editors Helmke, Gretchen, and Steven Levitsky 2006. Informal institutions and democracy: lessons from Latin America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- lots of literature, the "unrule of law" scholars, question the extent to which focus on "parchment" rules of law actually misses important on-the ground realities (1)
- "informal rules shape how democratic institutions work" (2)
- some informal rules compete with and subverts democracy (dedazo in Mexico), others can complement and help sustain them (Chilean Concertacion) (3)
- informal institutions definition: socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated, and enforced outside officially sanctioned channels (5)
- they must be enfored in some fashion (5)
- four distinctions: informal institutions should be distinguished from (6)
- weak institutions
- other informal behavioral irregularities: a patterned behavior must be accompanied by a rule and social sanction (if not done) for it to be an informal institution
- informal organizations (7): separate rules from players
- culture. these are not culture, though it can at times be hard to tell them apart
- why informal rules matter: (8) (can be good and/or bad)
- Political representation can be affected in both directions
- programmatic links can be broken
- sometimes looks like the tradeoff in clientelism
- democratic accountability (9):
- vertical accountability (citizens can punish officials), and
- horizontal (officials are responsible to other agencies, officials)
- informal rules can provide more accountability, but it might not provide the right type of public accountability (10-11)
- democratic governance
- informal rules of accommodation, power-sharing, and coalition building can prevent intractability problems (11)
- at times these may improve governance and stability, but not democracy
- citizenship and the rule of law
- brown areas = places where citizens do not actually possess the rights they should, especially indigenous (12)
- informal institutions can both violate and advance citizenship rights in areas not fully controlled by the state
- typology (13)
- two dimensions:
- degree of convergence between informal and formal institutions
- effectiveness of relevant formal institutions
- page 14:
|
Effective formal institutions |
Ineffective formal institutions |
Convergent |
Complementary |
Substitutive |
Divergent |
Accommodating |
Competing |
- some final points on this typology
- Substitutive may be able to achieve things that formal rule fail to (17)
- same informal rules may be in different box depending on the formal institutions discussed
- the relationship between formal/informal institutions is dynamic, both can cause decay and/or institutionalization of the other, can cause stability or instability in formal rules
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