985 and 1990 (BCRP, 1990), and per capita GDP fell to levels not seen since the 1960s. Much of the middle class slid into poverty. Inflation spiraled out of control, peaking at 7,640 percent in 1990. At the same time, brutal armed conflict between the Peruvian state and the Shining Path insurgency engulfed much of the country, leaving around 69,000 Peruvians dead and at least half a million displaced (CVR, 2003). Peru’s political leaders during the 1980s failed to address these crises, becoming consumed in their own internal machinations while growing distant from the sectors of society that they claimed to represent (Tanaka, 1998). The combined failures of the economy, the state, and the political leadership led to the election of the outsider Fujimori to the presidency in 1990 and two years later to Fujimori’s self-coup, which shuttered Congress and suspended the constitution. From his dominant position in the political system, he proceeded to undermine both horizontal and vertical accountability in his project to build a competitive authoritarian regime (Levitsky and Way, 2010).

A large literature has documented how Fujimori sought to limit horizontal accountability (Conaghan, 2005; Levitsky and Loxton, 2012). As did executives in delegative democracies, Fujimori saw agents of horizontal accountability as “nuisances to the president’s will” (O’Donnell, 1994: 60). He reportedly “couldn’t stand the idea of inviting the President of the Senate to lunch in the Presidential Palace every time he wanted to pass a law” (McClintock, 1996: 65). Although international pressure prevented him from permanently closing down Congress and the courts, he reconstituted these bodies on his terms. His control over nominations to the judiciary and regulatory agencies allowed him to pack them with loyalists, while his coattails in the 1995 general elections ensured that his supporters controlled a majority of seats in Congress. During his second term (1995–2000) he governed largely by decree, and Congress failed to monitor the executive, debate laws, or produce any relevant legislation (Degregori and Meléndez, 2007). Far from constraining the president, Congress and the courts helped him to break the law. Most infamously, Congress passed an unconstitutional “Law of Authentic Interpretation” to exempt the president from term limits so that he could run for a third term in 2000. The courts accepted these dubious laws. With the judiciary and the legislature under his control, Fujimori faced almost no horizontal accountability after 1992.

At the same time, he undermined vertical accountability in three ways. First, he actively attacked its institutional foundation: free and fair elections. Through his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, he bought off or bullied much of the Peruvian press. Montesinos’s connections with Peru’s intelligence agencies and military allowed him to employ these services in the president’s reelection campaigns (Levitsky and Loxton, 2012: 174–177). Meanwhile, he turned the “Ministry of the Presidency” into a massive clientelistic machine that controlled 20 percent of the national budget and targeted spending on social programs to boost support for the president before elections (Graham and Kane, 1998; Schady, 2000). The president’s personal control over the oversight agencies responsible for monitoring his behavior further tilted the playing field. Opposition candidates had no channels to protest the blatant abuse of state power. Nor was the president subject to the law. When the opposition appealed to the judicial and electoral authorities to block Fujimori from running for a third term in 2000, the government moved to pack more supporters into these bodies, ensuring a favorable outcome. Electoral competition under Fujimori was too unfair to be democratic.

Fujimori also attacked the organizational bases of vertical accountability. Active, organized, and continual public participation in politics beyond simply casting votes is critical to making democratically elected leaders responsive to society’s demands (Campbell, 2004; Putnam, 1993; Skocpol, 2004). By aggregating the efforts, resources, and expertise of many individuals, organized actors such as political parties, unions, neighborhood associations, and fraternal societies can exert greater political influence than those same individuals acting alone. Their greater capacity allows interest groups to monitor politicians between elections, informally sanction those who fail to meet their demands, and thereby link state and society. Organized civil society suffered during Fujimori’s presidency. Fujimori pushed Peru’s already weak parties into collapse. Coming after continual rhetorical attacks from the president (Levitsky and Loxton, 2012: 170), the 1992 self-coup left Peru’s parties out of office, publicly humiliated, and, in some cases, with their leadership in exile. Having neglected to build an organization of his own, Fujimori also had a strong demonstration effect—the recognition that parties were unnecessary for electoral success—and this led politicians to abandon them (Levitsky and Cameron, 2003). Consequently, the parties that had won more than 90 percent of the votes in the 1985 general elections captured less than 5 percent 10 years later. At the same time, both the state and the Shining Path actively directed violence at civil society, which struggled to survive. The continuing context of crisis and their respective weakening led parties and civil society to move apart (Cameron, 1994; Grompone, 1991), further reducing their ability to hold political leaders accountable. In these ways, the vehicles of representation almost vanished during the years of the internal conflict. To quote Hobbes’s description of a world without social contracts, civil society became a “disbanded multitude,” unable to exert influence in politics.

