Comparative research on the structural determinants of fiscal crises has been largely shaped by approaches focusing on endurance and stability of institutional arrangements. This article takes aim with this conventional wisdom and contributes to this debate by exploring the constraining effect of legislative malapportionment, which is one of the most stable and resilient institutional characteristics of federalism, on the responses to economic crises in Latin American federations. The analysis suggests that, strong, historically persistent, institutional arrangements have unintended distortionary fiscal consequences that extant research on institutional design often fails to acknowledge
