Papers by Omar Sanchez-Sibony
Latin American politics and society, Feb 5, 2024
This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifes... more This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifested in diminishing social trust toward parties, debilitation of links between parties and social collectivities, lowering levels of partisanship, and rising incidence of personalism in the electorate. It focuses on some unrecognized and undertheorized causal factors behind partisan involution in the region, putting emphasis on mutually reinforcing processes. First, it identifies forces endogenous to the traits of origin of diminished parties that foster their uprootedness and decay; second, it lays out some of the manifold ways that the weakening of political parties fuels regime malperformance, in a mutually reinforcing vicious circle; third, it outlines the existence of mutual feedback loops between political agency and structure; fourth, it identifies various agential sources of party decay. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to expect continued party deinstitutionalization across Latin America going forward.
Latin American Politics and Society, 2024
This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifes... more This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifested in diminishing social trust toward parties, debilitation of links between parties and social collectivities, lowering levels of partisanship, and rising incidence of personalism in the electorate. It focuses on some unrecognized and undertheorized causal factors behind partisan involution in the region, putting emphasis on mutually reinforcing processes. First, it identifies forces endogenous to the traits of origin of diminished parties that foster their uprootedness and decay; second, it lays out some of the manifold ways that the weakening of political parties fuels regime malperformance, in a mutually reinforcing vicious circle; third, it outlines the existence of mutual feedback loops between political agency and structure; fourth, it identifies various agential sources of party decay. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to expect continued party deinstitutionalization across Latin America going forward.
By embedding Guatemala in recent conceptual and theoretical work in comparative politics and poli... more By embedding Guatemala in recent conceptual and theoretical work in comparative politics and political economy, this volume advances knowledge about country’s politics, economy, and state-society interactions. The contributors examine the stubborn realities and challenges afflicting Guatemala during the post-Peace-Accords-era across the following subjects: the state, subnational governance, state-building, peacebuilding, economic structure and dynamics, social movements, civil-military relations, military coup dynamics, varieties of capitalism, corruption, and the level of democracy. The book deliberately avoids the perils of parochialism by placing the country within larger scholarly debates and paradigms.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
This book provides an in-depth look into key political dynamics that obtain in a democracy withou... more This book provides an in-depth look into key political dynamics that obtain in a democracy without parties, offering a window into political undercurrents increasingly in evidence throughout the Latin American region, where political parties are withering. For the past three decades, Peru has showcased a political universe populated by amateur politicians and the dominance of personalism as the main party–voter linkage form. The study peruses the post-2000 evolution of some of the key Peruvian electoral vehicles and classifies the partisan universe as a party non-system. There are several elements endogenous to personalist electoral vehicles that perpetuate partylessness, contributing to the absence of party building. The book also examines electoral dynamics in partyless settings, centrally shaped by effective electoral supply, personal brands, contingency, and iterated rounds of strategic voting. Given the scarcity of information electoral vehicles provide, as well as the enormously complex political environment Peruvian citizens inhabit, personal brands provide readymade informational shortcuts that simplify the political world. The concept of “negative legitimacy environments” is furnished to capture political settings comprised of supermajorities of floating voters, pervasive negative political identities, and a generic citizen preference for newcomers and political outsiders. Such environments, increasingly present throughout Latin America, produce several deleterious effects, including high political uncertainty, incumbency disadvantage, and political time compression. Peru’s “democracy without parties” fails to deliver essential democratic functions including governability, responsiveness, horizontal and vertical accountability, or democratic representation, among others.
Book Chapter in: Juan Pablo Luna et.al (eds) Diminished Parties Democratic Representation in Latin America, 2021
Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 2020
Peru constitutes a paradigmatic case of a democracy without bona fide political parties. This mak... more Peru constitutes a paradigmatic case of a democracy without bona fide political parties. This makes it an ideal "most likely case" of democratic dysfunction for examining key theoretical tenets about the relationship between political parties and democracy. Political science theory confers upon political parties several key functions of democratic governance and holds that, in the absence of bona fide parties, several dysfunctional political correlates should materialize: nonresponsiveness to societal policy preferences, serious deficits in electoral (vertical) accountability, flourishing populism, imperiled governability in state-society relations, and vulnerability to democratic breakdown. These five theoretical predictions are examined by way of perusing the empirical workings of Peruvian democracy along these dimensions in the post-2001 democratic era. Overall, Peru's democratic experience bears out the predictions in stark fashion, thus providing confirming evidence in favor of the real-world centrality of political parties for the functionality of democracy as a system of representation, governability, and accountability. The expectation that populism will flourish has been borne out, but of a low-intensity variety, such that radical populism has been kept at bay. Only the last prediction is not confirmed by the empirical record, insofar as Peruvian democracy has not been vulnerable to breakdown during the last two decades.
