 Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to the sessions. Thank you for coming everyone I'm going to be telling you about This work that is joined with Santiago Torres who's hitting rising here and James Robinson On contestation of political power in Latin America. There are some friends here who saw this work a month ago We took to heart many of your comments They are not here yet Not because we don't like them just because we're working on them So I might say at some point the things that we're doing and the directions that you suggested Just so you know that we don't have new stuff there So if I were to raise this question, how contested is political power in Latin America? Perhaps several of you might say well, you know, Latin America's a country with a huge concentration of economic and political power But if you look at the region recently, you definitely see that there are some different faces getting to power These are just some notable examples that you would easily recognize But that's true also if you look at how many women presidents have been elected or presidents from different ethnic backgrounds so, you know, there has been at least anecdotically if you look at this some entry of different and sorts of people into the into the into Accessing political power now There are also some clear indications of this turnover of political power if you look at the work of Ben Marks and being sponsored role here in which they have collected data on electoral turnovers for many countries and many regions You see that it has been increasing the electoral turnovers in many of the regions But actually in Latin America earlier and faster and in a larger amount So Latin America does seem to stand out as a region that has experienced increasing turnover in political power over this period As I said, this is probably not what one would have expected. This is a disruption with the with the past There are several Telling examples of that I'm bringing you here the case of the 14 families of Office of our controlling much of the economic and political power of the country And the one that Chico Ferreira already ruined the novelty of this because he presented this during his talk Which is basically the work of? Of a stone looking at the bloodline of the Spanish conqueror Juan Vasquez de Coronel without astonishing 31 presidents and 285 deputies Being able to be part of trace trace back to to these guy. So, you know clearly strong Persistent of political power historically, but now we see these changes Aside from these changes the region also has a number of things to show in terms of Economic development and other forms of political development. There's been a structural change with the railway of the agricultural sector There's been massive expansions of democracy and the end of dictatorships There's been more inclusive constitutions that emphasize rights recognize indigenous peoples recognize minorities There's been an expansion of education This a more active civil society has emerged So one can mention a number of things in the region that seem to go in in the direction of inclusiveness openness And with that also increasing some measures of economic development now inequality has been persistently high Despite all of these there's something special about inequality as an outcome or perhaps as a symptom of an underlying set of structural issues that haven't been able to have been able to solve that has been persistently sticky despite Despite all the other changes So why might Latin America be so persistently unequal despite political inclusion and despite some major economic advances? And you could think of two complementary explanations. One is that democratization has been insufficient To deliver policies because it might be captured and there's one story that it might be captured by pre-democratic elites and some people have done more can this All the importance on on pre-democratic elites trapping on capturing then the democratic institutions it could also be captured or Distorted by new elites as in say Robert Michaels Traditional iron law of oligarchy idea in which you have new faces But they are setting or facing a set of incentives on a set of situations that make them Replicate replicate the the kind of things that other elites were doing before now These things as to this thing has to be complementary with some structural factors that are actually enabled these to happen So now while democracy may have arrived other factors may directly set incentives that limit the adoption of good policies In the case of Latin America clentalism has been very often one feature of the political system that has been highlighted Or not necessarily that they directly distort policies But that they create Facilitate or incentivize the capture of either new or or or all the leads therefore distorting the policies now the figures that I showed You before Suggest that captured by all the leads doesn't appear to be Or is hardly the whole story because there are new elite centric So perhaps this idea that many of us probably had that this the same all the leads capturing the political system needs to be more Noons, there's something else hoping having having happening and we're going to sort of show some just suggestive figures that kind of explore these other channels and in particular these these Mechanisms that go along the lines of the iron law of oligarchy and we're going to look at more evidence from the case of Colombia So before I tell you about the iron law of oligarchy just let me show you that Colombia Like the rest of Latin America and examples that I showed has experienced significant entry of new forms of political actors into the Political arena the number of parties in Colombia movements increased dramatically since the 1991 Constitution so much so that we were very worried that we had created Too many political parties and though there was a reform that tried to cut that down and he did so but the trend Then reemerged at a lower level, but this mean an increasing trend and perhaps more interestingly These new parties these new people are really new in the sense that they represent Traditionally excluded minorities in the Colombian case. Yes, we have had elections for so many years We've had the democracy, but it's a democracy in which the political the traditional conservative I'm liberal parties for many many years had a power sharing agreements and these parties didn't represent the whole of society in fact Many people have subscribed part of our conflict issues to living out and many forms of Many groups in society out of political power So you can see the increased representation of our Chrome offer Colombian parties indigenous parties ex-militia parties Christian parties peasant parties women parties Okay Now it's not only that the parties exist It's that they have been able to grab power at the local level particular We're going to exploit variation of the local level and you can see here the amount of majors and councils and the seats won By this different parties and you see an increase so this new type of parties of traditionally excluded groups Have been able to get a higher share of power locally Now you may say well, yeah, it's it's but they might not be that different To start with they might just bring in the same policies We did this exercise very much inspired by what