Electing governors: complexities of institutional design in Latin America’s unitary countries

• Unitary countries are increasingly letting voters elect their own governors, but the power of these governors varies greatly. • Whether gubernatorial elections truly empower governors depends on additional reforms politicians introduce alongside these elections. • The stated goal of political decentralization is usually to enhance democracy, but politicians’ private goals better explain its actual effects. • Where private and stated goals aligned, decentralization was “designed to succeed,” but where they diverged it was instead “designed to fail.” Unitary countries are experimenting with reforms that strengthen subnational regions, a level of government usually associated with federalism. This paper examines the decision to introduce gubernatorial elections in four Latin American countries: Colombia in 1992, Peru in 2002, Bolivia in 2005, and Chile in 2016. Despite the appearance of institutional convergence – four neighboring countries one after another adopting the same electoral institution ostensibly for the same democratizing reasons – I show that the decision to elect governors had very different effects because of the way this discrete decision was paired with reforms in other institutional dimensions. In a highly complex fashion, these other dimensions (e.g. fiscal transfers, departmental autonomy, amalgamation, and deconcentration) were just as important as the decision to elect governors in shaping how this common decision played out. The main finding is that gubernatorial elections had the effect of profoundly decentralizing the political system in Bolivia and Colombia, while in Chile and Peru it failed to alter the inter-governmental balance of power due to high levels of instrumental mismatch. In the first pair of countries, where reformers’ private goals aligned with their stated goals, decentralization was designed to succeed, but in the second pair of countries it was designed to fail due to the divergence between private and stated goals.