The book is a thorough study that focuses on the impact of the current crime wave on citizens' respect for the law in countries such as Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. The work opens with a brief review of the literature on the rule of law and legal socialization, followed by an historical overview of the democratization and justice reform in Central America from the 1990s to the present. Set as a comparative, micro-level study, the work then looks at an array of measures from citizens' toleration of government abuses of power to vigilante justice and the reporting of crime to police. Lastly, an empirical model is developed to predict citizens' attitudes, combining both these micro-level individual attributes with macro-level measures of institutional performance. A unique look at the process of democratization from a comparative perspective, Citizens' Support for the Rule of Law in Central America it will appeal to faculty, researchers, and students interested in Latin American politics, comparative politics, and democratic transition.

Few tasks are as crucial for the future of democracy in Latin America—and, indeed, in other underdeveloped areas of the world—as strengthening the rule of law and reforming the system of taxation. In this book, Marcelo Bergman shows how success in getting citizens to pay their taxes is related intimately to the social norms that undergird the rule of law. The threat of legal sanctions is itself insufficient to motivate compliance, he argues. That kind of deterrence works best when citizens already have other reasons to want to comply, based on their beliefs about what is fair and about how their fellow citizens are behaving. The problem of "free riding," which arises when cheaters can count on enough suckers to pay their taxes so they can avoid doing so and still benefit from the government’s supply of public goods, cannot be reversed just by stringent law, because the success of governmental enforcement ultimately depends on the social equilibrium that predominates in each country. Culture and state effectiveness are inherently linked. Using a wealth of new data drawn from his own multidimensional research involving game theory, statistical models, surveys, and simulations, Bergman compares Argentina and Chile to show how, in two societies that otherwise share much in common, the differing traditions of rule of law explain why so many citizens evade paying taxes in Argentina—and why, in Chile, most citizens comply with the law. In the concluding chapter, he draws implications for public policy from the empirical findings and generalizes his argument to other societies in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

More than thirty years have passed since Latin America began the arduous task of transitioning from military-led rule to democracy. In this time, more countries have moved toward the institutional bases of democracy than at any time in the region’s history. Nearly all countries have held free, competitive elections and most have had peaceful alternations in power between opposing political forces. Despite these advances, however, Latin American countries continue to face serious domestic and international challenges to the consolidation of stable democratic governance. The challenges range from weak political institutions, corruption, legacies of militarism, transnational crime, and globalization among others. In the second edition of Latin American Democracy contributors – both academics and practitioners, North Americans, Latin Americans, and Spaniards—explore and assess the state of democratic consolidation in Latin America by focusing on the specific issues and challenges confronting democratic governance in the region. This thoroughly updated revision provides new chapters on: the environment, decentralization, the economy, indigenous groups, and the role of China in the region.

This book examines the reasoning practice of 15 constitutional courts and supreme courts, including the Caribbean Commonwealth and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Enriched by empirical data, with which it strives to contribute to a constructive and well-informed debate, the volume analyses how Latin American courts justify their decisions. Based on original data and a region-specific methodology, the book provides a systematic analysis utilising more than 600 leading cases. It shows which interpretive methods and concepts are most favoured by Latin American courts, and which courts were the most prolific in their reasoning activities. The volume traces the features of judicial dialogue on a regional and sub-regional level and enables the evaluation and comparison of each country's reasoning culture in different epochs. The collection includes several graphs to visualise the changes and tendencies of the reasoning practices throughout time in the region, based on information gathered from the dataset. To better understand the current functioning and the future tendencies of courts in Latin America and the Caribbean, the volume illuminates how constitutional and supreme courts have actually been making their decisions in the selected landmark cases, which could also contribute to future successful litigation strategies for both national constitutional courts and the Inter-American Court for Human Rights. This project was made possible due to the collaboration and funding provided by the Rule of Law Programme for Latin America of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Law School of the University of San Francisco de Quito.

This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the study of the rule of law across law, the humanities, and social sciences, as well as insights into the practice of building the rule of law within and among states. Its 28 chapters are by many of the world’s leading scholars of the rule of law, as well as distinguished junior scholars, from a dozen countries and representing a number of academic disciplines. The chapters are ordered to progress, first, from theory to the practice of the rule of law and, second, from the rule of law within, to beyond, the state. They divide into three parts. The first part examines the concept, history, and value of the rule of law. This section considers the importance of political and intellectual history in shaping the concept over the centuries and takes novel philosophical approaches to the connection between the rule of law and other important ideals such as justice, equality, and civil disobedience. The second part transitions from theoretical studies to accounts of practical exercises in building the rule of law. The chapters consider the challenges of rule of law reform, including the use of local intermediaries facilitating interactions between international legal aid organizations and state governments, the challenges of legal translation across vastly different societies, the pathways of knowledge among the powerless about the protective potential of the rule of law, as well as the possible future for artificial intelligence systems in helping to reinforce rule-of-law principles. The third part examines the rule of law from a number of perspectives within particular supranational and national states, such as the European Union, China, Singapore, and South Africa, among others, and concludes by considering the prospects of the rule of law beyond the state, both within and among international institutions such as the United Nations, as well as non-territorial spaces like the world’s oceans. This Handbook is aimed at rule of law scholars across law, the humanities, and the social sciences, law and development practitioners, policymakers, and advanced students and researchers who seek a state-of-the-art overview of the history, theory, and practice of the rule of law.

Essays on the emerging new orthodoxy in international law that advocates the "rule of law" and "civil society" across the globe