Latin American Politics and Society, 2021
The attempt to classify Bolivia under Morales has yielded a bewildering range of regime labels. W... more The attempt to classify Bolivia under Morales has yielded a bewildering range of regime labels. While most scholars label it a democracy with adjectives, systematic appraisals of the regime have been scant. This article aims fill this gap by providing a more systematic evaluation, making special emphasis on features of Bolivia's electoral playing field. It evaluates the slope of key playing fields of competition (electoral, legislative, judicial and mass media arenas), finding abundant evidence that all four were substantively slanted in favor of the incumbent. During the MAS reign, political competition was genuine but fundamentally unfree and unfair, because the ruling party benefited from a truncated electoral supply, much greater access to finance, a partisan electoral management body, supermajorities in the legislature used to dispense authoritarian legalism, a captured and weaponized judiciary, and a co-opted mass media ecosystem. Contra most extant characterizations, the regime is best categorized as competitive authoritarian.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
and Keywords While Latin America has augmented its tax effort significantly since 2000, tax reven... more and Keywords While Latin America has augmented its tax effort significantly since 2000, tax revenues remain below the global norm given the region's income per capita. Indirect taxes consti tute a disproportionate portion of overall revenues, a manifestation of the political and technical difficulties inherent to taxing Latin American elites. Several structural factors characterizing the region hamper revenue collection, including mediocre economic per formance, a large informal sector, high income inequality, the rentier status of some economies, and weak state infrastructural power, alongside feeble tax administration agencies, among other factors. Political scientists have deployed three main paradigms for understanding tax policy out comes and tax reform: interest-based, ideational, and institutional accounts. Interest-based accounts, centered on the political power and resources that interest groups can wield, provide a useful first approximation to understanding tax outcomes; nevertheless, this theoretical lens under-predicts the prevalence of observed tax reform in Latin Ameri ca. The ideational lens is indispensable to account for the overall contours of the taxation system in the region, because tax reform was informed by the neoliberal paradigm. In re cent years, moderately progressive tax policy changes have been enacted by left-and right-wing governments alike, reflecting the increasing centrality of addressing inequality (the vertical equity objective) in the realm of ideas. Democracy, qua a system of institu tions geared to enhance the public interest, has not spawned the taxation systems that the median-voter theory predicts in the context of high societal inequality, however. Democracy has not fulfilled the taxation and fiscal policy expectations placed upon it. Nonetheless, structural factors may yet produce a salutary fiscal result. The recent in crease in the size of the region's middle class has translated into greater societal pres sures to enhance the quality and quantity of public services, which may portend the de velopment of a more encompassing state-society fiscal pact.
Journal of Politics in Latin America
This article presents the case for steering clear of electoral outcome-based regime classificatio... more This article presents the case for steering clear of electoral outcome-based regime classifications. It advocates focusing instead on the systemic character of the formal and informal institutions that govern access to power as a more appropriate way to draw electoral regime boundaries. The case study of Ecuador under the presidency of Rafael Correa is offered as an example of this approach. Both electoral outcomes under Correísmo (2006–2017) as well as the procedural context in which elections occurred are examined. But the regime is here analyzed and categorized on a procedural-centered basis. The analysis of the slope of the playing field in the electoral arena reveals that political competition was fundamentally unfair, placing the regime in the competitive authoritarian category. This conclusion is reached on grounds of the incumbent's capture of the electoral management body, as well as highly discriminatory electoral laws drawn by the incumbent, among many other factors that rendered Ecuadorean electoral contests unfair.
Taiwan Journal of Democracy
This essay seeks to categorize Ecuador under the presidency of Rafael Correa as a regime type. Th... more This essay seeks to categorize Ecuador under the presidency of Rafael Correa as a regime type. The analysis of the slope of the playing field across three crucial arenas of political competition (the legislature, the judiciary, and the mass media) reveals a severely pro-incumbent playing field. Notwithstanding zigzags in the realm of public policy, the Correa government followed an underlying modus operandi: the systematic quest for power-accretion via recurrent legal and political reforms-as well as informal practices. Contrary to many characterizations of the regime as a democracy with adjectives, a process-centered evaluation of the relevant playing fields of political competition shows it is best categorized as competitive authoritarian.
