Understanding Institutional Weakness

Power and Design in Latin American Institutions

Steven Levitsky author Maria Victoria Murillo author Daniel M Brinks author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:27th Jun '19

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Understanding Institutional Weakness cover

Offers a new, more systematic and theoretically grounded, understanding of the concept and causes of weak institutions.

Political scientists have long said 'institutions matter' without too carefully specifying what that means and how we would know. This book offers the conceptual tools for understanding when institutions are strong, when they are weak, when they matter and when they do not.This Element introduces the concept of institutional weakness, arguing that weakness or strength is a function of the extent to which an institution actually matters to social, economic or political outcomes. It then presents a typology of three forms of institutional weakness: insignificance, in which rules are complied with but do not affect the way actors behave; non-compliance, in which state elites either choose not to enforce the rules or fail to gain societal cooperation with them; and instability, in which the rules are changed at an unusually high rate. The Element then examines the sources of institutional weakness.

ISBN: 9781108738880

Dimensions: 230mm x 153mm x 4mm

Weight: 210g

75 pages