Maxwell Cameron

Scholarship on the 2000s commodity boom and its effects on state development in Latin America seldom accounts for the role of the extractivism of the poor, whose capacity to avoid regulation and shape policy outcomes poses a major challenge to state authority. This dissertation is a study of the conditions and mechanisms through which informal gold miners undermine state authority and its monopoly over key commodities. It builds on ten months of fieldwork in the largest gold mining regions in the Andes – rural La Paz in Bolivia and Madre de Dios in Peru – and in a case of more recent expansion – Tambogrande, Peru – and includes ethnographic work, 156 interviews and a survey of 100 people.This dissertation is composed of four papers. The first introduces the concept of organizational challengers – a state competitor whose power lies in the development of informal governance systems with stronger inclusionary capacity than the state – and compares state responses to informal mining in Bolivia and Peru. The second paper puts forward a comparative study of perceptions of mining at different scales in Tambogrande, where informal mining has recently proliferated unopposed while large-scale mining was resisted. The study reveals that the compatibility of informal mining with the local social order explains the difference in attitudes of communities towards different scales of mining. The third paper explains the functioning of informal gold mining governance systems in Santa Rosa, Bolivia and Huepetuhe, Peru. It shows how key practices from the Andean peasant tradition have crystallized into resource governance institutions whose unintended effects – such as the provision of basic infrastructure and labor opportunities – give these local systems a competitive advantage over the state.The fourth paper explains why despite the implementation of two different state strategies – an accommodating one in Bolivia and a coercive one in Peru – informal miners have nonetheless gained political influence. I find that miners take advantage of the fracture between the central state and its peripheral branches to form pressure groups in coalition with local authorities. These alliances function first as shields against regulation and then as springboards to push for policy change.

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This dissertation seeks to explain why the Colombian Constitutional Court disallowed a referendum to extend presidential terms in 2010, when it allowed a similar reform in 2005. There are three elements to this decision that make it remarkable for institutional theory and comparative politics: 1) The sitting president, Álvaro Uribe, was an extremely popular and powerful president, who used his transformative capacities to initiate a far-reaching reform agenda; 2) the Court’s authority appreciably increased between 2005 and 2010; 3) the jurisprudence of the Court involved a doctrine that is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, but a re-interpretation of the norms outlining judicial review of constitutional reforms.This dissertation inserts the 2010 decision in the historical and political context and asks three questions that guide each chapter: 1) Does the 1991 Constitution amount to a critical juncture in Colombia’s political history? 2) Does the post-genesis evolution of Colombia’s constitutional jurisprudence follow a path-dependent logic? 3) Did judges follow strategic incentives when they developed and applied the substitution doctrine, which struck down Uribe’s reform to extent the number of terms in the presidential office?Building on the Colliers’ critical juncture framework, I show that the 1991 constituent process was a contingent event marked by genuine communicative action that incorporated sections from society previously marginalized, negotiated with important public input, and entirely restructured the meaning of the organizational imperatives of the polity. Contrary to expectations from the discontinuous change model, post-genesis development cannot be fully captured by path dependence, but involves incremental changes of institutional learning inside the judiciary. The investigation into the re-election decisions will show that institutional learning depends on carefully administered spaces of deliberation inside the Court that buttress the cohesion of legal reasoning. Altogether, this leads me to view institutions not as structured expectations in a game between rational actors or regularized patterns of conducts, but discursive structures, in which actors negotiate the meaning and significance of norms with reference to a constitutional text and the intention of the constituents that drafted the charter in the first place. The constitutional judge is a deliberative judge.

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States are expected to raise revenue through taxation, provide security, enforce rights, deliver public services, and build infrastructure. However, contemporary states vary in their ability to perform these tasks. In order to explain variation, I conceptualize state capacity as the ability of the state to coordinate large-scale collective action. I then argue that variation in state capacity is the result of alternative, multi-level and path-dependent solutions that societies adopt to establish political order. At the micro-level, the strategies that individuals use to collectively make demands on political authorities define the ways in which rulers try to remain in power and maintain stability. This in turn determines, at the macro-level, the ability of those authorities to perform other complex coordination tasks associated with collecting taxes, providing security, and delivering public goods and services. The dissertation tests this theory of political development through a comparative historical analysis of France (1789-1970) and Mexico (1810-1970). During the 1920s and 1930s, the political incorporation of the popular classes—workers, peasants, and lower middle classes—meant that the state had to obtain the support of a greater percentage of the people to maintain order. As a result, these states had to expand the size and scope of their activities and thus to coordinate collective action at a much larger scale than before. Their success or failure in facing those challenges can be traced back to the types of organizations that the popular classes adopted to interact with the state before and during the period of incorporation. In France, these groups mobilized through autonomous, impersonal and internally democratic organizations that demanded public goods, monitored authorities, and resisted the capture of the state by private interests. In Mexico, the popular classes were incorporated through personalistic and hierarchical organizations that interacted with the state as subordinate clients demanding rents and privileges. Even though both patterns of incorporation were effective in maintaining order during the 20th century, they had opposite effects on the long-term ability of these states to coordinate other forms of large-scale collective action, such as those posed by the requirements of taxation and public goods provision.

