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  • Tutelage and Regime Survival in Regional Organizations’ Democracy ProtectionThe Case of MERCOSUR and UNASUR
  • Carlos Closa (bio) and Stefano Palestini* (bio)

SINCE the 1990s, South American regional organizations have adopted, formalized, and reinforced additional provisions to their constitutive treaties, sanctioning members that do not respect democracy. These “democracy clauses” have played a central role in recent episodes of political unrest, either by being applied formally—as when mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur) and unasur (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas) suspended Paraguay’s membership rights in June 2012, and when mercosur did the same to Venezuela in August 2017—or merely by being invoked, as during the impeachment procedures against Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff in May 2016. Far from being an exception, the South American organizations’ actions are part of a wider trend, as intergovernmental organizations in the rest of the Americas, Europe, and Africa, have also adopted formal democracy clauses. [End Page 443]

This trend presents a puzzle. A priori, states are eager to retain their sovereignty unfettered. But by adopting clauses of this kind, states subject their sovereignty to monitoring and, possibly to sanctions. This article addresses this conundrum by explaining why states decide to formalize binding and enforceable democracy clauses.

We argue that South American governments formalized democracy clauses in reaction to concrete domestic threats, and with the specific goal of reducing political uncertainty and ensuring government survival. Going beyond the existing literature, we also argue that governments have asymmetric perceptions of the usefulness and enforceability of democracy clauses, and that those perceptions crucially influence decisions to adopt formal clauses. When decision makers support the adoption of democracy clauses, they take into consideration the perceived stability of their own government and that of other member states, as well as the likelihood of future enforcement of the clauses against their own country. Governments that perceive themselves as unstable thus support the adoption and formalization of democracy clauses to the extent that the provisions shield their own regimes. Moreover, they perceive that other states within the regional organization can effectively enforce these provisions if it is demanded of them. Conversely, governments that perceive themselves as either stable or too big to be sanctioned support the formalization of democracy clauses because they expect to be the enforcers—not the targets—of those clauses. We argue that the latter governments understand democracy clauses as tutelage mechanisms1 for governments perceived as unstable. Motivation for tutelage stems from a variety of reasons, such as the desire to protect regional stability, to project the image of being a regional leader, or to defend ideologically like-minded governments. But despite these motivations, the structural logic of tutelage remains: some governments perceive themselves as enforcers, while others perceive themselves and are perceived by others as requiring protection.

The literature on international institutions for human rights and democracy protection has overlooked the importance of tutelage to explain the formalization of international commitments. Theorizing based on the European case argues that the agreement between consolidated democracies and new democracies explains the formalization of, for instance, human rights regimes. But in regional environments in [End Page 444] which almost all states transited to democracy simultaneously, such as South America, considerations of stability and enforcement capability deriving from structural conditions like size gain particular salience. The existing literature also fails to note that as opposed to human rights protection through supranational courts, democracy clauses are inter-governmental provisions. Lacking delegation to an agent above the state, enforcement of these provisions relies on the states’ own capabilities. Thus governments’ expectations of the capability to provide tutelage play a crucial role in decisions to adopt formal democracy clauses.

In this article, we systematically test competing hypotheses to explain the adoption and formalization of democracy clauses. We do so by following the epistemological and methodological requirements of process-tracing analysis.2 We use evidence drawn from interviews with decision makers from two South American regional organizations, mercosur and unasur, which have formalized and enforced their democracy clauses over the past two decades. These interviews reveal the motivations of the decision makers who participated in the design and adoption of the clauses. The relatively young age of the two organizations allowed...

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