Ken Squash a pedo popularized with their work on on on newspapers and and Sort of his land of the newspapers in in the US in which they looked for distinctively kind of democratic terms and Others there are clearly markers of repeal of Republican politicians So things that are very often said by the republicans, but not by by Democrats and vice versa really mark Which group you belong to? So we did the same we created this sky square the statistic to look at which words in Legislation by these newcomer groups where new newcomers are simply politicians who had never been in office and arrived to the to the to Congress Which words are distinctively of newcomers in their pieces of legislation that they propose And which words are distinctively non newcomers and you can see that actually it's a different set of words They are bringing different sets of issues to the table and one thing that I love here is the fact that they're not newcomers So these traditional people are really worried about celebration honors and movements and going back to going back to clienteleism If you look at what celebration honors and movements often is is like I found out that Simone Bolivar once is left in this little town in Santander, let's make an honor to this little town that welcomed Simone Bolivar and therefore we have to build a stadium We have to do something like that and we send some money And so you know every politician said knows that that's one one of the tokens of clientelistic exchanges Whereas newcomers are thinking about the environment social security and health welfare on poverty public administration So they are bringing new things Moreover they are bringing not only the turnover that I mentioned before these new groups But it has been come different to get in the more difficult to get entrenching power We are here we are seeing here different generations of a congressman And we are plotting how many additional periods they are elected on the horizontal axis and then on the y-axis You can say see the share of congressmen and you can see that as we move To sort of so to speak younger and younger cohorts. They Spend much less time in Congress. It's much harder to stay longer in Congress So there's really there's a true fluidity here. There's a true entrance of different people of newcomers The newcomers are different. They can't stay so long and The last picture that I want to show you is I've been focused on the side of politicians And of course they are influenced by what voters do, but also you think of citizens Citizens seem to have been more engaged also in Colombia Not just through voting, but they have been more active In the street in collective action We see an increased share of protests in Colombia and interestingly when you break these by topics They are in the streets claiming for rights and and and for the things that they are entitled to so that I think is also very telling okay now Very fluid inclusion, you know the dream of a political economies. This should you know show up in great outcomes And then I look at outcomes here on newcomers People who had never had a office before They arrived to a local mayorship and how do they do? Well, they don't do great things I mean there is sort of an increase this by the way our indices of several outcomes so that we don't pick and choose And that we classify into different dimensions and you can be sort of optimistic about some effects here in education There was something on public services, but it doesn't really last too much on the other things seems like really noise and You know, this is from just a simple RD analysis in which we're looking at whether the trends in the behavior of these things changed after the arrival of an e-commerce And I think if I want to look at this is largely not a big thing Maybe we can be optimistic about location, but other than that. There's not really something very very stark So could there be sort of an iron law logic here? So first piece of evidence of a perhaps of an iron logic is these people are complained against almost as much as non-newcomers So they bring new topics. They are Different they are creating turnover, but they don't seem to be cleaner so to speak than others Perhaps more important interesting I like this one even more is that as they spend more time in Congress They start looking more that the people like the people who were there before they start looking more like other politicians They said they start voting more for example with the ruling coalition and we're going to do as well the word analysis with the legislation to see if they also start looking more in Terms of the and they start proposing honors and and things like that again as all politicians So all of these we don't have the answer but going back to the persistent inequality perhaps as a symptom, but also As a marker of something structural going on in in Colombia We then divide these effects by inequality and you can see here although there is considerable noise in the Estimation that if you look at places that are below the average genie That's perhaps the only places where we can see some effects But the places that are above average genie without have a high inequality are places where you definitely don't see any improvement Other dimension of structural factors in Colombia that are that is very easy to capture is like you need some sort of function in state To for inclusion to work probably and perhaps the most notable failure of the state in Colombia Locally is the fact that you have aren't violence So let's look at places that have it and don't have it and here the stark is pretty clear The places where we don't have as much violence where we have peace these newcomers can make a difference But if not, they actually don't make a difference that they even appear to do worse than the ones that are non newcomers So, you know, this is just to provoke some ideas and I will end this with this But we think that political systems in Latin America have become more inclusive more than other regions in the world This has removed a very big barrier to development and inclusion in the region And we know that inclusion is clear for equality But somehow that doesn't seem to be the case in the region. So why so our interpretation of these results? Is that the success of political inclusion in expanding public goods? rests upon Deep-rooted social and economic characteristics and things like lower inequality and peace in the case of Colombia But more generally having a minimally functioning state seem to be requisites for political inclusion to be able to to to create actually effects and so in this sense High inequality is sort of a vicious cycle really because we cannot drive down high inequality Because high inequality in fact is really related with these structural reasons That make political inclusion relatively ineffective. No one final note is that I don't want to sound too pessimistic Relatively ineffective that is despite all the advances that we have observed in the region There are these things where we haven't moved so far ahead, right So we're talking more about the limits of what this has been able to attain not that we haven't been attained Attaining anything and then we should go back to the dictatorships of the 70s or whatever. I'm not claiming that So if I'm okay with time I'll end there and thank you very much