In Latin America, winning an election can be easier than respecting its rules. In several countries that held competitive elections between 2022 and 2026, the elected president governed by weakening the institutions meant to control him. No homogeneous regional judgment of poor government performance exists for this group of electoral contests.

The Essential Points

  • In 8 of the 15 Latin American countries holding competitive elections between 2022 and 2026, the elected president governs by restricting checks and balances, according to IRIS/Jean-Jaurès Foundation/University of Michigan monitoring through 2026.
  • Between 55 and 62% of citizens surveyed in these same elections judge government performance as poor: discontent is massive but produces no institutional correction.
  • Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson theorized this mechanism for economics: without institutions that force those in power to account for themselves, the gains from a term concentrate rather than distribute.
  • Constitutional courts, organized civil societies, and independent presses under pressure attempt to resist; their ability to do so depends on constitutional architecture as much as on mobilization.
  • For the 2030-2040 decade, the challenge is to design institutional mechanisms that make authoritarian capture structurally more costly than it is today.

Electing Without Controlling: How Democracy Empties From Within

The word “democracy” covers two distinct realities, and their confusion perpetuates many misunderstandings. The first is electoral: candidates compete, votes are counted, the winner takes office. The second is liberal: independent courts control the executive, legislative assemblies legislate without pressure, media investigate without risking their licenses. Latin America of 2022-2026 illustrates what political scientists call “democratic backsliding”: the first form persists, the second retreats.

Several presidents govern by weakening at least one of these institutions. The mechanisms vary by context: in Central America, political control of judicial appointments can seriously weaken a supreme court, especially if accompanied by removals, legal reforms, an aligned parliamentary majority, and other attacks on judicial independence; in several countries, extensive recourse to states of exception has degraded rights and the rule of law and, depending on national rules and their application, can also reduce effective parliamentary control; elsewhere, tax pressure on critical media or discretionary financing of local governments creates dependency that disciplines without requiring prohibition. The result can be similar: a political space where elections remain competitive while institutional constraints on the office holder are limited.

Political science has documented for three decades the temptation of Latin American elected officials to concentrate executive power. Over the 2022-2026 period, several countries experience comparable evolution.

But it does not translate into correction.

The Trap of Unlimited Majority

In certain contexts, an unpopular president can weaken checks and balances; the capacity for resistance depends notably on control institutions and power relationships, in interaction with citizen attitudes and political context.

In a system where checks and balances function, discontent follows institutional channels: judicial recourse, legislative votes, parliamentary inquiries, media coverage that amplifies criticism. These channels transform diffuse dissatisfaction into structured political pressure. When these channels are obstructed or weakened, discontent remains dispersed. It expresses itself in polls, sometimes in the streets, but it produces no constraint on the executive.

This is the heart of the thesis developed by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson in Power and Progress. Their demonstration concerns technology and prosperity: for a thousand years, the gains from technological progress were captured by elites whenever institutions were lacking to force their distribution. Applied to politics, the reasoning is identical. The “political technology” of elections produces legitimacy. Control and accountability institutions are a central element of limiting executive power, among other political and social mechanisms.

Without these mechanisms, electoral legitimacy can expand the executive’s room for maneuver.

The parallel deserves testing. One could object, with political scientists like Ivan Krastev who analyze the recompositions of populist right-wing movements in Europe, that Latin American “backsliding” responds first to real social demand: citizens who reject corrupt elites and a failing state, and who voluntarily grant more latitude to an elected official they judge different. This reading describes part of observable political dynamics. In several cases, the elected president benefited from an explicit anti-establishment mandate. But the explanation through voluntary delegation of expanded trust is insufficient to account for all situations.

Discontent often preexists the end of the term. Restriction of checks and balances can then amount to political strategies that do not respond solely to social demand.

Common Points in Resilient Institutions

Analysis must also account for cases where checks and balances resist. In several countries, competitive elections brought to power winners without notable weakening of checks and balances. What these cases have in common deserves as much attention as the drifts.

Countries where checks and balances resist generally share three characteristics. First, a constitutional court whose members do not depend on unilateral nominations by the executive: the nomination procedure involves multiple actors and staggered terms that prevent any party majority from controlling the institution quickly. Next, a press whose economic viability does not depend on state advertising or renewable licenses at discretion: financially independent media can cover abuses without risking their existence. Finally, an organized civil society capable of bringing legal actions and maintaining structured public pressure between elections.

These three elements do not guarantee liberal democracy. But their absence can weaken it. Data from the V-Dem Institute, which tracks liberal democracy indicators worldwide, allow observation of the evolution of these indicators over the long term.

Difficulties observed in Latin America also concern constitutional architecture. As the Journal d’un Progressiste documented in its analysis of American vetocracy, mechanisms of separation of powers and mutual control can slow the concentration of power, but they are insufficient by themselves to guarantee the durability of an institutional system. In Latin America, certain constitutions were designed for executive efficiency rather than resistance to capture: they facilitate governance but expose checks and balances.

