While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing...

This paper addresses an important source of variation within democracies – the degree of institutionalization. The concept of institutionalization describes the extent to which politics takes place, and is believed to take place, via formal political institutions. Countries vary in their...

This paper is concerned with the characteristics, determinants and consequences of varying levels of congressional institutionalization. Our work can be traced back to the early work on congressional institutionalization done by Polsby (1968), which is complemented here by the game-theoretic...

Countries with different levels of state capacity have access to different sets of policies. In particular, countries with strong state capabilities are able to draw from a broader menu of policies, and pick and successfully implement those policies that best suit the nature of their challenges....

"La era de la productividad" describe de qué manera la baja productividad de América Latina y el Caribe impide que la región se ponga a la par de los países del mundo desarrollado. Los autores indagan más allá de las explicaciones macroeconómicas tradicionales y profundizan hasta llegar...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. The veto player approach has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing different policymaking styles, their causes and their consequences in Latin America, finding that lower institutionalization and greater use of alternative political technologies (APTs) are more likely the lower the cost of using these technologies,...

This paper argues that where institutions are strong, actors are more likely to participate in the political process through institutionalized arenas, while where they are weak, protests and other unconventional means of participation become more appealing. This relationship is explored...

The understanding of the economic effect of formal institutional rules has progressed substantially in recent decades. These formal analyses have tended to take for granted that institutional arenas such as Congress are the places where decision-making takes place. That is a good approximation...