Forthcoming in Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, eds., Informal
Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America. Forthcoming,
Johns Hopkins Press.
CHAPTER 3
Do Informal Rules Make Democracy Work?
Accounting for Accountability in Argentina
Susan C. Stokes
Voters’ Informal Decision-Rules and Democracy
Political rules may be written down or they may not be. And the punishment that
is triggered when rules are violated may happen in officially sanctioned channels or it
may not be. This is the essence of the distinction between formal and informal
institutions that Helmke and Levitsky make in this volume. But there are other
dimensions on which rules vary. They may, for instance, be either explicitly understood
by those who follow them, or they may be only implicitly understood. When rules are
implicit, even people following them quite closely frequently cannot render a formalized
account of them. Consider the difference between the rules of a game and the rules of a
language. The rules of chess are explicit; to be able to play one has to know the rules. If
I don’t know, say, that the rook may move an unlimited number of spaces in horizontal or
vertical straight lines, whereas a king may move only one space but in any direction, I
cannot play the game. But if I do know these rules, I can both make them explicit and
play by them.
The rules governing the speaking of a language are quite different. We learn to
follow these rules well before we learn what the rules are – if indeed we ever learn what
they are. A quite average five-year-old will utter many sentences of his or her “native”
(first, early-acquired) language in ways that conform to the formalized grammatical rules
of that language, whereas even a highly intelligent adult speaker of the same language
will have great difficulty explaining these rules unless he or she has been trained to do
so. 1
1
One might object that grammatical rules do not govern, but simply describe, behavior. Yet these rules in
fact are as prescriptive and descriptive; the point of their formalization is to police people’s usage, which is
prone to stray from the rules.
1
I call rules that can be rendered explicit by those following them game rules. I
call rules that are implicit and difficult to formalize by those using them grammatical
rules.
Two central premises of this chapter are (1) that the way people vote in elections
is rule-governed – that the phrase voters’ decision-rules is to be taken seriously – and (2)
that voters’ decision-rules are grammatical. They are rules, and not simple responses to
physiological or material incentives; they are diffused through social mechanisms and not
merely thought up by individuals; they are not normally rendered explicit, at least not in a
formalized version, by people who use them; and, to varying degrees depending on the
rule, they are violated at the risk of social – and even, sometimes, physical and material –
sanction.
Much is at stake for democracies in the informal and grammatical decision-rules
that voters adopt. Consider five rules, each of which has a large political science
literature behind it, claiming that it is the rule that voters use.
•
If the economy grows by at least x percent on an incumbent’s watch, vote for the
incumbent; otherwise, vote for an opposition party (retrospective sociotropic
rule).
•
If my salary grows by at least x percent on the incumbent’s watch, vote for the
incumbent; otherwise vote for an opposition party (retrospective egocentric rule).
•
Vote for political party that my father voted for (socialization rule).
•
Compare the distance between all parties’ programs and my own ideal point and
vote for the one that minimizes this distance (spatial rule).
2
•
If the candidate who minimizes this distance has no chance of winning, vote for
the next best one who has a chance of beating the candidate whom I most desire
to keep out of office (strategic rule).
•
Consider the extreme statements of competing parties in order to identify the one
on my side and vote for that party (directional rule).
•
Count the number of people from my ethnic group on parties’ lists and vote for
the one with the largest number (ethnic rule).
•
Compare the value of the private goods proffered to me during the campaign and
vote for the candidate whose gifts have the highest value (clientelism rule).
These decision-rules, when adopted by large numbers of voters, have major and
varying implications for how well democracy works. At least in theory, retrospective
voting can induce accountability if it is sociotropic, but not if it is egocentric (Ferejohn
1986). Spatial, strategic, and directional decision-rules hold out some hope for
responsiveness. 2 In turn egocentric and socialization voting cut governments loose from
both responsiveness and accountability. Clientelistic decision-rules allow voters to hold
politicians accountable (Kitcshelt 2000) – although in a paltry way – but they also allow
politicians to hold voters accountable (Stokes 2005). 3
Skepticism that voters’ decision-rules are in fact informal rules or institutions in
the sense used in this volume may arise from doubt that violation of voting rules
2
I mean by accountability the ability and tendency of voters to turn out of office governments and
politicians who, at the end of their term, are deemed by voters to have performed below a threshold that
voters set. I mean by responsiveness a tendency for governments and politicians to adopt policies preferred
by (a majority of) their constituents. Democratic theorists often hold that accountability causes
responsiveness but responsiveness can be achieved through other mechanisms as well.
3
On sociotropic and egocentric rules, see Ferejohn 1986. On socialization voting, see Campbell et al.,
1964. On spatial voting, see Downs 1957. On strategic voting, see Cox 1997. On directional voting, see
Rabinowitz and McDonald 1989. On ethnic voting, see Chandra 2004. On clientelistic voting, see Stokes
2005.
