Mayors Unchecked
Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of Local Autonomy in Latin American Municipalities
Tomáš Došek (Pontifical Catholic University of Peru) & Kent Eaton (University of California, Santa Cruz)
It was once the case that when we talked about democracy, we thought of it only at the national level: a country was considered democratic (or not) just by considering the quality of its national institutions and the question of whether elections for national offices were free and fair. But that tendency to privilege the national level and to ignore more local levels of government comes at a cost because it misses many of the ways that people actually experience democracy or its absence. In response, scholars have started to directly research local levels of government – not in ways that ignore the importance of the national level but that treat local spheres as significant. One major finding that has emerged from this “subnational turn” in the literature is that some countries have quite robust democracies in terms of their national governments, but their local governments cannot be as accurately described as fully democratic. The opposite can also be true: there are countries that we consider to be authoritarian at the national level but in which local governments may actually be characterized by a fair amount of democratic contestation.
Our article contributes to this literature by studying mayors in one region of the world – Latin America – who in the last couple of decades have gained more prominence as political actors. This is primarily because decentralization as a popular trend has given local governments much more power, authority, and responsibility. In many cities across the region, we can point to mayors who have used their authority to do important things, including opening the budget to new forms of participation and providing services that are tailored to local priorities. In this article, however, we emphasize the opposite problem: mayors who govern using informal political practices that might be characterized as undemocratic.
Our central argument holds that when mayors want to hang on to power indefinitely, or co-opt the opposition, or stack the deck in their own favor, they are often more able to do so than other politicians. The title that we have given our paper – “mayors unchecked” – conveys this sense that it may be especially hard for national politicians, local councilors, or citizens to hold mayors accountable for their actions as elected officials. Our argument is not that mayors are more powerful than presidents at the national level or governors at the provincial level, since these actors typically have much more power at their disposal than most mayors. Instead, we find that undemocratic mayors enjoy greater institutional leeway and can be harder to get rid of, with troubling consequences for democracy on the ground.
By conducting wide-ranging and lengthy interviews with a host of stakeholders in six different municipalities, we have uncovered some of the most important reasons for why mayors are seldom checked by would-be opponents. The fact that these six cities are in three otherwise quite different countries – Chile, Paraguay, and Peru – increases our confidence in the common dynamics that we have found across our cases. In the article, we distinguish between the vertical (inter-level) and horizontal (inter-branch) advantages that boost mayoral autonomy. By vertical autonomy, we refer to the absence of institutional instruments that would enable higher level authorities to remove mayors who are clearly abusing power in their offices. Presidents in Latin America can be (and often are) removed from office through impeachment when they engage in undemocratic behaviors, and in other countries undemocratic governors can also be removed through what are called “interventions” by the national government. Widespread perceptions of the lesser importance of mayors – despite their significance in terms of whether and how democracy is experienced across the country – protect them from this kind of removal from above.
Meanwhile, mayors often benefit from many advantages within their own localities that allow them to behave autocratically. For instance, in some countries the party of the mayor is guaranteed an absolute majority of seats on the municipal council, regardless of the outcome of local elections: an institutional advantage that we never see at the national level. This is important because the municipal council is one space where mayors would be most likely to encounter actors who would otherwise try to hold them accountable. Even where this guarantee is not in place, and the majority of councilors do not belong to the mayor’s party, most councilors face a whole range of other structural obstacles that make it very hard for them to exercise oversight of the mayor. For example, many councilors do not receive a salary and have other forms of employment, and some of them receive only per diem funds, and mayors may control the release of these funds. Many councilors are not present in the day-to-day operations of the municipality and may only come to the municipality once a week to attend to residents’ concerns and take part in council meetings. In addition to benefiting from the weakness of checks by councilors, mayors also benefit from a number of other deficits, including the absence of local media markets and the weakness of the kind of civil society watchdog groups that tend to be more robust at the national level.
What can be done to “check” mayors to ensure that they govern in ways that enhance rather than undermine democracy? We believe that effective solutions will need to tackle both of the dimensions we emphasize in our paper. Vertically, national-level auditing institutions should be strengthened in their authority and capacity to expose local abuses. Horizontally, automatic majorities on local councils should be eliminated if they are ever going to serve as checks on mayors. Councilors could participate more fully in the day-to-day administration of municipalities if their jobs were full-time and be compensated with salaries that are independent of the will of the mayor. Finally, local civil society organizations should be strengthened, incentivized, and supported, including if necessary by national actors both governmental and non-governmental.
Read the full UAR article here.
Tomáš Došek is an associate professor of Political Science in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and author of The Persistence of Local Caudillos in Latin America: Informal Political Practices and Democracy in Unitary Countries (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024). @tomdosek
Kent Eaton is a distinguished professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of Territory and Ideology in Latin America: Policy Conflicts between National and Subnational Governments (Oxford University Press, 2017).