ABSTRACT
X You will be able to describe how political reality and what is written down in constitutions do not always coincide, and give some reasons why.
IF THE BREAKDOWN of democracy preoccupied political scientists in the 1970s and “transitions” preoccupied comparativists in the 1980s, then the “consolidation” and “deepening” of democracy became the favored theme of the 1990s. Attention shifted away from the study of democratic breakdowns and transitions toward more prescriptive studies. Many political scientists think that Latin America’s democracies are stable and unlikely to revert to military rule; for them, the time has come to focus more attention “on the process whereby elected leaders, working through the institutions of democracy, make decisions” (Munck 2004: 437). This call has been answered by a school of comparativists called “new institutionalists.”
