| Scholars and policymakers generally regard democracy as a force for better governance; however, democracy is a many-splendored thing and it is not clear which elements of a democratic regime are critical in the governance equation. Moreover, we have only an imprecise understanding of the causal mechanisms in the democracy-governance relationship. Accordingly, the goals of this dissertation are to identify those elements of democracy that have a positive impact on the quality of government and to understand the causal mechanisms underlying this relationship. I turn from the question "Does democracy improve the quality of government?" to "How does democracy improve the quality of government?";Of all the various ways in which democracy might improve the quality of government (e.g., political participation, electoral competition, press freedom and political constraints created by checks and balances), I argue that political constraints on the executive's discretionary authority, activated by checks and balances, have the greatest impact on the quality of governance. Legislative constraints, particularly, have a strong effect on the quality of government by reducing the discretionary authority of the executive over the public bureaucracy.;The dissertation follows a mixed-method research strategy. In the first section, I begin with a theoretical chapter to develop the main argument and conduct cross-national statistical analyses to identify the component of democracy underlying variations in the quality of government, using time-series data and disaggregating democracy into specific components. The second part of the dissertation comprises three case studies: Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. Here, I process-trace the decisions these new democracies took to create professional and non-corrupt bureaucracies. |
