UC Berkeley

In many developing countries, even those that now have democratically elected governments, there remain widespread concerns about strong leaders exercising unchecked power and imposing important decisions through executive orders or decrees. Concentrated executive authority seems most popular during times of crisis or political gridlock, but can backfire in the long run. Many developing democracies have also had presidents removed early and/or prosecuted for abuses of power. Yet it remains unclear whether these forms of accountability actually work, when prosecutions are often politicized and may drive incumbents to cling to power to protect themselves.

In this dissertation, I study how the fates of former Latin American presidents influence successors’ efforts to consolidate power, through their use of executive decrees. I use computational methods to parse decrees and identify those that not only enact external policies, but that make changes to internal government institutions. I also introduce measures of the consistency or predictability of former leaders’ punishments and rewards, and test whether that predictability influences subsequent leaders’ decisions about how to use their own power while in office. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how strong political leaders make important decisions – even restructuring powerful components of the governing apparatus – and what signals about their future punishment or reward encourage them to seek more power for themselves or to exercise restraint.