 Welcome to this special event to Honour Constitution Day. I'm Keith Webster, the Helen and Henry Posner Junior Dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and I am so pleased that you are able to join us for this year's Constitution Day lecture. This event is a joint venture between the University Libraries and our friends in the Division of Student Affairs and the Alumni Association. We deeply value this partnership through which we have brought Constitution Day events to you since 2005. This year I'd like to acknowledge and thank Anne Cramer, my Executive Assistant, for coordinating this event. Shannon Riff, our Associate Dean for External Relations and her entire team. Later in this event you'll meet two other colleagues, Lenny Chan, the Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Director of the Office of Community Standards and Integrity. Lenny will moderate a Q&A session after today's lecture, and closing remarks will be delivered by my colleague Gina Castellania, Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students. One special feature of our Constitution Day celebrations at Carnegie Mellon is the recognition of the copy of the Bill of Rights held in the Posner Centre. This is one of only four surviving copies of the first printing of the US Bill of Rights and its ratifications, and it is part of the Posner Memorial Collection. We're grateful to the Posner Foundation and the Posner Family for entrusting Carnegie Mellon University Libraries with the care and stewardship of this magnificent collection. To say more about our copy of the Bill of Rights, I'm delighted to welcome Dr Sam Lenny, Curator of Special Collections in the University Libraries. Sam is responsible for our collections of rare books, manuscripts and early scientific instruments and calculating machines. Sam might be best known to many of you as the host of Coffee with the Curator, an ongoing series of informative YouTube videos on distinctive objects held in special collections. And you can find those videos on our YouTube channel. With that, Sam, welcome the floor issuers. Good evening everyone. I'm Sam Lemly. I'm the Curator of Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. And tonight I'll be sharing something from the collection with you in introduction to tonight's event. This is, I think, one of the most remarkable things in special collections at CMU. It's a printed pamphlet. It's about 11 inches tall. And at some point in the past it was actually removed from its original binding. You can see that there are some small fragments of that original binding's spine on the pamphlet's left-hand edge. You can also see that there's a small stain in the upper right portion of the first page and the outer leaves, right, the first and last pages that kind of serve as the pamphlet's binding in the absence of the original binding. Are noticeably darker and kind of stained. And that suggests that it's actually been in this disbound condition for some time and was probably handled in this condition for the centuries that it was in circulation before coming to CMU. So on the first page of the document, about a third of the way down, is the document's title, and that's articles in addition to an amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Of course, this is a copy of the American Bill of Rights. It was printed in Philadelphia by Special Commission in January or February 1792. And this particular copy was purchased by Henry Posner Sr. in 1963 and was later deposited with the libraries along with the rest of the Posner Memorial Collection by Henry Posner's son and family. So given the appearance of this document, it usually surprises visitors to Special Collections to learn that this is one of the rarest documentary artifacts that we have. And in fact, it actually might be the rarest single item we hold. Only five copies, including this one, are known to survive. So that's a vanishingly small survival rate given the size of the original edition, which I'll get to in a minute. But apart from its rarity, what's fascinating about this document is that this printing of the Bill of Rights, it wasn't fully unprecedented. This was not the first time that the constitutional amendments that would become the Bill of Rights had been printed. In fact, they had been put into circulation fairly early, usually in the form of newspapers or broadsides as early as 1789, which was immediately after they were approved by Congress and sent to the states for debate for ratification. So what does make or what did make this particular printing of the Bill of Rights important and groundbreaking then is the context of its printing. And remember that it was printed likely in January or February 1792. In other words, immediately after Virginia became the 11th and final state to ratify on December 15, 1791. And it was Virginia's vote that met the requirement that three fourths of states ratify any proposed amendment to the Constitution. And remember too, at this point in American history, there were only 14 states and the Constitution itself was fewer than five years old. So this document that I'm holding, putting it differently, is the first form of the Bill of Rights that could claim the force of law. And the first time that it's 10 articles appeared in print as an integral part of the United States Constitution. And for this reason, constitutional scholars and scholars of American history refer to this document, this printing as the official, the first official Bill of Rights. So, instead of merely listing the ratified amendments, though, it also records the kind of legal deliberation and legislative compromise that led to ratification. So, in a sense, embedded in this document is the story of the contentious origin of the American Bill of Rights. And I think the best and most basic evidence for this is the fact that it lists 12 amendments rather than the more familiar 10. What many don't know is that of the 12 amendments that were originally proposed in 1789, only amendments 3 through 12 were ratified to become part of the Constitution. So, for example, our first amendment, which protects the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, and the press was actually the third in the original form of those 12 articles. So, besides that, though, beneath the printed