Unpacking delegative democracy : digging into the empirical content of a rich theoretical concept

Abstract

Abstract: In his work on delegative democracies, Guillermo O’Donnell appealed for more “empirical research, as well as more refined analytical work” on the “new species” he depicted (O’Donnell 1994: 55). This is what I intend to do in this paper: first, I provide an empirical classification of some Latin American cases based on the different dimensions in O’Donnell’s definition of delegative democracies.1 In this descriptive section, I observe cross-case variation between delegative and representative democracies (something O’Donnell obviously recognized), but also variation inside each of the two groups. Even more importantly, there is also within-case variation over time: in some countries, there has been a continuous erosion of their representative democracies; others have been going through a gradual but steady “second transition” to a more representative democracy, while in a third group of cases there has been an oscillating trend or, “recurring delegativeness.” Second, I explore some possible causes of this variation by identifying the main conditions under which delegative democracies are more likely to occur and why delegative democracies are enduring and recurrent in some countries, while not in others. The paper is structured as follows: In the first section, and after reviewing the research and justifying the main contribution of this work to the empirical literature on the topic, I present O’Donnell’s definition of delegative democracy and the discussions over the concept.