William T. Barndt
September 2005
Princeton University
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I. I
NTRODUCTION
Throughout South America, basic political liberties are routinely suspended when their
exercise becomes a thorn in the sides of elected presidents. While South American presidents
usually tolerate opposition voices, sometimes those voices seem particularly ‘inconvenient’: voters
threaten to overturn pro-government majorities in elections, street protesters make the president
appear indecisive and incapable, or newspaper editorials report corruption in the executive branch.
Faced with such inconvenient opinions, presidents routinely decide that the costs of toleration are
higher than the costs of repression (Dahl 1971). Consequently, they try to restrict their critics’
freedoms of expression, association, public assembly, or voting. In doing so, they initiate what I
have called an executive assault: Journalists are gagged. Partisans of the opposition are turned away
from the polls. Union organizers are internally exiled. Political elites are arrested. Protests crumble
under states-of-emergency. Even business leaders occasionally find themselves in jail for opposing
government policy. In short, executive assaults are interferences by presidents in the freedom of
particular individuals to critique the exercise of state power. Such suspensions of political liberty
usually do not apply to the entire citizenry and are always temporary. Indeed, they rarely last more
than a matter of weeks.
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Nonetheless, their frequency in nominally democratic countries presents a
real empirical puzzle for analysts. (See Table 1 below for specific examples).
The Argument
This dissertation explains why executive assaults occur in South America and how they can
be overcome. I identify three different types of assaults – anti-insurgent, socioeconomic, and
quotidian – which differ both in terms of why they occur and how easily they can be overcome.
While anti-insurgent and socioeconomic assaults tend to occur during particular types of crises,
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As Helmke and Levitsky argue for “abuses of executive authority” more generally, executive assaults are “best
understood as noninstitutional behavior” (2004: 727).
Convention