ABSTRACT
Bureaucratic inefficiency, patronage-induced overstaffing, and outright corruption retard economic development and reduce public well-being in developing countries. They prevent governments from effectively carrying out the economic plans to which they devote so much official attention, and deprive citizens of government services to which they are legally entitled. In this chapter, the author explains why reforms that are widely regarded as necessary and desirable often face such severe obstacles to their initiation. She explains how the game-theoretic prediction fares when confronted with evidence from the Latin American democracies. The author analyses the predictions derived from the game-theoretic model on the universe of Latin American countries that have experienced 15 or more years of consecutive competitive democracy since 1930: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Costa Rica was excluded because its legislators cannot be immediately reelected, so that the simplifying assumptions about the interests of legislators used here could not be expected to apply to them.
