Thursday, November 6, 2014
:
10:35 AM
Navajo (Convention Center)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The legitimacy of the law as a governing structure distinguishes so-called ‘illiberal democracies’ from liberal democracies. Empirically, deficient rule of law and illiberal democracy appear to correlate and this suggests that elections are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a robust democracy. Evidence indicates that deficient rule of law in the developing world has negative implications for economic growth, democracy, and well-being more generally. However, only a small portion of the literature has focused on revealing the determinants of the rule of law. This paper explores the complex interplay of social structural, political, and legitimating factors on rule of law in Latin America. This study employs survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) representing residents of 21 Latin American countries. The survey data is a rich combination of perceptual, attitudinal, and objective questions and selected questions have been extracted from the survey data and combined into latent factors using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Missing data has been handled using full information maximum likelihood (FIML). This study utilizes the 2010 LAPOP survey at the national, sub-national and individual levels. Accordingly, the design uses Multi-level modeling to control for expected heterogeneity shared across these nested units, operating under the assumption that shared spaces within a polity matter when it comes to legal and political regimes. In addition, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is employed to reveal relationships across the constructed latent factors. This study tests competing theories regarding the rule of law to discern which theoretical factors or their combinations best explains rule of law norms, attitudes that recognize and justify the binding of private and public behavior, while taking into account rule of law violations such as crime, corruption, and vote-buying. Accordingly, this study has substantive implications for constitutional and legal reform policy and can contribute to those international organizations and government agencies actively formulating, implementing and funding reform policies in the region.
