Monday, June 9, 2014

Helmke and Levitsky 2006

 Introduction, Helmke and Levitsky, 1-30

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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