amendments, beginning on page 3 appears a kind of roll call of states, recording how each state voted on the question of ratification. And I find this fascinating because it turns out that the bulk of the Pawsner Bill of Rights, you know, actually isn't the Bill of Rights at all. You know, the amendments take up only one leaf or two pages out of 12, you know, but otherwise most of the document is given over to kind of an enumerative record of legislative bureaucracy. So I'm going to show Pennsylvania's vote on screen here, which appears on page 9, and Pennsylvania was one of the last states to submit its vote on ratification. And you can see that that vote is dated September 21, 1791, or about three months before Virginia's deciding vote. So after Virginia's vote to ratify was submitted to the federal government, Thomas Jefferson, who was then Secretary of State, commissioned the printing of this edition. And 135 copies were made and distributed to the 14 state legislatures to ensure that they had the sort of official and approved language of the amendments on file. So that's a very almost painfully brief documentary history of the Bill of Rights that only brings us to about 1792, 1793. But I want to end with the observation, or sort of by looking forward, right, with the observation that this copy of the Bill of Rights offers a number of important lessons, most of which are still very much alive today. You know, famously Thomas Jefferson called the Constitution a good canvas in need of some retouching. And I think revisiting this document reminds us that the American experiment is maybe always a good canvas in need of some retouching. You know, and that's part of its power and part of its beauty. You know, after all, this particular copy of the Posner or the Posner Bill of Rights lacks all the so-called reconstruction amendments, including the 13th amendment, which effectively ended slavery in the United States, and the 14th and 15th amendments, which respectively extended the rights of citizenship and the right to vote to recently emancipated enslaved people. So, you know, with that idea kind of offered in introduction, I would invite all of you, anyone to reach out to me with questions about special collections or the Posner Bill of Rights. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sam, for an informative presentation. It's now my pleasure to introduce this year's Constitution Day lecturer, Dr Ignacio Arena, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Institute of Security and Technology. Ignacio is a comparativist who specialises in elite behaviour by analysing how the personality traits and other individual differences of heads of government impact executive governments. He studies the consequences of variation in political institutions across countries with an emphasis on Latin America, examining executive legislative relations, informal institutions, gender and politics and judicial politics. He has recently completed a book manuscript titled Presidential Personalities and Constitutional Paragrabs in Latin America 1945 to 2021, and that is the title also for this evening's lecture. Ignacio will draw on years of studying presidential behaviour to examine the characteristics of leaders who undermine their country's democracies through constitutional paragraphs. This lecture will discuss the individual characteristics of presidents who attempt to change the constitutions of their country to relax their term limits or increase their powers. Ignacio, welcome. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for that introduction. Good evening everyone. It is my honour to present to you today the core of a book I just completed. Before sharing with you my presentation, I would like to provide some historical context. All Latin American countries except Cuba are presidential systems, and they are presidential systems because they borrowed heavily from the American Constitution. Like the United States, all Latin American countries over a few gain independence from monarchies, and the elites needed to create a new political system. National elites borrowed heavily from the American Constitution because all countries became independent between 1808 and 1826, so a few decades after the American independence. The only exception is Cuba, which became independent in 1898. So national elites used the American Constitution as a reference, and over time, constitutions were amended or replaced to adapt them to the national realities. So there's a strong influence of the American Constitution on Latin American constitutionalism. Now let me share with you my presentation. The title of the book is presidential personalities and constitutional power grabs in Latin America from 1945 to 2021. The motivation is to study how the individual differences of presidents can be associated with relevant political outcomes. What do I mean by individual differences? Differential psychology defines individual differences as how individuals are different from each other. In other words, how we are different in terms of personality, abilities and experience. The individual differences are strong predictors of job performance and job satisfaction. According to one author, two thirds of medium to large American organizations use some type of psychological testing to select personnel. And they do these to improve fit and reduce turnover. So we know, for example, that of optimist salespeople tend to sell more. They sell more cars, they sell more shoes, they sell more properties. But what about presidents who are the most powerful politician in presidential systems? We don't have similar data for presidents. We know a lot about presidents. Most citizens have strong opinions about them. The media covers their daily agenda. Pundits write about them frequently in the media. There are books and biographies written about them. We have a lot of information about presidents. However, most of mainstream quantitative political science research that analyzes the presidency treats the individual differences among leaders as residual bias. So the assumption here is that the individual differences of these individuals are dispensable in the explanation of their actions. This assumption is really untenable because we know that they reached the presidency based on their personal trajectory