3
provokes social disapproval or sanctions. In one image, voting is carried out by lonely
voters who make up their minds in isolation, with no communication (let alone sanctions)
among voters. Assuming the ballot is secret, furthermore, people’s actual votes are
(presumably) opaque; hence they cannot be punished for voting for one party and not
another. If one’s vote cannot be known, presumably nor can one’s method of deciding
how to vote. To the extent that they are voluntary and unenforceable, voters’ decision
“rules” are not informal rules or institutions as the concept is used in this volume.
But the image of the lonely voter is overdrawn. Parents talk about politics and
elections to children and with one another in the presence of children; in these ways,
people’s party sympathies and ways of thinking about politics are nurtured in childhood
and early adulthood. During campaigns, people deliberate informally about the quality of
candidates, the performance of incumbents, and the strategies posed by alternatives.
Especially when decision-rules clash, informal deliberations over them can become
frequent and heated. An acquaintance of mine recounted numerous conversations with
fellow members of her dog-walking group about whether to support an ideologically
proximate (to them) candidate in a Democratic primary or switch strategically to a lesssympathetic Democrat in order to keep a particularly odious Republican out of the
Massachusetts governors’ office. According to some theories, voters choose which party
to vote for as a means of expressing their political identities: “expressions” have to be
expressed – communicated to other people: to family members, co-workers, and other
acquaintances (Schuessler 2000).
Whether they are expressing themselves or working out problems of strategy,
voters who engage in such informal deliberations also try to persuade one another. And
4
when they fail they aim “social sanctions” at one another – they get angry and indignant,
and, in extreme cases, cut off social intercourse with those whom they have failed to
persuade, if only temporarily.
Sanctions for violating an electoral decision-rule can go beyond unpleasant
interactions. It’s worth noting in this connection that the secret ballot is not an absolute
impediment to knowing, or forming good inferences about, how individuals vote.
Clientelist parties insert themselves deeply into the social networks of neighborhoods and
civic associations, and garner extensive information about the likely votes of individual
members and neighbors. It is difficult for many voters to dissimulate their voting
decisions. A Peronist party operative reported in an interview that he could tell how his
neighbors had voted by whether or not, the day after the election, “they can’t look me in
the eye.” 4 When parties can make good inferences about individuals’ votes, then clientvoters who breaking the rule “vote for the party that gave out the most valuable gifts” run
the risk of sanctions, especially the loss of future “favors” and “gifts.” Suggesting a
grim-trigger strategy in response to defections, another Peronist explained how she dealt
with people in her neighborhood to whom she had given bags of food or clothing but who
then voted for another party. “They’re dead. They died forever.” 5
In Helmke and Levitsky’s usage, informal institutions generate (or encapsulate)
expected, patterned actions. Regarding democratic responsiveness and accountability,
expectations are crucial. If informal institutions and informal rules are to help achieve
responsive government, they must accurately describe not just what people do but what
4
Interview conducted in Córdoba, Argentina, by Valeria Brusco, Marcelo Nazareno, and the author,
January 2003.
5
Interview conducted in Córdoba, Argentina, by Valeria Brusco, Marcelo Nazareno, and the author,
January 2003.
5
they expect others to do. Without these expectations the rules are eviscerated. Consider
the retrospective sociotropic rule. If a voter uses this rule as a method of enforcing
accountability, she must have certain expectations about the motives and actions of
officeholders. If she doesn’t think that anticipation of the next election will discipline an
office-holder, then she may interpret anything good that happens on the his watch as
fortuitous and owing to circumstances that the voter can’t observe (e.g., a favorable
international economic climate). She should then pay no attention to the incumbent’s
apparent performance in office and focus entirely, perhaps, on whatever she can learn
about politicians’ characters or preferred policies during the campaign (or chose by some
other criterion).
As is true of languages, the grammatical decision-rules of voting are variable over
even fairly compact geographic spaces. Political accents, dialects, even distinct
“languages” can emerge within a single national territory. In this chapter I offer evidence
of cross-regional variation in electoral decision rules in contemporary Argentina.
Argentina is a new democracy in which formalized political institutions,
understood either as rules or, more traditionally, as political parties and bureaucracies and
elections, are, to put it mildly, enfeebled, (see Levitsky, 2003a, b). Popular protest and
economic distress, not constitutional rules, frequently determine the length of Argentine
presidents’ terms. In the last few years primary elections have been cancelled when they
threaten to produce a result opposed by those who have the power to cancel them,
whether that power comes from a command over party machinery or from physical force.
