This book accounts for and analyzes the latest developments in Latin American presidential democracies, with a special focus on political institutions. The stellar line-up of renowned scholars of Latin American politics and institutions from Latin America, Europe, and the US, offer new insights into how democratic institutions have operated within the critical context that marked the political and social life of the region in the last few years: the eruption of popular protest and discontent, the widespread distrust of political institutions, and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Combining different methodological approaches, including cross-national studies, small-N studies, case studies, and quantitative and qualitative data, the contributions cluster around three themes: the problem with fixed-terms and other features of presidentialism, inter-institutional relations and executive accountability, and old and new threats to democracy in these times of turmoil. The volume concludes with an assessment of the political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America. Beyond current scholars and students of comparative political scientists, Latin America in Times of Turbulence will be of great interest to a wide spectrum of readers interested in comparative systems of government, democracy studies, and Latin American politics more generally.

This volume is the first comprehensive analysis of a new type of executive instability without regime instability in Latin America referred to as "presidential breakdown." It includes a theoretical introduction framing the debate within the institutional literature on democracy and democratization, and the implications of this new type of executive instability for presidential democracies. Two comparative chapters analyze the causes, procedures, and outcomes of presidential breakdowns in a regional perspective, and country studies provide in-depth analyses of all countries in Latin America that have experienced one or several presidential breakdowns: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. The book also includes an epilogue on the 2009 presidential crisis in Honduras.

This book deals with political institutions and their effect on democracy in the Dominican Republic since 1966. It provides a new analysis of the Dominican democracy, and uses case-study methods to generate new and improve existing theories and concepts. The book develops new measurements of critical concepts such as deadlocks, and horizontal accountability, and provides a thorough discussion of the concepts of democracy, democratisation and the institutionalisation of democracy. Through an analysis of the Dominican regime, author finds, and explains why, the Dominican democracy has been misclassified by much of the comparative literature, and argues that the regime still is not a full democracy. The book then explains why the Dominican Republic never fully democratised. The author finds that while deadlocks did not put the Dominican demoracy in peril, deadlocks tended to increase presidential dominance and lower the level of horizontal accountability, and that the institutions inherited from the 1966 constitution was an obstacle to a virtuous institutionalisation of democracy after 1978.