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Scholars have long observed that institutions and power relations are cyclically constitutive, as institutions shape a given polity’s power relations, and the latter influence the design of institutions. This dissertation unveils how indigenous agents interact with each other, and with the state’s bureaucrats and consultants to create divergent institutional trajectories in a new institutional environment: the construction of 11 pilot institutions of indigenous self-governance in Bolivia, as provided by the 2009 Constitution. The combinations of institutional forms have most significantly been shaped by local relations of power among differently identifying indigenous agents, and by the state-determined socio-territorial boundaries that are the site of institutional construction. Each new “indigenous autonomy” combines liberal and indigenous norms, constituting a hybrid model of indigenous autonomy. Within that model we can discern a bifurcation in which some institutions are more liberal and others are more communitarian.These observations contribute to our understanding of democracy and citizenship in contemporary Latin America as states respond to popular pressures for more rights and inclusion, in what many have called “left turns.” In terms of democracy, this study illustrates how electoral representation is complemented by communitarian democratic forms in ways that enhance Bolivia’s historically exclusionary democracy, yet how elaboration of communitarian democracy is also constrained by the party-based system of representation. Meanwhile, the Constitution’s expansion of rights has contributed to what some observers have called “post- liberal” citizenship. This investigation indicates that state-society relations in Bolivia are not well-characterized as populist, liberal or corporatist; rather, they are concomitantly plural, cyclical and reactive – which I conceive of as interest intermediation by “contentious bargaining.”The contradictions in the construction of these “indigenous autonomies” are a consequence the changing character of the ruling party. As the Movement toward Socialism and its leader, Evo Morales, have shifted from an oppositional force to elected government, they have contended with a complex correlation of social forces and pursued a development program of resource nationalism that responds to widespread calls for economic growth and poverty reduction. In Bolivia’s contentious context, the state’s disposition with regard to indigenous self- governance has been contradictory, simultaneously enabling and constraining indigenous rights.

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My dissertation investigates the sources of hegemonic party resilience. I ask why do some hegemonic party regimes persist, while others concede to multipartism? Building on party politics and electoral authoritarianism literature, I develop a mid-range theory based on the concepts of strategic coordination and institutionalization to explain why elites unite and oppositions fail to pose a credible threat. To demonstrate the utility of my explanation, I compare two similar hegemonic parties of different outcomes: the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore and the Kuomintang Party (KMT) in Taiwan.I posit three factors to account for hegemonic party resilience. First, I contend that a hegemonic party that is adept in strategic coordination – by providing public goods and withdrawing political, civil liberties and media freedom – is more likely to win mass support and deter opposition coordination. Both the PAP and early KMT were high performing, strategic regimes that enjoyed growth and forestalled democratization. While the PAP remained the ruling party in Singapore, the KMT controlled the pace of liberalization during its long decade of transition, losing power after a party split. Second, I argue that the PAP is better than the KMT in keeping the ruling elites united because of its institutionalized leadership succession system. I develop a model to explain how a centralized, oligarchic and exclusionary leadership selection method fosters elite unity. My findings based on elite interviews, party publications and survey data support the counter-intuitive theory that the more intra-party democracy, the less party cohesion. Finally, in hegemonic party regimes, survival means increasing the certainty of winning. Through electoral engineering, the incumbent is able to institutionalize an uneven playing field that systematically disadvantages the opposition. By analyzing the mechanical and psychological effects of electoral reforms, I offer new empirical evidence to show how the PAP “manufactured” its legislative supermajority to rescue its declining popular votes. The contrasting study of the KMT highlights how a former hegemonic party transforms and adapts as a dominant party to survive the uncertainty of elections.