And political parties have failed in one of their key functions: allocating the scarce
resource of candidacies among their members. It is not my claim here that informal
6
institutions can save Argentine democracy, or that they can prop up that country’s formal
institutions of democracy when the latter really collapse. Rather my claim is that
democracy functions better there (and probably in most democracies, new and old) when
informal rules enforce accountability.
The remainder of this chapter is laid out as follows. I begin by noting substantial
differences in the quality of democracy across towns, cities, and provinces in Argentina.
I then pose the question, Do these differences correspond to systematic differences in the
electoral decision-rules that voters employ across regions? Are there distinct dialects, if
you will, in the grammatical rules underlying voters’ choices? I draw on survey research
indicating that the answer is “yes.” People in regions where democracy works relatively
well display a heightened appreciation for mechanisms of accountability and, more than
people from other regions, expect others – their neighbors and officeholders – to follow
decision-rules that make accountability possible. People from regions where democracy
has worked less well expect their neighbors to follow voting rules that are supportive of
clientelism. I do not in this chapter offer a full account of the origin of these expectations
and rules, but I do eliminate some explanations that the literature on the transition and
consolidation of democracy suggest, and speculate about a better answer. I show that
neither the income levels of individuals nor social capital explain regional differences in
the prominence of rules of accountability. What may matter more are not traits of
individuals but of communities: their levels of social equality. I conclude by returning to
the general question of the importance of informal institutions to democracy.
7
Accountability and Expectations of Accountability in Argentina
Local democracy works better in some parts of Argentina than in others. 6 Some
provinces are good at maintaining balanced budgets; others are profligate spenders.
Some provinces strive to implement good public policy; in others, public assistance is
glossed as personal charity by the governor. Experts deem the Argentine federal budget
and the process by which it is written to be far more opaque than in other Latin American
countries; yet a handful of mayors have tried to bring community organizations and
individuals into the process, at least at the local level. In some cities, powerful political
and economic actors impose their will on the citizenry; in others, the political leadership
has experimented with relatively novel forms, such as the referendum, to give residents a
voice in crucial collective decisions. These comparisons allow Cleary and Stokes
(forthcoming) to posit a ranking of a set of four regions in which we conducted sample
surveys. Among these four regions, we ranked the city of Mar del Plata and the
surrounding district of General Puerreydon the highest, followed by the rest of the
provinces of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and, finally, the province of Misiones, where case
studies of local politics find a extensive clientelism, personalism, and extreme
domination of political life by powerful economic actors. 7
Do people in Mar del Plata perceive the motivations for politicians’ actions, and
the constraints they are under, differently than did people, say, in Misiones? In the first
three questions listed in Table 1 we asserted that politicians sometimes behave well –
6
See Gibson and Calvo 2000, Remmer and Wibbels 2000, UNDP 2002, Calvo and Murillo 2004, Amaral
and Stokes 2005, and Cleary and Stokes forthcoming.
7
The surveys were carried out in December 2001 and January 2002. We instructed the polling firm
Consultores en Políticas Públicas, S.A., to conduct face-to-face interviews with 480 adults, aged 18 or
older, each of the four regions. To select our sample, we used multistage cluster sampling procedures,
based on census tracks.
8
provide good public services (Services), are efficient (Efficient), pay attention to the
opinions of constituents like the respondent (Attention) – and then asked respondents to
choose among several alternative explanations for this good behavior. In each case one
option that we offered attributed good behavior to the personal qualities of politicians
(“they are committed people,” “they care about constituents’ opinions”), whereas the
other attributed it to mechanisms of accountability (“they’re under the watch of the
courts,” “they’ll lose the next election”). Among respondents across all three provinces,
the “accountability” answer was in all cases the one respondents chose more frequently.
Responses to these questions differed systematically by region. The number of
respondents offering accountability responses to the questions in Table 1 is highest in our
most-democratic region and then trends downward. For example, 65% of respondents
from Mar del Plata attributed good services to institutional monitoring, while only 40%
of respondents from Misiones made such an attribution. In many cases, institutional trust
declines monotonically as the level of democracy declines.
To probe systematic differences across regions, I coded answers to Services,
Efficient, and Attention as dummy variables for an “accountability” answer. Thus if a
person chose the answer “when municipal governments are efficient, this is because
otherwise people won’t vote for them in the next election,” I scored this person 1 on the
dummy variable Efficient; otherwise I scored him or her 0. I then estimated logit
regression models of these accountability answers. The results are reported in Table 2.