Finally, Fujimori’s economic policy reshaped society, the state, and policy making in ways that limited vertical accountability. Soon after taking office he implemented a drastic neoliberal shock program that undermined the legal basis for important collective actors such as unions and peasant cooperatives. It also shrank the state’s scope and responsibilities, thereby reducing the incentives for interest groups to organize for making claims on the state. The way these reforms were implemented affected vertical accountability as much as their substance. Acting like the president of a delegative democracy, Fujimori aligned himself with apolitical technocrats. In exchange for insulation from political influence and control over economic policy making, these technocrats provided Fujimori the political program that he lacked and the expertise to implement it. Together, Fujimori and his experts became the “alpha and omega of power” (O’Donnell, 1994: 60), particularly after the self-coup undermined the influence of other actors and the success of the shock program gave this team public legitimacy (Dargent, 2015). Just as Fujimori sought to consolidate his hold on the presidency, technocrats embedded themselves in the state. They gained control of crucial institutions such as the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, the Central Bank, and the national tax authority. From these positions, they restructured the economy along neoliberal lines with little input from society. Their specialized knowledge, combined with the success of their policies at taming inflation and restarting economic growth, gave them power. How could Fujimori or any other politician remove them from their posts if doing so might plunge the economy back into crisis? Safe from the threat of termination, technocrats would gain the upper hand against politicians once Peru returned to democracy.

Peruvians may have elected Fujimori democratically, but they did not have democratic channels to hold him accountable or remove him from office. The same crisis conditions that brought Fujimori to power allowed him to transform Peru’s politics, economy, and society on terms that favored his continued rule. Horizontal accountability died at the hands of an isolated but popular caudillo who saw any restriction on his power or organized opposition as a nuisance. In Fujimori’s view, the president’s immediate will overrode campaign promises, institutions, and opponents. The agents and institutions of vertical accountability also stopped being “really important decisional points in the flow of influence, power, and policy” (O’Donnell, 1994: 67). Elections served little more purpose than to legitimize a president to whom society had, intentionally or not, delegated decision making. The more Fujimori succeeded at resolving Peru’s crises, the more the society delegated; the more it delegated, the more it weakened; the more it weakened, the more difficult it became to restore the representative link whose absence had contributed to the crises in the first place. As Mainwaring (2006) noted, a caudillo, even if extremely popular, is a symptom of rather than a solution to problems of representation. The combination of such an anti-institutionalist caudillo and deep neoliberal reforms left an indelible mark on Peruvian politics (Roberts, 2014). Put another way, the crisis of representation Peru faced in the early 1990s was not merely self-reinforcing but self-intensifying.

Peru After Fujimori: Facing Weak Vertical Accountability

Fujimori’s government collapsed in late 2000 because of escalating public protests and a widening bribery scandal that made its corrupt, authoritarian nature impossible to ignore. Although subsequent governments, particularly the transitional administration of Valentín Paniagua, restored Peru’s democratic institutions, meaningful vertical accountability has not reemerged. We argue that it is the continuing weakness of vertical accountability that drives Peruvians’ deep dissatisfaction with politics. Peru’s democratic machinery has consistently failed to achieve one of its main goals: linking the public to the exercise of power. Without organizations with the interest and capacity to participate in politics, such representation is impossible. The premise that democratic decision making is done on “people’s terms” (Pettit, 2012) remains a chimera.

