Governance in the Americas: Decentralization, Democracy, and Subnational Government in Brazil, Mexico, and the USA

3. The Changing Institutional Capacity of Subnational Government: Toward Effective Co-governance

C H A P T E R T H R E E The Changing Institutional Capacity of Subnational Government Toward Effective Co-governance Victoria E. Rodríguez, Peter K. Spink, and Peter M.Ward Until relatively recently most analyses of federalism and decentralization in Latin American countries focused almost exclusively upon relations between the various levels of government, looking up and down the levels of government from central to local, with a particular emphasis upon the central and highest level. It is equally true that in most of these studies the term government is associated almost exclusively with the executive branch, especially in heavily centralized federal and presidentialist systems. Although the other branches are also institutionalized, they have been largely invisible in the discussion—except for their legitimating functions for the national polity and, in the case of the judiciary, for their day-to-day work in civil, contractual, and criminal justice affairs. Horizontal versus Vertical Decentralization and the Separation of Powers The central aim of this chapter is to assess the impact of changes in democratic practice and decentralization on intragovernmental institu88 The Changing Institutional Capacity of Subnational Government 89 tional development and performance at the subnational level. We use the term intragovernmental relations to differentiate these relations from intergovernmental relations, a term most widely used to refer to relations between different levels or, occasionally, to relations among governments at the same level—the latter being the focus of chapter 4. Breaking down this question further, we propose to examine the efficacy of these co-governance arrangements measured in three ways. First, we examine the relative powers exercised by the principal branches of government and the changes that are taking place in the three countries with regard to the balance of governmental power. Second, we explore the modernization of institutional capacity and readiness across those branches. And third, we analyze the expectations and opportunities for citizen participation and engagement in formal governance through such mechanisms as plebiscites, referenda, and single-issue voting procedures. Other aspects of citizen participation, such as interest groups, consultative councils , forums, and lobbying, will be discussed in chapters 4 and 5. As we outlined in chapter 1, centralization and decentralization are usually understood to describe a vertical structure and process in which resources and decision-making authority are organized and transferred between the central (federal) government and subnational and local tiers of government. However, a second dimension of decentralization that is studied less systematically also opens up the political space. This is horizontal decentralization, which embraces the political space of the roles, activities, and powers between the three branches (or powers) of government (Rodríguez 1997), as well as institutional changes in the ways citizens may exercise their individual or collective authority.1 Under federalist structures these powers are separated by design. As Ackerman (2000) points out, while this constitutional design may create a structure of more or less equal powers, it can also weight effective power in favor of either the executive or the legislative branch. However, in countries experiencing democratization, the “separation of powers” is a question not merely of prior design but of a deliberate process to “loosen and separate ” previously compacted institutional relationships, and this results in a recasting of the roles played by each branch and level of government at both the national and the subnational level. In the USA the Founding Fathers, after the experience with the Articles of Confederation, fashioned a bottom-up federalist system of a union of 90 RODRÍGUEZ, SPINK, WARD states in which the relative power of the national executive was highly constrained vis-à-vis the legislature and the judiciary.As Ackerman (2000) and others before him have amply explained, the U.S. model gives the president very substantial powers over the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy but also gives the predominant power for lawmaking to a lower house of representatives that is elected nationally and a strong upper house representing the states, each of which sends two (locally) elected senators to Washington. Although the balance of power varies depending upon the party composition of the respective houses and their relative alignment with the policy orientation of the president, this presidentialist system of federal government creates structural impediments to the efficacy of policy making and accentuates the possibilities of gridlock .2 This separation of powers is replicated at the subnational state level, where the effective powers of the state executive (the...