They show that older people were more skeptical of the characters of politicians and
more likely to ascribe good behavior to mechanisms of accountability. Women were
more likely to ascribe good government to the characters of politicians, men to their fear
9
of losing votes. Most important for our purposes, respondents in Buenos Aires, Córdoba,
and Misiones were generally less likely to offer accountability responses than were
respondents from Mar del Plata. 8 They were significantly less likely than were people
from elsewhere to say that governments provide services when they are under the watch
of the courts, the congress, and the press; somewhat less likely to say that efficient
governments are ones that fear losing office; and significantly more likely to say that
politicians who pay attention want to be reelected.
The regional effect on expectations of accountability was sometimes quite strong.
To give a sense of how much of a difference region makes in institutional trust, consider
a typical respondent in our sample, one with an average household income, education
level, and quality of housing, and who lived in a city of average size. Simulations show
that if she lived in Mar del Plata, this typical respondent had a 68% chance of saying that
governments provide good services “because they’re monitored.” But if she lived in
Misiones the chance dropped to 41%. 9
Expectations of accountability, when they do occur in Argentina, focus on both
formal institutions and on informal rules and behaviors. In some settings people believed
that politicians performed well when under the watchful eye of the courts or other
branches of government. But they also believed in informal rules of accountability.
8
The models in Table 2 include dummy variables for respondents who lived in all three regions other than
Mar del Plata. Negative signs on the Buenos Aires, Cordoba, and Misiones dummies indicate that people
in these provinces were less likely than others to offer “accountability” answers to the question.
9
Here and later I generated the simulations using the Clarify program (Tomz, Wittenberg, and King, 2001,
and King, Tomz, and Wittenberg, 2000). Clarify draws simulations of parameters of statistical models (in
this case, logit regressions) from their sampling distribution and then converts these simulated parameters
into expected values, such as expected probabilities of an answer to a survey question, given hypothetical
values of explanatory variables. Clarify software and documentation are available from Gary King’s
website at http://gking.harvard.edu. For this simulation we held household income, education level, quality
of housing, age, and population size of the respondents’ community at their sample means, and assumed a
female Peronist supporter.
10
In more-democratic regions the belief was more widespread that the anticipation of the
“future retrospective judgment of voters” (Manin, 1997) or that anticipation of “the
moment when their power is to cease, when their exercise of it is to be reviewed”
(Madison 1788), could induce governments to be efficient. The electoral connection
involves several informal rules and the expectation that other people will follow these
rules. For it to hold voters must expect other voters to use appropriate criteria in deciding
how to vote. Consider again the question, “When municipal governments work
efficiently, is this because they are staffed by good, committed people, or because they
know that if they don’t work well people won’t vote for them later?” To answer
“because they know that if they don’t work well people won’t vote for them later,”
respondents had to believe that other voters do consider the incumbent government’s
efficiency when they decide how to vote. They must expect other voters to use
retrospective criteria and not to be bought off by the small, individualized inducements of
clientelism, which tend to come at the cost of efficiency and of the provision of public
goods (see Estévez et al., 2001, and Medina and Stokes, 2002).
My survey provides more direct evidence that the expectation that one’s
neighbors would follow retrospective and not clientelist decision-rules in deciding how to
vote was more widespread in Argentina’s higher-performing democratic regions than in
its lower-performing regions. We asked survey respondents questions about how they
vote and how they expected other people in their neighborhood to vote (see Table 3).
Table 4 reports logit regression estimations. In the first two models, the dependent
variables are dummies for people who said that their neighbors used clientelistic
decision-rules, rules that would not support accountability: that they responded to
11
handouts (Handout) or favors (Favor), not a party’s program or its concern for everyone,
when deciding how to vote. The negative coefficient on dummies for Mar del Plata
indicate that respondents from that city perceived their neighbors as less clientelistic than
did respondents from other cities and towns. People from Mar del Plata were also less
likely to be the targets of clientelistic mobilization. The dependent variable in the third
model (Gift) is a dummy for people who reported that they had received a handout from a
party operative in the last campaign. The negative sign on the Mar del Plata coefficient
shows that people there were less likely to have received such handouts, leaving them
freer, presumably, to take performance into account.
In one way Mar del Plata residents were less prone to accountability than people
from elsewhere. We asked whether people in the respondent’s neighborhood paid
attention to how well a party performed in the past versus how good its proposal was for
the future (Past). People in Mar del Plata viewed their neighbors as more prospective
than did those from elsewhere (as indicated by the negative sign on the coefficient
relating the Mar-del-Plata dummy to Past in model 4). As Fearon (1999) explains,
retrospective and prospective considerations can interfere with one another when voters
attempt to use their vote to induce politicians to be responsive
Yet the central finding thus far is that people who live in regions where
democracy functions fairly well, in a national context where democracy more often
performs badly, differ from people from other cities and towns in that they are more
likely to abide by informal rules of politics that support accountability, and they are more
likely to expect their neighbors also to abide by these rules. They also show a stronger
appreciation of formal institutions that support democratic accountability.
