Argentina's delegative democracy: A case study

This study analyses why Argentina remained an immature and underdeveloped delegative democracy rather than a fully-liberal democratic polity. Following the work of Guillermo O'Donnell this work explores the quality of, and serious deficiencies in, Argentina's democracy. This work pays special attention to presidential use and misuse of Decrees of Necessity and Urgency by as a means to govern alone, thus bypassing Congress and how there is no existing check and balances in the government in this regard. Observing delegative democracies, this work also examines the following: the use of economic restrictions, use of policies such as nationalizations, privatizations, management of the federal budget, international relations of the country, restriction on the media, behavior of the judiciary branch, changes in the national constitution, and decreasing role of the Vice President.;This work analyzes the relationship between democracy, decrees of necessity and urgency, laws sanctioned by Congress and inflation using transfer function models. Democracy is measured using the Polity IV dataset. There is a causal relationship among the explanatory variables (inputs) ---the numbers of laws passed by Congress, inflation, and number of DNU --- and Democracy (output). This work finds that the number of laws passed by Congress explain the level of Democracy in Argentina. This study suggests that there is an inverse relationship, where the level of Democracy impacts inflation as well as Number of Decrees of Necessity and Urgency (signed arbitrarily by the President). This study analyses the relationship among these three variables and the dependent variable (output) democracy and offers policy recommendations to deal with these issues.