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Abstract:
The price boom of natural resources in the first decade of the twenty-first century has been a blessing for all South American economies. For some political regimes, however, it was an institutional curse. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and to a lesser extent Argentina, the commodity boom made possible the emergence of "rentier populism," a new type of political coalition, based on the economic incorporation of the informal sector and funded by windfall gains from exports of natural resources. Based on a new fiscal structure, rentier populism in turn fostered the intensification of plebiscitarian mechanisms of vertical accountability and neutralized constraints of horizontal accountability. The chapter explores the conditions under which a common exogenous shock, the commodity boom, spread across the region with differential coalitional effects. It also delineates the mechanisms that link the rentier populism coalition to the emergence of plebiscitarian and hegemonic forms of accountability. In order to highlight old and new in rentier populism, the chapter places the coalition in historical perspective, using Guillermo O'Donnell's earlier work on political economy as a source of contrasts and similarities. Likewise, "plebiscitarian hegemonies" are compared with delegative democracies, the key concept in O'Donnell's later work on institutions.

Latin America is currently caught in a middle-quality institutional trap, combining flawed democracies and low-to-medium capacity States. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, the sequence of development - Latin America has democratized before building capable States - does not explain the region's quandary. States can make democracy, but so too can democracy make States. Thus, the starting point of political developments is less important than whether the State-democracy relationship is a virtuous cycle, triggering causal mechanisms that reinforce each other. However, the State-democracy interaction generates a virtuous cycle only under certain macroconditions. In Latin America, the State-democracy interaction has not generated a virtuous cycle: problems regarding the State prevent full democratization and problems of democracy prevent the development of state capacity. Moreover, multiple macroconditions provide a foundation for this distinctive pattern of State-democracy interaction. The suboptimal political equilibrium in contemporary Latin America is a robust one.

Democratic breakdown and survival in Latin America, 1945-2005 / Anibal Perez-Linan and Scott Mainwaring --. - Argentina's democracy four decades after modernization and bureaucratic-authoritarianism / Carlos Gervasoni --. - Reflections on "transitology" : before and after / Philippe C. Schmitter --. - Rentier populism and the rise of super-presidents in South America / Sebastian Mazzuca --. - Democracy and markets : notes on a twenty-first century paradox / Robert Fishman --. - Inequality and democracy : Latin American lessons for the United States / Terry Lynne Karl --. - Economic performance, political competition and regime stability in postwar Latin America / Marcelo Leiras --. - Theorizing a moving target : O'Donnell's changing views of postauthoritarian --. - Regimes / Timothy Power --. - Building institutions on weak foundations : lessons from Latin America / Steven Levitsky and Maria Victoria Murillo --. - Inequality and the rule of law : ineffective rights in Latin American democracies / Daniel Brinks and Sandra Botero --. - Unpacking delegative democracy : digging into the empirical content of a rich theoretical concept / Lucas Gonzalez --. - Accountability deficits of delegative democracy / Enrique Peruzzotti --. - Democracy, agency, and the classification of political regimes / James McGuire --. - Democracy and democratization : Guillermo O'Donnell's late attempt to rework democratic theory / Jorge Vargas-Cullell --. - "A mi, si, me importa" : Guillermo O'Donnell's approach to theorizing with normative and comparative intent / Laurence Whitehead --. - Conclusion : studying big political issues / Scott Mainwaring, Daniel Brinks, and Marcelo Leiras