12
What’s Trust Got to do with It? Expectations of Accountability in Mar del Plata
Social scientists have emphasized in recent years the importance of trust, and of
the institutions that promote trust, in making social relations work smoothly, both market
relations (see especially North, 1990) and relations between citizens and representatives
(see Putnam, 1993, Levi, 1997, and Ferejohn, 1999). Are people from more-democratic
regions of Argentina particularly trusting?
We asked a series of questions designed to measure levels of interpersonal trust.
By trust I mean A’s belief that B will act in A’s interest, even though B would stand to
gain in some way by not so acting and even though A cannot directly monitor B’s
relevant actions (Cleary and Stokes forthcoming). Table 5 reports questions that explore
levels of interpersonal trust: whether respondents trust their neighbors and whether they
view other people in the abstract as trustworthy. Respondents across the three provinces
were quite trusting of their neighbors, saying by a margin of three to one that they would
trust a neighbor to care for their home while they were away. But they displayed
widespread distrust of abstract others, with majorities agreeing that most people will take
advantage of you when they can and that a minority of people is trustworthy. Several
studies indicate that Argentines came to trust each other less and less over the first two
decades of renewed democracy. The percentage responding in the World Values Survey
that one could trust other people fell from 26% in 1984 to 18% in 1995 (Mussetta
2002:66).
If democracy worked unusually well in some regions of Argentina this was not
because people there were more trusting in a generalized sense than were people in other
regions. Consider the question, “Thinking about the locality or barrio where you live, if
13
you were to go on a trip, do you have any neighbors whom you could trust to care for
your house while you were away?” (variable name, Neighbor). To discern the factors
influencing people’s answers, I estimated logit regression models (not shown) where the
dependent variable was a dummy that took the value of 1 when a person said they would
leave their house in the care of a neighbor, 0 when they said they would not. Information
about a person’s income and the quality of their housing, and about the size of the city or
town they live in would help us predict their answer to this question. (People with
relatively high incomes, who lived in high-quality housing, and who were from smaller
towns and cities are more likely to trust their neighbors.) But knowing the region where
the person lived would not help us predict the answer.
Market trust. Expectations of accountability among residents of regions where
democracy worked unusually well focused on politics, and did not extend to commercial
relations. Our survey asked, “Considering now merchants who act honestly, is this
because (1) they are honest people, (2) if they weren’t, they know they could be fined, or
(3) they could lose clients?” Among all respondents, 45% answered “because they are
honorable,” 8% “because they know they could be fined,” and 45% “because they could
lose customers.” One can think of people who answered “they know they may be fined”
as believing in formal, legal institutions of commercial accountability, and those who
answered “they could lose customers” as believing in informal rules – there is no law that
says that customers must abandon merchants whom they discover to be dishonest, and no
sanction for failing to abandon them, but we would expect many customers to do just
this. Such beliefs (as well as formal legal institutions) help reduce transaction costs and
smooth the functioning of market economies (North, 1990). But what’s important for our
14
purposes is that residents of Buenos Aires (including Mar del Plata) were significantly
less likely to believe in either a formal or an informal institution of market accountability
than were people from Córdoba and Misiones.
In sum, not greater interpersonal trust, nor a generalized belief in rules enforcing
accountability, but a belief specific to political relations, is what distinguished people’s
expectations in more-democratic regions from those of people in less-democratic regions.
Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Roots of Accountability
The question that immediately suggests itself is, Do these informal (and formal)
rules, and the expectations that others will follow them, in fact cause democracy to
function better? Perhaps, instead, the causal sequence is reversed, and relatively lively
local democracy causes beliefs in these informal rules? Why does democracy function
relatively well in some settings, and are informal rules of accountability really the cause?
Although I won’t in this chapter offer a full answer to these questions in the Argentine
case, I offer some preliminary thoughts.
Notice first some explanations that we can reject. One line of thinking, proposed
most prominently by Robert Putnam (1993), focuses on a political culture of trust. Some
regions in a country may develop a relatively rich associational life, a greater reservoir of
personal trust, and hence larger supplies of social capital. According to Putnam,
democracy works better in the North than in the South of Italy because “the civic
community” in the former “is marked by an active, public-spirited citizenry, by
egalitarian political relations, by a social fabric of trust and cooperation,” whereas the
South is “cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and
isolation, and a culture of distrust” (:15, emphasis mine). Social trust in the polity acts
15
like market trust in the economy, allowing people to achieve higher levels of efficiency.
A trusting society secretes a well-functioning democracy.