In the following pages, we trace the weakness of vertical accountability across the four elected governments of the post-Fujimori era. The crucial piece of evidence here is that while presidents have won office by promising to pursue reform, they have subsequently embraced the status quo. Presidents have not been held accountable for implementing their campaign promises. In some cases, presidents had promised economic changes (Garcia and Humala), in others the defense of institutions and democracy and the battle against corruption (Kuczynski), but they all broke these promises. Having shown the weakness of vertical accountability, we trace two legacies of Fujimori’s regime that have inhibited the development of responsive government. The first is continued control by technocrats of important areas of policy making regardless of who occupies the presidential palace. The second is the persistent weakness of civil society, particularly political parties. The absence of strong political parties supporting and at times pushing presidents to pursue policy change combined with the opposition of entrenched technocrats to reforming the status quo creates incentives for presidents not to pursue their campaign agendas. The logical course of action for them is to break their promises and delegate authority to technocrats. These legacies of the Fujimori era sever the representative link between state and society that democratic politicians ideally provide and thereby generate the high levels of dissatisfaction with politicians that Peruvians have expressed over the past decade and a half.

Summary

After Fujimori’s regime collapsed in 2000, Peru restored the basic institutions of a well-functioning democracy but not the representative link between policy making and public preferences. Presidents without roots have seen little risk in betraying their campaign priorities. Politicians’ lack of accountability for the programs that they offer to voters undermines their popular support. Voters like neither liars nor passive leaders. Given that Peru’s presidents have often been both, Peruvians unsurprisingly hold them in low esteem. Further evidence for the link between weak accountability and low popularity comes from the trajectories of each president’s approval rating. Approval ratings over time for the three presidents who completed their terms follow similar patterns in which presidents enter office with favorable ratings that decline over the first half of their terms (Figure 3). The public remains disappointed in its leaders for failing to follow through on their campaign promises or respond to the desire for change that voters have expressed.

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Figure 3.

Presidential approval ratings, 2001–2016 (authors’ calculations based on IPSOS (2006; 2008; 2011; 2016).

The preceding section also suggests some causes of Peru’s weak vertical accountability. One is the weakness of Peruvian parties. Except perhaps for APRA and Fujimorismo, Peruvian parties are empty labels that do not command disciplined or much presence outside Lima. As Levitsky and Zavaleta (2016) have argued, Peru’s politicians have learned to play politics without political parties. The absence of strong parties and politicians’ adaptation to these circumstances reduces vertical accountability in several ways. First, politicians without parties are isolated from society. Parties provide citizens and interest groups an everyday presence in politics. The constant pressure from below that they produce incentivizes politicians to take on politically risky battles to implement new policies. Without such pressure, Peru’s politicians have little reason to challenge entrenched technocrats, the business sector, and the media by championing reform of the neoliberal model. Instead, they leave the country “on auto-pilot,” a phrase Peruvians often use to describe their governments. Thus elections and fresh faces in power bring nothing more than “alternation without alternatives” (Vergara, 2012). Second, the absence of parties leaves politicians ill-equipped to govern. Without parties, politicians often win election as political novices who lack the critical knowledge and skills of governing that previous experience in office provides. Furthermore, Peruvian politicians lack the technical support, dependable legislative allies, and electoral organization that strong parties supply. Even when politicians want to pursue new policies, they often lack the capacity to do so. Finally, the absence of parties is self-reinforcing. Without parties, politicians are ineffective, and citizens become discouraged. Such citizens are poor building material for parties. While Peru’s experience has shown that democracy is neither unthinkable nor unworkable without parties, it suggests that it is likely unpopular.

The power of technocrats also impedes vertical accountability. Their experience and expertise give them considerable leverage against weak amateur politicians (Dargent, 2015), and they have increasingly taken control of the government. For example, recent finance ministers have generally been technocrats. Between 2000 and 2012 every finance minister had been educated abroad, and all but one had worked for an international organization (Dargent, 2015). In line with Vergara and Encinas (2016), the percentage of technocratic ministers in Peruvian cabinets has grown steadily through the 2000s. Technocrats made up 49 percent of Toledo’s ministers, 63 percent of García’s, 75 percent of Humala’s, and 70 percent of Kuczynski’s, and the proportions of “political” ministers have correspondingly fallen. The fact that technocrats dominated the cabinets of presidents elected from the left, right, and center demonstrates that these experts, supported by media and business elites, have gained the upper hand against all politicians. The delegation of authority over key areas of policy making from elected politicians to unelected experts creates obvious problems for vertical accountability.

