Please join us for the fourth speaker in our Spring Series: Contemporary Challenges to Latin American Democracies.

Andres Meji (University of Notre Dame) will join us on April 6 t 12:30pm in the Greenleaf Conference Room for a talk entitled: State Erosion by Design: Unpacking the Case of Ecuador

The extensive literature on democratic backsliding has thoroughly documented how executives undermine electoral, liberal, and other regime-level institutions to advance their own political agenda. This research project brings the state back into the conversation to illustrate how some presidents in Latin America also aim to weaken or dismantle essential governance capacities by dismantling or politicizing bureaucracies, hollowing out regulatory agencies, centralizing coercive authority, or redirecting public resources in pursuit of partisan ends. The presentation illustrates some empirical trends observed in the case of Ecuador and argues that hollowing out state capacities represent a more pervasive and longstanding threat to the survival of democratic governance.