and based on who they are. When we vote, we vote for a specific individual with a specific characteristics. So with this motivation, I decided to interview former presidents from Latin American countries. I conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with former presidents in nine countries. So in this group, there are mostly democratic presidents, but there is also, for example, a military detector who was accused of a genocide in Guatemala. There is a former Nobel Prize winner. There are puppet presidents. There's only one woman president. I have tried to interview more. There is a president who was impeached. There's another president who was ousted to a coup. So it's a varied group. I asked these former presidents several questions, mostly about the relationship with the constitution, but also about their own individual differences and whether they think that the individual differences of presidents can be associated with the performance in office. Guess what? Their overwhelming reply was yes, absolutely yes. For them, it was very obvious that who the president is makes a big difference. So these are the other presidents. So building on these semi-structured interviews and on differential psychology research, I studied presidents addressing two extremely important research questions. So the first research question is which presidents challenge their term limits. So these are presidents who try to change the constitution to relax their term limits so they can govern for more time. This is a global trend. 30% of the 221 presidents from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia who faced the end of their terms from 1975 to 2018 attempted to extend their staying office. There are influential countries in this group such as Russia, Egypt, China and Brazil. So with Vladimir Putin from Russia, Xi Jinping from China, LCC in Egypt and Fernando Enrique Cardoso in Brazil. 35 Latin American presidents who governed from 1945 to 2021 tried 49 times to overstain office. This is a little bit more than 10% of the presidents that govern in this period. And these presidents expand their capacity when they succeed to maintain promises and to enforce threats in inter-temporal negotiations, make more appointments to state positions, they develop clientelist relations and they enjoy the material and symbolic privileges of the position for longer. The expanded incanvency advantages of these presidents dampen political competition, reinforcing the leaders' attachment to their offices. The second research question is which presidents increase their formal powers. So in the comparative politics literature there are lists of what are the formal powers of presidents and we can talk more about that in the Q&A. But it's a pretty well established and studied list. In Latin America 26 leaders who were burned between 1945 and 2021 tried 29 times to expand their powers. So this is roughly 9% of the leaders that govern in this period. These presidents removed checks on their office, minimized the representativeness of the political opposition, increased their control of their cabinets, consolidated their party's leadership and achieved more policy goals. The leeway that strong presidents enjoy comes at the expense of policy stability, electoral representation and checks and balances. So the significance of these constitutional power grabs are first that they are, for the reasons I just mentioned, anti-democratic. And I will show you precisely how the index indices of democracy decline when over-reaching presidents are in power. This I will show you also in the next slide the list of the heads of government who are in the group of over-reaching presidents. And these are some of the most influential Latin American presidents that have governed in the region since 1945. These studies have not considered the individual differences of presidents as explanatory factors. I will show you that mostly the explanations are centered on institutions and the broader socio-economic context. So this is the list of presidents and you can see here, if you are familiar with Latin America, you will see here several of the most influential presidents that have governed in the region. Jo Vargas in Brazil, Ebon Morales in Bolivia, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Hugo Chaves in Venezuela, etc. These have been all very influential presidents. Now there are four types of explanations that the literature has provided to explain the relaxation of term limits. One is centered on executive legislative relations. I put in parenthesis the authors that endorse these approaches, these explanations. A second explanation focuses on the president's institutional and political strength. A third one centers on the president's capacity to curb the judiciary. And a fourth one focuses on the president's material incentives. Based on the interviews and my research on differential psychology, I propose a two hypothesis about which presidents are more likely to challenge their term limits. I propose that presidents with higher levels of dominance and that are more politically inexperienced are more likely to attempt this power grab. Why? Well, politically inexperienced presidents have a shallow understanding of the presidency. They have a shallow understanding of the pace, the procedures and the practices of government. So they tend to overestimate their capacity to relax the term limits to retain power. They also are faced fewer constraints by elite networks. Since they just entered the electoral arena, they have not acquired long-term commitments with other politicians. If you think about the experienced politicians, they have developed strong commitments with their parties and with other politicians. So when they are in the presidency, they need to return several of the favors and those commitments made throughout their careers. Now, dominant individuals tend to have a strong motivation to outdo others. They have no problems in challenging and criticizing others. They enjoy controlling their context and they have a strong inclination to impose a will on others. So these are excellent attributes that help presidents who want to challenge their term limits because they allow them to endure the backlash that their constitutional power grab will onset. They also have the capacity