In Argentina, as we have seen, people in places where democracy worked
relatively well did not trust people in general, or their neighbors, or merchants, or
politicians, more than in other regions where democracy worked less well. They weren’t
particularly prone to entrust their homes to their neighbors, but they did trust their fellow
voters to punish politicians who underperformed, and they trusted their fellow voters not
to be bought off by handouts. And they didn’t trust politicians except in the convoluted
sense of trusting them to follow their own interest in staying in office and out of jail. A
final piece of evidence that social capital is not the key to our story is that people in
more-democratic regions do not seem to have created more social capital than did people
elsewhere. We asked a range of questions about respondents’ involvement in
organizations and about whether and how frequently they attended meetings. These
measures of social capital failed to predict adherence to rules of accountability; nor were
people from more-democratic regions more involved in associational life than were
people from less-democratic ones.
Another venerable line of research links the emergence and consolidation of
democracy with economic development. Higher incomes are supposed to imbue people
with longer time horizons, and make them less conflict-prone and more tolerant of others’
opinions – all of which are in turn supposed to promote democracy (see especially Lipset,
1958, 1960). Among people who answered our surveys we observed no straightforward
effect of income, education, or the quality of housing on beliefs that might promote
democracy. Just as important, whatever effects people’s household incomes or
16
educational levels or quality of housing might have had, they did not reduce the effect of
region on expectations of accountability. Comparing a resident of Mar del Plata with a
resident of a Misiones city or town of the same size as Mar del Plata, both with the same
level of income, the Mar del Plata resident is considerably more likely to abide by, and
expect others to abide by, informal rules that support accountability.
In contrast, income and development, not as traits of individuals but as structural
traits of communities, may help explain differences in the quality of local democracy in
Argentina. Regions and cities vary in their levels of development and in their class
structures. Scholars in comparative politics have contended that equality promotes
democracy (see especially Boix, 2003, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2002; this idea also
appears in places in Lipset, 1958). When the gap between rich and poor is relatively
narrow, the rich may view the poor as less “`beyond the pale’” (Lipset 1958:83) and
hence more readily incorporated into civic life; and social equality may make the poor
look less threatening to the wealthy, because they are less prone to pursue strongly
redistributive measures (Boix 2003). Applied to our context, one could imagine that a
community that is not socially polarized would also be one in which people would be
relatively ready to expect others to follow courses of action appropriate to sustaining
democratic accountability. It is tantalizing to note, along these lines, that a higher
percentage of self-reported incomes in Mar del Plata than in any of our three other
regions were concentrated in the middle of the range (300-700 pesos per month; 44%
reported this as their household income in Mar del Plata, whereas only 33% did in
Misiones, and the other two sampling regions fell in between). It is also tantalizing to
note that, when asked to place themselves in the lower, middle, or upper class, a larger
17
percentage of people in Mar del Plata chose “middle class” than in any of the other
regions. Yet these comparisons could be misleading: they involve comparing income
distribution in a single city with income distribution across whole provinces. 10
My hunch is that beliefs in accountability are both a cause and a consequence of
well functioning democracy, and that both structural factors and good luck are often at
play. Imagine that a city happens, for no structural reason, to generate a set of judges and
lawyers who aggressively prosecute corruption and waste in city government. Citizens
who observed politicians being held accountable should display a growing belief that
politicians can be held accountable. Because they hold this belief, they are gradually
willing to concede more power and resources to city government. Local government
does more for people, and its own structures are strengthened, including those that
strengthen accountability. A virtuous cycle is underway. At the same time structural
factors, such as development and equality, are likely to further strengthen both the reality
of, and expectations of, local democracy.
Conclusions: Informal Institutions and Democracy
When democracy works well, when it achieves the effects that make it better than
other systems of government, this is because formal institutions, informal institutions,
and informal rules of behavior interact in felicitous ways. The new institutionalism in
comparative politics may have underestimated the importance of informal institutions and
10
I did study the effect of the proportion of poor people in a municipality, measured either as the proportion
of houses that are substandard, or as the proportion of people in a municipality with “unsatisfied basic
needs,” on the beliefs and expectations discussed in this paper. Unfortunately these data come from the
1991 census, and hence are not very reliable measures of poverty rates in 2001-02, when we conducted the
survey. What’s more, poverty rates are a very uncertain measure of the distribution of income: two
communities with identical poverty rates may have very different Gini indexes, for example. With both
caveats, the effect of poverty rates was the reverse of what we might have expected: the higher the poverty
rate in his community, the more likely a person was (all else equal) to offer “accountability” responses to
various questions. Furthermore, poverty rates did not make regional effects disappear; indeed poverty rates
if anything brought out these regional effects more strongly.
