ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused on how COVID-19 has impacted Latin American countries with an emphasis on legislative policy. Legislatures are the most important representative institution of democratic governments. Therefore, understanding how they have worked is a means to analyze the functioning of democracy and how executive–legislative relations have been configured during this period of transformation. The chapter shows that legislatures adapted their functioning to the crisis, although their roles varied across the region. The pandemic was an opportunity for legislatures to strengthen their representative character and exercise their counterbalancing role by carefully monitoring presidential action. However, in some cases, their role was limited and the pandemic reinforced previous trends in the relationship between powers unfavorable to legislature.
