Searching for the right way to count: veto players in Argentina's first democratic decade

Abstract

The democratization literature often singles out the process of institution-building as a core and durable issue for young democracies. This article assesses Argentina's first democratic decade in light of this essential requirement and does this by suggesting the worth of assuming that democratic consolidation is an unpredictable outcome of contingent contributions at selected points in time through which political actors struggle to shape institutions, which in turn constrain future political behavior and incentives. This progressive crystallization of formal rules (what is acceptable) and political ambitions (what is attainable) will be illustrated through an analysis of the relationship between the executive and the judiciary in two particularly sensitive areas for the Argentine polity in this period and fundamentally intersecting one another: the independence of the judiciary and transitional justice.