Date:
Location:
"Draining the Swamp? Partisan Bias in the Prosecution of Former Latin American Leaders"
Speaker:
Gretchen Helmke, Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester.
Contact:
Gabrielle Patterson
gpatterson@fas.harvard.edu
Moderator:
Steven Levitsky, Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Populism/Challenges to Democracy. David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, Department of Government, Harvard University; Harvard College Professor.
Abstract:
This paper introduces and analyzes an original dataset, Latin American Leaders on Trial, which examines the extended post-tenure legal fates of 119 Latin American presidents over the last three and a half decades. Because we can only observe whether, when, and for what crimes former leaders are charged, but not whether such crimes were actually committed, our analysis of whether the rule of law is functioning or being manipulated in any given case is limited in important ways. Yet, guided by micro-level theory and careful analysis of what can observe about such trials, we uncover a series of robust correlations, which suggest that partisan bias shapes whether successor governments prosecute their predecessors. Taken together, our results provide new support for the old Latin American adage, “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.”