18
informal rules, whether they are more like the rules of a game or the rules of grammar,
for democratic outcomes. Comparativists have tended to conceive of institutions as
creating incentives that map straightforwardly onto outcomes. A better way to think
about the mapping of formal institutions on outcomes is that their effect is often
conditional on informal institutions and rules, and these informal institutions and rules
are variables that need to be unpacked empirically. As Helmke and Levitsky note, the
role of informal rules on democracy goes beyond one of filling the gaps left by formal
institutions. In fact, formal institutions in some instances will not work at all in the way
they were meant to unless the appropriate informal rules are in place.
We’ve seen a lot of evidence from Argentina that certain informal rules covary, at
least, with good democratic outcomes. What seems to have mattered for a relatively
lively local democracy is not that people trust politicians or other people in the simple
sense of expecting them to promote one’s interests if unconstrained. Expectations of
accountability, rather than trust, were the informal rules that helped support local
democracy in Argentina.
19
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23
Table 1 Responses to Questions about Institutional Trust and Trust in Politicians by
Region
Mar
del
Plata
Buenos
Aires
Córdoba
Misiones
Total
65%
(311)
30%
(142)
56%
(268)
40%
(192)
48%
(232)
40%
(194)
40%
(192)
53%
(256)
52%
(1003)
41%
(784)
6%
(27)
4%
(20)
11%
(54)
7%
(32)
7%
(133)
71%
(340)
24%
(116)
5%
(24)
75%
(362)
22%
(106)
3%
(12)
68%
(326)
26%
(125)
6%
(29)
67%
(321)
29%
(140)
4%
(19)
70%
(1349)
25%
(487)
4%
(84)
85%
(410)
11%
(55)
3%
(15)
80%
(386)
17%
(83)
2%
(11)
78%
(375)
16%
(76)
6%
(29)
78%
(375)
18%
(87)
4%
(18)
81%
(1546)
16%
(301)
4%
(73)
Services
When governments provide good
services to the people, is this because
they are under the watch of the
courts, congress, or the press
because they are good, committed
people
no answer
Efficient
When governments function efficiently,
is this because
they know if they don’t, people won’t
vote for them in the next election
the people governing are good,
committed people
no answer
Attention
When politicians really pay attention to
people like you, is this because
they want to be reelected
they really care
no answer
24
Table 2 Logit Models of “Accountability” Responses to Questions about Politicians
Dependent
variable
Model
estimated
Income
(1)
Service
(2)
Efficient
(3)
Attention
Logit
Logit
Logit
-0.057
0.005
-0.105
(0.043)
(0.038)
(0.054)
0.041
-0.073
-0.060
Education
(0.037)
(0.038)
(0.043)
-0.006
-0.065
0.018
Housing
(0.076)
(0.089)
(0.094)
-0.014
-0.062
Gender
-0.318
(0.102)
(0.103)
(0.119)
-0.006
Age
-0.013
-0.017
(0.004)
(0.004)
(0.004)
0.049
Peronist
-0.230
-0.420
(0.116)
(0.127)
(0.150)
supporter
-0.058
-0.036
0.045
Radical
(0.144)
(0.142)
(0.226)
supporter
0.006
0.040
0.031
Log
(0.037)
(0.046)
(0.046)
Population
0.081
Buenos Aires
-0.408
-0.438
(0.184)
(0.190)
(0.214)
-0.115
-0.313
Córdoba
-0.618
(0.187)
(0.224)
(0.255)
-0.384
Misiones
-1.080
-0.517
(0.229)
(0.222)
(0.247)
Constant
1.605
1.881
2.664
(0.528)
(0.697)
(0.742)
The models reported were estimates that drew on five datasets with imputed values for
missing data. To generate the imputed datasets I used the Amelia program described in
King et al. (2001) and implemented in Honaker et al. (2001).
Explanation of variables:
Service: Dummy for response, “Governments provide good services when they’re under
the watch of the courts, congress, and the press.”
Efficient: Dummy for response, “When municipal governments are efficient, this is
because they know otherwise people won’t vote for them.”
Attention: Dummy for response, “When politicians pay attention to people like me, this
is because they want to be reelected.”
25
Income: Self-reported by respondent, 9-level scale of family income.
Education: 9-level scale, from no formal education to university.
Housing: Assessed by interviewer, 5-level scale (1=poorest quality, 5=highest quality),
based on assessment of building materials, flooring, and presence or absence of consumer
durables.
Gender: male=0, female=1.
Peronist: coded 1 for respondents who said, independent of how they voted, that they
liked the Peronist Party more than others, 0 otherwise.
Radical: coded 1 for respondents who said, independent of how they voted, that they
liked the Radical Party more than others, 0 otherwise.
Log population: natural log of the number of inhabitants, according to 2001 census,
residing in the municipality where the respondent lived.