Finally, a weak civil society is unable to act as an alternative agent of accountability. More than 20 years after the internal armed conflict destroyed much of its organizational capital, civil society remains feeble. Less than 5 percent of Peruvians are unionized, and less than 20 percent even sympathize with a political party, according to the 2014 Latin American Public Opinion Project survey (LAPOP, 2015). Organized civil society’s limited footprint and lack of coordination limits its capacity to convert popular discontent into pressure on political leaders. For example, whereas in Bolivia and Ecuador civil society helped to scale up local issues into national protests that altered the trajectory of politics, in Peru the weakness of civil society has meant that local protests remain local (Meléndez, 2012). Similarly, a weak civil society cannot serve as the basis for party building as it has for the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism) in Bolivia.

With weak parties, a demobilized civil society, and entrenched technocrats, politicians lack the tools, incentives, and opportunities to pursue new policies. They see little choice but to delegate authority to the technocrats. Consequently, the nexus of power in Peruvian democracy lies not between society and politicians but rather firmly in the hands of unelected, isolated experts. Consequently, while surveys like Latinobarómetro and LAPOP find that Peruvians support the institutions of democracy at similar levels to most Latin Americans, they deeply distrust the politicians who operate within these institutions. Our analysis echoes an observation Jeremy Waldron recently made while reviewing the work of Habermas: “In a democracy, laws are supposed to have legitimacy because the people to whom they are addressed are also their authors.” Even if mediated by other structures and actors, “all of this is done in our name. . . . These procedures are us, making laws for ourselves” (Waldron, 2015: 70). If the ultimate point of democracy is to give citizens final say over the laws they must obey, then Peruvians have reason to be upset with politicians who replace their judgments with those of unelected, unaccountable technocrats.

Conclusion

Robert Dahl (1971: 1) famously said that the key element defining a democracy is a situation of “continued responsiveness.” In modern democracies, representation is the main mechanism for making government responsive to the public’s preferences. Yet recent analyses of democracy have followed Guillermo O’Donnell in focusing on problems of horizontal accountability rather than the link between policy makers and society. This focus is largely due to the recurrence of presidents like Alberto Fujimori who win power democratically but undermine the checks on their power, pushing democratic regimes into authoritarianism. Political scientists have devoted more attention to horizontal accountability than to problems of representation and accountability to society. However, as Enrique Peruzzotti (2013; 2015) and Luna and Vergara (2016) have pointed out, broken links between political regimes and citizens can be equally damaging to democracy.

The Peruvian case demonstrates the truth of this statement. The institutions of liberal democracy reemerged after the collapse of Fujimori’s authoritarian regime. Since 2001, presidents have coexisted alongside the judiciary and Congress without undermining them. However, meaningful vertical accountability has not developed in this institutional framework. Its absence lies at the root of the problems of legitimacy that plague contemporary Peruvian democracy. Without responsiveness, Peru’s politicians and institutions have failed to generate public trust. Without roots, presidents have little to gain from pursuing new policies and little to lose if they do not. The lack of strong political parties, the limited ability of civil society to channel public discontent, and the continuing power of unelected technocrats have impeded the regeneration of vertical accountability. As O’Donnell (2010: 197) wrote a decade after publishing his work on delegative democracy, citizens can succumb to alienation—forgetting both that they have created institutions and that these institutions exist to serve them.

This situation generates a serious legitimacy problem for Peruvian democracy. Without a strong civil society to channel their grievances, Peruvians have become silent witnesses in a political system that is supposed to give them voice. How long this equilibrium will last as the economy slows and whatever minimal legitimacy technocratic management has produced evaporates is unclear. Will this situation lead disenchanted middle classes and rural social movements angered by resource extraction to link up behind another Fujimori-like populist who uses a crisis to undermine Peru’s democratic institutions? Could such a moment disrupt these institutional dynamics, creating incentives for politicians to build links to society and exert greater control over policy making? Or, despite a slowing economy and disenchantment, might continuity prevail? No one should be surprised if the latter occurs. Peru’s politicians seem to have learned a lesson Machiavelli taught centuries ago: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”