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[CN] Chapter 4
[CH] Historic Modes of Governing: The Politics of Patrimonialism, Violence, and Instability
Latin American politics has long been noted for its high levels of political violence. Whether it is a caudillo—a charismatic boss, usually with an armed following—or a general leading a golpe de estado (a military seizure of state power), or an authoritarian government using force to repress its opponents, we conceive of Latin America as a region ruled by force. Along with violence , we have also focused on the region’s reputation for political instability (actually a consequence of it)—its endless rounds of musical governments as coup followed coup and general followed general to become supreme leader for an undetermined but not infrequently short length of time. Governments were more often changed by force than electoral results.
Although the description presented above is now showing signs of passing into history, and perhaps has even already made the journey in a few countries, we should neither ignore these long-standing habits of rule nor assume that they are gone forever. Take, for example, patrimonial or personalist politics, which are leader-centered, often to the extent of placing the leader above the law. This characterized caudillo politics. Contemporary Latin America still has a number of high-profile, personalist presidents, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who embody much of the caudillo tradition. And although political violence has played a diminishing role in Latin America since 1990, it has not vanished. Because of this, we need to see how caudillo rule and political violence came to be policy instruments and what let them keep their usefulness for so long. How, that is, did they become political institutions? This is a way to try to understand why political actors, institutions, and instruments have such long lives in Latin America.
In this chapter, we treat the politics of caudillos, coups, and revolutions as parts of a model of rule, a political tradition. Doing this means placing these phenomena in a broader theoretical framework. Two perspectives offer the best possibilities. One treats personal rule and high levels of political violence, as well as the political instability that often accompanies them, as political institutions: well-established, rule-bound structures and processes of governing. The other sees them as manifestations of political culture: the values and attitudes people hold about politics. Using these tools will enable you to understand how these instruments of rule developed, how they have persisted, and how they are changing.
[A] Introduction: Modes and Models of Governing
In 1952, political scientist William Stokes published an article titled “Violence as a Power Factor in Latin American Politics,” in which he wrote that
[v]iolence seems to be institutionalized in the organization, maintenance, and changing of government in Latin America. The methodology of force is found in advanced and in backward countries, in Indian, mestizo, and white republics, in large states and in small ones, in urban and in rural areas, in agricultural and in industrial organization, in the beginning of the twentieth century, in the present period, and in the early, middle, and late nineteenth century—in a word, wherever and whenever Hispanic culture is to be found in the Western Hemisphere.[1]
A half-century later, historian Robert H. Holden published Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, in which he speaks of “public violence”: [2]
The boundaries of … state power, constituted not so much by structural boundaries but by fluid social relationships, vary over time and space. The killing, maiming, and destruction that take place in this field is “public violence,” owing to this compatibility with all the conventional senses of the word “public” … its wide visibility, potential to affect great numbers of people, and connections with government.
Plainly, violence has been an important political commodity in Latin America. Therefore, those who are skilled in the use of violence—sometimes called “specialists in violence”[3]—have been well placed to gain the power to rule. It also means that other political instruments, such as building electoral political parties to mobilize voters, were long underdeveloped. One can also ask whether the conditions noted by Stokes and Holden also point toward a particular mode of organizing government, namely personal rule. This question arises partly because personal, one-man rule has long been common in Latin America and partly because specialists in violence come mostly from extremely hierarchical institutions, where leadership is called command. In short, one has to consider whether the correlation of these factors points to them reinforcing each other, giving both rule by violence and one-person rule special institutional viability.
[B] Political Institutions and Their Relation to Modes of Governing
Politics works in and through political institutions. On hearing “political institutions” what generally comes to mind is the formal machinery of government: executives (presidents or prime ministers and their cabinets), legislatures, courts, and bureaucracies. These are clearly political institutions, but they are not the only ones. We also include parties, groups and movements, the media—especially when they treat political affairs—and even well-established practices that may not have any legal status (for example, how patronage is used). To understand political institutions we need more than a list. We need to know what characteristics define them. Although there is no universally accepted definition, there are components that appear repeatedly.
A common way to identify institutions is by searching for repeated patterns of interaction among people. “Repeated” implies both that the interactions happen over a period of time (hence that an institution is long-lived), and that they are not random but rather intentional or systematic, implying that they reflect rules. Indeed, some argue that institutions are rules,[4] but it is more prudent to say that they lay down rules that shape the behavior of individuals who work with them. This makes institutions “deliberate attempts to channel and constrain human behavior.”[5] In the case of political institutions, the rules will establish who gets to make decisions, about which issues, limited by what restraints, and with what penalties for breaking the rules. Seen in this light, the link between political institutions and modes of governing becomes clear. How rulers govern will shape political institutions, even start them, but the institutions will also affect how rulers rule. Institutions offer a selection of mechanisms with which to govern, but also set some limits on their use.
But how are these institutions formed? One view suggests that they began as instruments that people devised to achieve some objective.[6] Over time, an instrument—a combination of rules and processes—can metamorphose into an institution by becoming more autonomous, setting more rules to govern people associated with it, and being valued in its own right instead of simply as a tool to do a job. Alternatively, people can set out to establish organizations that will direct human activity in given directions.[7] In either case, institutions begin with a conscious decision by someone to find a way to do something.
[B] Historical Institutionalism and Informal Institutions
There are other questions that arise in connection with political institutions. How do they change? Is formal, legal recognition necessary for a political institution to exist? How should we study them? To examine the question of institutional stability and change, many political scientists, along with sociologists and historians, use the theory of historical institutionalism.[8] Central to this theory is the concept of path dependence.[9] Path dependence refers to why institutions tend to adhere to established ways of doing things, or paths.[10] How an institution works often reflects previous outcomes rather than current conditions, unless a significant off-path change has shifted the direction of an institution’s evolution.
