Proyecto de investigación
CASIANO HACKER-CORDON
PhD, Yale University (2002)
JD, UCLA (1993)
BA, Reed College (1990)
Research Agenda as INVESTIGADOR GARCIA PELAYO
at the Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales, in Madrid Spain.
Title and Description: Democracy, Cultural Autonomy and Private Property: An Interdisciplinary Social Justice Evaluation of Constitutional Change in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
As its title suggests, my project falls squarely within CEPC’s research program on Democratization, Rule of Law and Constitutional Reform. Specifically, my project should be especially interesting to colleagues and students concentrating on institutional design in new democracies, international institutions’ role in democratization, and constitutional reforms in Latin America.
Constitutional change and reform can be conceived broadly, following the Western canon of political philosophy, as the redesign of a political society’s major institutions –either in wholesale revolutionary fashion or through more piecemeal increments of social engineering. Constitutional reform can also be conceived more narrowly, in line with much contemporary thought, as the formal-legal reformulation of major tenets within a national state’s basic law, --that is a national state’s formal-legal charter, which constitutes it as a self-subsistent entity. I am interested in constitutional change in both its broad and narrow meanings, but the focus of my study over the next three years will be constitutional reform in its narrow sense.
What have been the causes and the effects of constitutional change around the world over the past thirty years? In order to understand the effects of constitutional change, it is useful to understand its causes, for one way to pick out precisely the difference that constitutional change makes is to see how much of its supposed effects can be attributed instead to the social process that caused specific constitutional reforms. Beginning in Southern Europe, and then spreading through Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and East Asia, the world’s national states have undergone transitions to democracy in the political realm. These constitutional changes came about through different social mechanisms in different countries, and their exact content and level of success varies from country to country. But from the perspective of comparative political science, there certainly has been a sea change in the formal-legal landscape of the world’s national states. The metaphor of a wave might not be the most apt to characterize this world-historical change, however, since the ‘third wave of democracy’ had organized support at the international level from superpower and would-be superpower states and from formally constituted international organizations such as the European Community/European Union, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, etc. So I am interested in opening up, with the hindsight benefit of thirty years of ‘transitions to democracy’, the question of the extent to which contemporary constitutional change at the national state level can be fruitfully characterized as the effect of agency and structure at the level of the international system. Explanations for national level democratization at the level of the interstate system should be compared, contrasted (and perhaps developed in tandem with) the family of social science explanations that emphasize domestic level political conflict and cooperation.
As with democracy, so with minority cultural autonomy and private property: What have been the causes and effects of the last thirty years’ legal reform of national political economies in the direction prescribed by the reformulated classical liberal ideal, dressed up in monetarist economics and the Anglo-Saxon notions of contract, property, and tort law? And what have been the causes and effects of the worldwide shift toward the accommodation (if not enhancement and empowerment) of minority cultures within national states?
Democracy, Cultural Autonomy and Private Property –these three constitutional forms can be investigated as separate phenomena, but historically they are interrelated. So I am interested in how they complement each other just as much as they are in tension and can undermine each other. I choose to focus on Latin America and Eastern Europe not only because I find these areas of particular intrinsic interest, for personal and intellectual reasons, but also because these are the regions of the developing world that are closest culturally to European political thought. More importantly perhaps, I have began a global cross-national study on the effects of private property and privatization (and other elements of neoliberal orthodoxy) on poverty and inequality, and my preliminary results show a strong negative impact of private property on poverty (measured as the infant mortality rate), and this global result is most accentuated in Latin America. On the other hand, the results for Eastern Europe are not statistically significant. This is at odds with the impression many contemporary economists and journalists give, that neoliberalism has succeeded in Latin America but failed in Eastern Europe. For me the issue is worth investigating more closely, with systematic small-n designs (justified by reference to large-n findings and historical judgment) that focus on the way constitutional features such as democratic elections and quasi-consociational mechanisms for the implementation of cultural minority rights interplay separately and in tandem with the entrenchment of private property rights in the process of political-economic structural reform. But speaking of success or failure is no self-evident talk, and so my study is firmly grounded in a theory of social justice from which I derive the outcomes by reference to which I assess the institutions of democracy, cultural autonomy and private property.
Method: I have gathered global-level and region-level cross-national large-n data sets with measures of (and I have done preliminary statistical analyses about) the correlations between neoliberalism generally and private property in particular on one hand and poverty and democracy on the other hand. These preliminary analyses, and the impression that students of Eastern Europe are dealing with very much the same issues as students of Latin America, led me to want to focus on Eastern Europe for purposes of systematic comparison. Further statistical analysis of the cross-national data should be decisive in selecting the full set of country cases (some within Latin America and some within Eastern Europe). At this point the only three I am sure will form part of the set are Chile (because it is a most salient case of a strong private property regime formed under a dictatorship that underwent major constitutional reform during the last thirty years), Cuba (because, for different reasons, it is an excellent control case for both the Latin American and the Eastern European countries), and Guatemala (not only because I grew up there, but also because –among the Latin American countries—it is the country in which the conflict between cultural autonomy and private property is most salient). Once I pick the full set, I will apply historical and legal research methods to trace the specificity of each country’s constitutional reform process. I will also utilize existing country-level data sets to quantify the outcomes salient within my evaluative framework (poverty and various forms on social inequality) and to conduct large-n analyses of the correlations between moves in the constitutional reform process (e.g. the implementation of privatization programs) and the desired social outcomes. Ultimately, I hope to be able to specify the causal mechanisms by which private property, democracy, cultural autonomy, poverty and social inequality are related to each other, at least in a few critical Latin American and Eastern European countries. Throughout I will keep in mind (and try to find ways to estimate the effects of) secular and policy change at the interstate level.