Discontent Without Institutional Outlet

Levels of dissatisfaction with governments vary by country and retained indicators. This dissatisfaction may not produce immediate institutional correction. In certain countries, these effects may be limited.

Two interpretations clash. The first is pessimistic: discontent without institutional outlet accumulates frustration that will seek other exits. Violent social mobilizations, second-order populist surges, governance crises are possible outcomes. Latin America has provided several examples over the past two decades.

The second reading is more nuanced. Citizen discontent, even without immediate institutional outlet, constitutes a resource for actors who maintain resistance capacities. Constitutional courts that held in several countries in the region were able to do so because they benefited from measurable public support, which made their dismantling politically costly. Independent media that survive under pressure often do so because an audience follows and finances them. Civil society organizations bringing lawsuits find lawyers and plaintiffs because discontent creates demand for justice.

Pierre Rosanvallon developed for European democracies the observation that forms of counter-democracy—citizen surveillance, veto, and judgment—can function even when formal channels are obstructed, provided that organized actors manage to activate them. In Latin America, this capacity varies considerably from country to country and from institution to institution, but it exists and constitutes a real margin for progress.

Paths for Constitutional Architects Through 2040

Data from 2022-2026 poses a prescriptive question: what institutional mechanisms can make authoritarian capture structurally more costly.

Comparative research over the past two decades, synthesized notably by the work of the V-Dem Institute and Sciences Po OPALC (Observatory of Latin American and Caribbean Politics), identifies several architectures that resist better. The first is the multi-actor judicial nomination procedure, already mentioned. The second is the budgetary security of control institutions: when the prosecutor’s office, the court of accounts, or the ombudsman depend on government budget for their functioning, they are structurally vulnerable. A few countries in the region have begun inscribing in their constitutions automatic funding for these institutions, calculated as a percentage of the state budget and not subject to annual voting.

The third path, less explored, is the strengthening of direct citizen participation mechanisms that bypass representative institutions when those are captured. Referendums of popular initiative, randomly selected citizen assemblies, petition mechanisms with binding legal effect: these devices do not replace classical checks and balances, but they add a layer of friction that complicates the concentration of executive power. Chile, whose constitutional process of 2021-2022 ultimately failed but produced an unprecedented citizen assembly experience at this scale, offers data on what these mechanisms allow and their particular limitations.

Over the 2030-2040 horizon, two scenarios emerge for the region, without it being possible to assign probabilities to documented sources. In the first, the current dynamic consolidates: elected presidents continue to gradually weaken checks and balances, discontent remains without institutional outlet, and the region settles into what political scientists sometimes call “degraded democracy,” elections without real alternation of power. In the second, the combination of persistent citizen discontent, organized civil societies, and a few constitutional courts that hold produces progressive constitutional reforms in several countries, making institutions more resistant to the next wave of capture.

What would distinguish these two trajectories would be observable through relatively precise signals: the fate of constitutional courts in the two or three countries where they still actively resist the executive, the ability of independent media to maintain financing outside state advertising, and, more decisively, the emergence or not of political coalitions capable of carrying constitutional reforms in countries where they are today blocked.

The stakes extend beyond Latin America. As Acemoglu notes in his most recent work on AI governance, the question of who controls those in power is universal and intensifies as surveillance and information control tools become more powerful. A president governing without checks and balances in 2026 has instruments for maintaining power that his predecessors of 1990 did not have. Digital surveillance, algorithmic control of social networks, modulation of information flows: these capacities make institutional capture more durable than it was. What Latin American democracy faces is, in this sense, an advanced version of a problem other regions of the world will encounter.

Seven Countries That Resist

In several countries, competitive elections delivered winners who govern without notably weakening checks and balances. These situations can stem from constitutional architectures designed to limit power concentration.

These countries experience corruption, administrative inefficiency, and persistent inequalities. They nonetheless establish that liberal democracy in Latin America rests on identifiable structural conditions, that it can be built, and that it can hold under pressure. The region simultaneously produces cases of institutional capture and cases of institutional resistance; this observation is most useful for the decade ahead.

The comparison between these two families of cases is one of the richest sources that researchers and constitutional reformers have at their disposal.

Citizen discontent in countries experiencing authoritarian drift can constitute available political pressure. It awaits institutions capable of channeling it. Building them, or repairing them when they have been weakened, is the central political work of the region for the next fifteen years.

Sources

  1. IRIS / Jean-Jaurès Foundation / University of Michigan, monitoring of Latin American elections 2022-2026: https://www.espaces-latinos.org/archives/134508
  2. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, MIT Shaping Work: https://shapingwork.mit.edu/power-and-progress/
  3. V-Dem Institute, annual reports on liberal democracy indicators (V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg)
  4. Sciences Po OPALC (Observatory of Latin American and Caribbean Politics), electoral and institutional analyses 2022-2026
  5. Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, Harvard University Press
  6. Ivan Krastev, analyses on recompositions of populist right-wing movements and illiberal democracy (European Council on Foreign Relations)