Governance, 2005
There are two broad traditions that provide alternative ways of understanding policy choice and t... more There are two broad traditions that provide alternative ways of understanding policy choice and the factors that influence the adoption, implementation, and consolidation of economic reform initiatives. The first is called the new political economy (NPE), which applies the tools of economic analysis to political phenomena. The second strand is the new institutionalism, with origins in sociological theory, which stresses concepts of conflict, group consciousness, institutions, and power. The theoretical divide, then, is that between those who draw on economic theory and those who draw on sociology. The first group searches for explanations that apply to large cross sections of countries; the latter prefers the case study approach and insists that political behavior is always rooted in context and specificity.
BOOK CHAPTER IN: Gemma Medero Sanchez (ed) Gobierno, Gobernabilidad y Poder Local en Guatemala
Party Politics, 2009
This article makes a case for expansion of the conceptual framework for the classification of par... more This article makes a case for expansion of the conceptual framework for the classification of party universe types. In particular, it introduces the concept of 'party non-systems', defined as those party universes characterized by a fundamental absence of inter-temporal continuity in the identity of the main parties. At the heart of this concept is the explicit differentiation between intra-and extra-systemic volatility. Party nonsystems are characterized by persistently high transfers of votes away from the main parties towards new and small parties (i.e. high extrasystemic volatility), an ever-changing constellation of parties without a stable 'core'. It is argued that the difference between non-systems and all other party universe types is not only one of degree (in level of institutionalization), but also one of kind. This conceptual innovation is then applied to a number of Latin American cases (Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) at the low end of the institutionalization continuum to highlight important cross-country and inter-temporal differences in the nature of (core) party competition.
Contemporary Politics, 2012
Latin American Politics and Society
The article examines the degree of institutionalization of the Guatemalan party universe across f... more The article examines the degree of institutionalization of the Guatemalan party universe across four areas: the pattern of interparty competition; the rootedness of parties in society; the legitimacy accorded to parties and democratic institutions; and the nature of internal party organization. Guatemala displays an extremely inchoate party structure across all these variables. There is no stability in the identity of the main parties in the polity. After more than two decades of electoral democracy, no single party has been able to avert a drift into electoral irrelevance or outright disappearance. With respect to the basic facets of internal party organization, Guatemalan parties exhibit a feebleness so pronounced that their very status as parties is questionable. In general, Guatemalan "parties" only fulfill Sartori's minimalist definition as organizations that field candidates for public office, but offer nothing more substantive. LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 50: 1 SANCHEZ: GUATEMALA'S PARTIES 125 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 50: 1 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 50: 1 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 50: 1
World Development, 2003
The swinging of the pendulum toward policies that enhance Latin America's insertion into the worl... more The swinging of the pendulum toward policies that enhance Latin America's insertion into the world economy diverted attention from domestic policies that continue to be essential for growth and development broadly defined. Six domestic policy areas are identified here: increasing domestic savings, implementing countercyclical fiscal policies, mobilizing public resources, investing in education, promoting employment, and reducing income inequality. The opportunity cost of not having devoted due attention to these issues throughout the 1990s is surely enormous, and for those countries still underplaying domestic variables, the longer the delay the greater the costs. The imperative of devoting more political capital to domestic strategies of development cannot be overstated--whether international financial institutions choose to emphasize them or not.
Third World Quarterly, 2009
Democratization
This article compares the transitions to democracy in Spain and Chile, two countries that share i... more This article compares the transitions to democracy in Spain and Chile, two countries that share important pre-transition characteristics. Both transitions were made from the legality of the existing regime, and democratization followed from a stalemate between the forces of the ancien régime and those of change. Moreover, both were transitions by transaction -negotiated with the authoritarian forces. Yet the differences were more pronounced. The article analyzes the significance of a number of elite-level and institutional variables that have all too often been masked by the crude and simplistic distinction made in the 'transitology' literature between pacted and unpacted transitions. These include: cohesion within the authoritarian forces, the role of agency, substantive (rather than pragmatic) cohesion within the democratic opposition, attainment of civil supremacy, presence or absence of the dictator, length of dictatorship, and even Machiavellian fortuna, among others.
Review of International Political Economy, 2006
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Papers by Omar Sanchez-Sibony