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This dissertation sheds new light on the question of why some individuals and some countries are more protectionist than others, by applying findings from public opinion studies to the topic. More specifically, by addressing the gap between the predictions of economic trade theories and the findings of public opinion studies, I examine non-economic determinants of individual attitudes toward trade policies, and institutional factors as an intervening variable that could mediate or exacerbate protectionist sentiment. This dissertation consists of five separate papers each of which tackles a different theoretical or empirical puzzle: why is there a discrepancy in views on trade liberalization between economists and the public; why are females more protectionist than males; does more spending on welfare bring about more public support for openness; what explains the recent protectionist backlash in Korea, an export-oriented economy where there is a public consensus on the positive impact of trade on the national economy; and does democratization lead to more economic openness as predicted by factor endowment models? Each chapter provides answers to each puzzle by utilizing three different methods that include survey experiments, survey analyses, and content analyses. The findings of the five papers converge on the following two: (1) positive effects of income growth on support for trade are significantly offset by concerns with the effect of trade liberalization on domestic social and economic arrangements, e.g., increasing inequality and poverty; (2) the negative effects of such communitarian concerns on support for trade are magnified by a lack of public confidence in their government’s effectiveness and responsiveness.The importance of the communitarian critiques of trade liberalization in shaping trade attitudes not only suggests that trade-induced economic growth does not necessarily lead to public support for greater trade openness; but it also suggests that the prediction of the factor endowment models that the electorates (the median voter) in capital scarce countries prefer more openness is flawed. The findings also suggest that new democracies often characterized by weak political institutions and rule of law are not necessarily in a better position than their authoritarian counterparts to garner public support for trade liberalization.

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Using a method of process tracing based on in-depth elite interviews, this dissertation examines the relationship between presidentialism and the rule of law in Venezuela. It finds that the perils of presidentialism—minority government, coalitions, deadlock, term limits and fixed terms—lead to institutional instability when they interact with low rule of law. Institutional instability occurs when one branch of government threatens or attacks another. Instead of exploring regime level stability this dissertation argues that state level factors more accurately capture problems associated with democracy. Rather than focusing on executive-legislative relationships, as much of the literature does, I argue that the judiciary is an important determinant of democratic governance. This dissertation shows how an examination of executive-judicial relationships helps explain dynamics leading to institutional instability in presidential systems. Interviews revealed that institutional instability was associated with judicial non-independence in three periods of Venezuela’s democratic history. During the Punto Fijo era political parties supplanted state institutions that are necessary foundations for democracy; in the transition period the gravity of the problems of a non-independent judiciary became evident; and during the Bolivarian period, the interaction between a low rule of law and presidentialism led to institutional instability. An examination of the precarious executive-judicial relationship in Venezuela builds on previous studies of instability to provide a more complete account for the decline of a seemingly stable democracy. Specifically, it provides a case study of an unstable presidential democracy to show how presidentialism contributes to institutional instability when the rule of law is weak. Finally, the dissertation contributes to shifting the analytical focus of the democratization literature from regime to state. This shift in analysis shows that satisfying the minimal regime criteria for democracy, such as elections, is insufficient to ensure institutional stability, and perhaps continued democracy. For free and fair elections to be meaningful state institutions must be capable of restraining executive power.

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In 2007, the world suffered a net decline in freedom for the second successive year for the first time in fifteen years. There are indications of global democratic stagnation. Coups and democratic reversions continue to occur. Why do regimes sometimes experience reversions away from democracy? An analysis of data from 1972-2003 indicates that for every $1 increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, the odds of a democratic reversion decrease 0.2%; for each 1% increase in GDP growth, the odds of a democratic reversal decrease 9.2%; and, for each 1 unit increase in Consumer Price Index (CPI), there is a 4.1% increase in the likelihood of democratic reversion. When the analysis is limited strictly to a comparison of democratic reversion cases and ongoing democratic regimes, variables addressing political institutional configurations, vulnerabilities to international pressures and civilian control over the military are either insignificant or provide very little purchase for explaining variance on the dependent variable. The dissertation includes thirty case studies of reversions from democracy, representing one universe of such cases from 1975-2003. Based on an analysis of these cases, several conclusions may be drawn. On economic issues, the case studies indicate we should be cautious in overstating the importance of economic performance and they draw attention to the problematic nature of analyses based on one year lags. The importance of legislative gridlock, particularly during an economic crisis is highlighted. High levels of legislative fractionalization are found to increase reversion risks. Younger democracies are also found to be more vulnerable, as each additional year a democratic regime is in existence decreases reversion risks by 3.8%. The consideration of international influences on costs associated with reversion decisions is found to be relevant. The case analysis indicates attempts to assert civilian control over the military are likely to increase reversion risks. Based on a rational choice analysis and a case study of the Philippines, higher levels of democratic uncertainty are found to reduce reversion risks by allowing actors to tolerate lower levels of goods in light of the potential for future democratic change.

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