Federalizing Processes in Latin America

This paper focuses on Latin America’s federal countries, which are few in number but large in (territorial and demographic) size, containing well over half of the region’s population. The first part engages in a cross-national comparison of the most important similarities and differences between the three largest federations (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), including institutions of self-rule and shared rule. The goal here is to document the “varieties of federalism” that exist within Latin America, to ask where these institutional varieties come from, and to consider why they matter. Moving from this “comparative statics” approach to a more dynamic mode of analysis, the second part then examines cross-temporal change by seeking to explain how and why these three federations have evolved over time, converging in some respects and diverging in others. While the set of federal systems in the region has remained the same for over a century now, each of these three federations has experienced important episodes of decentralization and recentralization, often in connection with changes in regime type (i.e. political democratization) and development models (i.e. economic liberalization). Who is driving these changes in federal institutions and who is resisting them, and what do these changes mean for the balance between effectiveness and legitimacy that all federal systems need to strike?