to persuade others, especially other politicians, meaning legislators, and they also should have a strong motivation to retain office. There are two main types of explanations that the literature has provided for the increases in presidential powers. One centres on the institutional distribution of political power among branches of government and the other one centres on socio-economic factors such as a giving birth capital, inflation, economic growth, level of democracy, etc. I propose two hypotheses to explain which presidents are more likely to try to increase their powers. Those are presidents with higher levels of risk-taking and presidents with higher levels of assertiveness. Risk-taking entails uncertainties in the outcome, but also with potential gains. That's exactly what happens in the context of presidents who want to increase their powers. They face enormous uncertainties. If they fail, they can lose a significant amount of political capital and they can also even lose office as it happened to an Urwaian president. The potential gains are also high because increasing the power allows presidents to consolidate their power with respect to assertiveness. Presidents who try to increase their powers should be highly motivated to succeed. They should have excellent negotiation skills and they should also enjoy concentrating decision-making on themselves. These are all characteristics of assertive individuals. So this is the summary of the arguments. You can see at the top the conventional arguments. My theory is at the bottom. My theory to explain the relaxation of turn limits and the expansion of presidential powers. The sample are the 332 presidents who govern one of the 19 Latin American countries from 1945 to 2021 for at least six months. Six months because that gives them enough time to try a constitutional power graph. The data comes from the presidential database of the Americas that I have built over time. It has three sources. One are the interviews that I already mentioned. A second source are with research assistants. We coded 13 characteristics of presidents that studies have shown to be correlated with constructs of theoretical interests. We did this based on the biographies of presidents. The main components are the online service which were conducted in 2011 and 2012 and a second wave in 2021 and 2022. I would talk a lot about this but it took a lot of time to do this. We end up contacting 1,800 experts of which 600 produced 903 evaluations of 228 of the 347 presidents who ruled in Latin America and the US between 1945 and 2021. So I also include American presidents in my survey. The expert survey, I'm very satisfied with the experts that we got. 87% of the experts had graduate studies. 64% had a PhD so highly educated experts. 42% of the participants interacted with the presidents and 8% of them interacted with the presidents more than 21 times. So we were able to reach out to advisors, other politicians, ministers, former legislators or scholars who interacted frequently with presidents. So they have a detailed knowledge about the individuals. The experts come from 33 professions. Most of the largest minority in this group are political scientists followed by historians. You can see in the map here, this map, the circles show you the IP address of the computers from where the experts completed the survey. So we have that data and you can see most of the surveys were answered in the Americas but also we received answers from Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa. Now, you might wonder whether, well, aren't all presidents or aren't most presidents dominant, politically experienced, assertive and risk-taking? This data shows you that now. They vary significantly across all these four variables. You can see in the figure on the left, it shows you political experience and dominance. The triangles, it shows you the presidents who were over-reachers. So you can see that yes, presidents tend to be more dominant than not and more assertive than not. They also tend to be more politically experienced than not. But there's variation and there is variation also if you focus on the red triangle. So over-reaching presidents were both dominant and non-dominant, assertive and unassertive, and a varied too in levels of risk-taking and political experience. So I conducted several statistical analyses. I conducted a discrete time survival analysis, mostly, but not only, in which the unit of analysis is precedent year. I will show you these tables but I will not discuss the tables. I don't think we have enough time but this provides the technical support for my findings. I conducted for each of these two dependent variables approximately or I present approximately 30 models in which I use different samples. I measure the variables in different ways. I use different statistical techniques, et cetera, and the results are quite robust. So this is the main table about the attempts to relax trim limits. This is the main table that shows you the attempts to increase potential powers. But I do want to spend some time explaining you these results. So these rock plots for trim limits on the left, you can see that the blue curve presents the predicted capacity of conventional arguments. So there's a probability of 72% that conventional arguments will correctly predict a constitutional power grab instead of classifying it as a non-power grab. And this probability increases to 81% when you have the individual characteristics of presence. When you focus on the figure on the right, you can see that the predicted capacity of conventional arguments is 77% but this increases to 85% when you add the individual differences. Now, when we calculate the predicted probabilities of the potential attempts to relax their trim limits, you can see that when presence are very low levels of dominance are a highly politically experienced, they are very unlikely to try to relax their trim limits. But this probability increases over time, increases when dominance and political inexperience increases. So you can see, for example, in dominance, the most dominant president in the sample is Rosfidel Castro, 4.8%. So when you have that level of dominance, the probability that the president will try to relax his or her term limits is 10%. When the president is highly