Buenos Aires, Cordoba, and Misiones are dummy variables for interviewees living in
each of these regions. The base region is therefore Mar del Plata.
26
Table 3 Responses to Questions about Voters’ Decision Rules
Question
“Do people sympathize with
[most important party in
neighborhood] because it has a
better program, or because it
gave out things during the
campaign?”
Variable
Handout
“Do people sympathize with [this Favor
party] because they believe it is
concerned about everyone, or
because it has given out a favor?
Gift
Accountability Non-acct’y
Response
response
No ans.
Better
program:
53%
Gave things
out:
28%
Concerned
about
everyone:
45%
Gave out
favors:
33%
22%
Yes: 7%
No: 92%
1%
19%
“In the last campaign, did you
receive any good from a party
operative?”
“Do people sympathize with [this Past
party] because it managed things
well or because it has a good
program?”
managed well: good
program:
32%
43%
27
24%
Table 4 Logit Models of Clientelistic (Non-Accountability) Responses to Questions
about Voting
Dependent
variable
Model
estimated
Income
Education
Housing
Gender
Age
Peronist
Radical
Log
population
Poverty rate
Mar del
Plata
Constant
(1)
Handout
(2)
Favor
(3)
Gift
Logit
Logit
Logit
Logit
-0.067
(0.042)
0.034
(0.034)
-0.034
(0.079)
0.021
(0.105)
-0.003
(0.004)
-0.453
(0.137)
-0.661
(0.176)
0.028
(0.033)
-0.048
(0.018)
-1.635
(0.183)
0.056
(0.426)
1920
-0.038
(0.034)
0.048
(0.031)
0.099
(0.068)
0.005
(0.095)
-0.010
(0.003)
-0.848
(0.117)
-0.329
(0.145)
0.081
(0.032)
0.003
(0.016)
-0.705
(0.136)
-0.191
(0.419)
1920
-0.217
(0.078)
-0.221
(0.080)
-0.311
(0.131)
-0.184
(0.195)
-0.014
(0.006)
0.718
(0.221)
-0.321
(0.385)
-0.096
(0.051)
0.027
(0.034)
0.095
(0.031)
-0.087
(0.068)
0.007
(0.095)
0.009
(0.003)
-0.253
(0.118)
-0.203
(0.148)
-0.167
(0.033)
0.012
(0.016)
-0.437
(0.133)
1.771
(0.434)
1920
-0.886
(0.398)
1.368
(0.758)
1920
(4)
Past
N
observations
The models reported drew on five datasets with imputed values for missing data. To
generate the imputed datasets I used the Amelia program described in King et al. (2001)
and implemented in Honaker et al. (2001).
Explanation of variables:
Handout: Dummy for response, “People support [most important local party] because it
gave things out in the campaign [not because it has a better program.]”
Favor: Dummy for response, “People support this party because it has done them a favor
[not because it is concerned for everyone].”
28
Gift: Dummy for people who said they had received a campaign handout from a party
operative during the previous (October 2001 national legislative) campaign. The modal
handout was some food.
Past: Dummy for response, “People support this party because it has performed well in
the past [not because it has a good proposal for the future.]”
Poverty rate: Proportion of residents living in sub-standard housing, from the 1991
census.
The remaining independent variables are defined as in the notes to Table 2.
29
Table 5: Responses to Questions about Personal Trust, by Region
Mar del
Plata
Buenos
Aires
75%
(360)
25%
(113)
2%
(7)
80%
(383)
20%
(97)
0%
(0)
55%
(263)
42%
(203)
3%
(14)
Córdoba
Misiones
Total
75%
(359)
24%
(117)
1%
(4)
68%
(328)
30%
(146)
1%
(6)
75%
(1430)
25%
(473)
1%
(17)
53%
(254)
45%
(215)
2%
(11)
50%
(241)
45%
(214)
5%
(25)
57%
(272)
37%
(178)
6%
(30)
54%
(1034)
42%
(810)
4%
(80)
26%
(123)
61%
(291)
13%
(64)
0.4%
(2)
23%
(111)
56%
(271)
20%
(95)
1%
(3)
18%
(84)
59%
(284)
22%
(105)
2%
(7)
22%
(414)
59%
(1140)
18%
(351)
1%
(15)
Neighbor
If you go away on a trip, do
you have a neighbor whom
you could trust to care for
your house?
yes
no
no answer
Advantage
Do you believe most people
would take advantage of you
if they had the chance?
yes
no
no answer
Trust
Which is closest to your way
of thinking
You can trust a majority
of people
You can only trust a
minority
I don’t trust anyone
no answer
20%
(96)
61%
(294)
18%
(87)
1%
(3)
30