Applied to the central question of this chapter—how caudillo rule, violence, and military insurrection remained instruments of rule in Latin America for so long—path dependence suggests two answers. One is that an outcome at a “critical juncture” can significantly shape the future evolution of an institution. For example, Robert Holden argues in another context that “[t]he core event in the Central American state formation process was the gradual knitting together of dispersed power centers into coherent organs of coercion.”[11] Thus, some action produces results that literally change the course of history. So if using violence as a method of rule works by bringing some desired end when first employed, this raises the chances that violence will become a normal, institutionalized instrument in a ruler’s toolbox.
The other point is that once a path is embarked upon, it becomes progressively harder to shift direction, as a form of institutional inertia comes into play.[12] In terms of violent politics in Latin America, path dependence would suggest that rulers would see that their predecessors used violence to take and keep power, note that violence worked, and continue with this successful strategy.
But does any form of institutional analysis really apply to caudillos, military rule, and political violence? If being an institution demanded having formal rules and publicly known structures, the answer is no. However, historical institutionalists argue that formal, legally defined organizations are not the only institutions. There are informal institutions (see Text Box 4.1) that cover phenomena ranging from legislative folkways to how bureaucratic corruption operates. They, too, have rules than can be enforced (think of any mob movie), persist over time, and shape the behavior of people associated with them. What informal institutions do not have is published rules that are legally enforceable, official tables of organization, or the ability to trace their origins to legislation. Political science has always known that informal institutions exist and affect how politics works, and has studied them over the years.[13]
Text Box 4.1. Formal and Informal Political Institutions
Formal political institutions are easy to define. They are official state organizations, with publicly known rules and regulations, and a legally, sometimes constitutionally, specified place in the political process. Examples include constitutions, bureaucracies, legislatures, electoral systems, and security agencies, but also political parties and interest groups, as these also have formal legal structures. Since the advent of the New Institutionalism in the 1980s,[14] political science has emphasized how institutions, and their design and operation, affect political actors and outcomes.
Informal institutions are harder to pin down. Helmke and Levitsky define them as “socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels.”[15] Yet like their formal counterparts, informal institutions are durable and influence official political actors and the actions of government. An example of an informal institution that is often given is the dedazo, literally “pointing a finger,” which is how Mexican presidents were chosen from the 1930s to the 1990s. The incumbent president, always a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)or its lineal predecessors from 1929 to 2000, selected his successor from the party’s ranks. As the PRI, the official party of the Mexican Revolution, controlled the electoral apparatus, the designated heir always won. Never enshrined in law, the dedazo was nevertheless very real and unchallengeable in practice. It was dropped in the late 1990s as the PRI moved to more open and conventional methods of candidate selection to adjust to the increasingly open and honest Mexican electoral system.
[B] Political Culture
If we treat caudillos, coups, and violence as institutions, it means that we see them as well-established, widely accepted instruments of government whose use is governed by informal but enforceable rules. This reminds us that the three mechanisms became standard ways to take and hold power. As a result, those who became governors accepted these institutions as normal parts of the political process. There is, however, another way to account for the same phenomena: political culture.
Political culture is conventionally defined as a people’s political values, attitudes, and beliefs. It is thus more about preferences than rules, although in many cases the line dividing preferences from informal rules is faint and shifting. The concept of political culture has been part of political science for some 50 years; but it has come to be seen as having limited explanatory power. Nevertheless, there is a significant school of Latin Americanists who use political culture as their central analytical variable. Their argument is that Latin America possesses a distinct political tradition that is best understood through the prism of political culture.
One of central figures of this school is Howard Wiarda. He argues that understanding why Latin American politics does not work like those of the historic democracies requires understanding the region’s political culture. This culture is organic, corporatist, Catholic, and authoritarian. Thus it is dramatically different than the political culture of the United States and Canada.[16] The work of Glen Caudil Dealy, another forceful advocate of the centrality of political culture, puts the matter more starkly. Whereas North America and northwestern Europe share a tradition of pluralist politics, a tradition encouraging the existence of centers of power independent of the state, Latin America’s tradition is monist, thus favoring the concentration of power in the state.[17] Certainly, Dealy’s view helps explain the longevity of highly centralized, presidentialist political systems in Latin America.
Looking at the institutional and political culture schools of interpreting Latin American politics lets us see their complementarity. There can be no political tradition without both institutions—long-lived sets of rules, processes, and organizations—and a political culture whose values and preferences are congruent with those institutions. To grasp the lasting power of personal rule and the pervasiveness of violence as an implement for governing we need to take both institutions and culture into account.
[A] Personal Rule or Patrimonialism
Personal rule is most easily defined as a government of men, not of laws. It is a political system in which the will of the ruler—whether a monarch, dictator, or president—counts for more than do laws and institutions. In fact, personal rule is almost anti-institutional, because there is no way to turn an individual’s preferences into long-standing processes and organizations. However, personal rule as a political system can become institutionalized if it comes to be seen as the natural way to govern.
Although personal rule demands executive-centered government, not all executive-centered government is the product of personal rule. As long as there are institutions that countervail an executive’s power and enforce accountability on a nation’s chief political executive, constitutional government prevails. So if an exceptionally strong president or prime minister still has to struggle with the legislature, obey the courts, tolerate the critical media, and, if in a federation, deal with the provinces or states, he or she will remain under the ultimate control of the rule of law. Under these conditions, the next leader may not be able or willing to push the limits of executive rule so far, and the interinstitutional balance of government will re-equilibrate itself.