politically inexperienced, the probability that that president will try to relax his or her term limits increases to 9%. So there's a significant effect of these two variables on the probability that presidents will attempt a constitutional power grab. Now, here I present to you the predicted probabilities of potential attempts to increase the potential powers. So similarly, when a president has a very risk adverse or is very unassertive, the probability that they will attempt to increase their powers is less than 1%. But this increases to 15% when you have a highly risk taking president and the probability increases to 9% when presidents are highly assertive. The bars on the background, if you are wondering what do they mean, that's the actual data and distribution of this variable among a president. So the distribution of risk, propensity and assertiveness. This is the final table that I want to show you with results. So you can see on the table on the top part, I am including the three main organizations that measure democracy around the world. You have varieties of democracy, the Freedom House and Polidified. In all these cases, the level of democracy in these countries decreases when there is an overreaching president in power. By overreaching president, I mean one that attempted a constitutional power grab. So you can see the first column that shows the electoral democracies taking from varieties of democracy. If you focus on overreaching presidents, democracy in these countries decreases by 5%. And among non-overreaching presidents, the level of democracy increases 2%. The table at the bottom shows you the statistical analysis using five different measures of democracy taken from varieties of democracy. And it shows that overreaching presidents tend to decrease the level of the electoral, liberal and deliberative democracy. The results for participatory and egalitarian democracy are not statistically significant. But as you can see, the effect of overreaching presidents on the level of democracy is pretty clear. So in conclusion, the individual differences of presidents explain their attempts to relax their term limits and increase their powers complementing current mainly institutional accounts. The institutional explanations of the power grabs receive partial statistical support. In particular, judicial independence is the institution that most consistently inhibits overreaching presidents. The leaders of overreaching behavior have tangible consequences. Several leaders overstate in office abuse their power and let out return regressions. Sadly, that explains why they also gain historical prominence because they state some of them even for decades. The universality of the theory proposed suggests that the hypothesis tested should work across regions. Now this research makes a contribution to four research streams. One is to research on democracy. Constitutional power grabbers move the presidency toward authoritarianism. If you engage with the literature about democratic erosion, most of the explanations are centered on the socio-economic variables or institutional variables. But there is little examination of the behavior of leaders such as today you have numerous examples that we can discuss in the Q&A. It also makes a contribution to the study of political elites. Most of the study of political elites is centered on groups. My study pushes that to encourages the study at the national and subnational level of individual elite members. It also makes a contribution to research on institutions because powerful actors such as presidents can generate indigenous institutional change. And the literature about indigenous institutional change mostly centers in groups of elites. But some of these elite members are extremely powerful, so I encourage, I think there's an enormous opportunity to study the effect of these individual leaders. Finally, this study makes a contribution to a presidency study by integrating presidency-centered and president-oriented studies. Presidency-centered research centers on the institutions that surround presidents. So the institutional environment within which presidents operate. These studies depersonalize the presidency and they tend to be quantitative. You have president-oriented studies which tend to be qualitative. They focus a lot on presidents, but there's no dialogue between these two streams of research. My research is integrating these two streams by testing a president-oriented hypothesis using the quantitative format commonly used in presidency-centered studies. Thank you very much for listening and I will be happy to answer or address your questions. Well, Professor Wana, thank you so much for sharing your research and your expertise with us. I always enjoy this event every year, but I also think it's extra special when we have someone from our community share their knowledge. If you have a question and you're in the audience, feel free to pose that question in the Q&A function in Zoom. So one of the questions that we have for you this evening is about your research looks at state-level systems of governance and people who spent their political lives cultivating their personas. Are there any parallels or lessons you would offer to people who want to stop the abuses of power grabbing leaders? That's a great question because you don't only have power grabbers leaders at the presidency level, they are in different positions of power. So the institutional variable that mostly inhibits presidents is judicial independence. So judicial independence, when the judiciary is independent, it insulates the constitution from overreaching presidents because they keep the exercise checks on presidents. So if we make a parallel to even the non-political world or politics at the subnational level, I think that institutions are key, institutions that are enforced and that keep leaders accountable. So we shouldn't even at the corporate level, we shouldn't rely on the goodwill of individuals and that you can reach a solution to a conflict just by discussing it. Sometimes, unfortunately, there are abusive leaders. So in those cases, there need to be rules on place that can be enforced to keep them accountable. So there should be mechanisms that force leaders to be accountable and that should prevent the recurrence of abuses. Great. Have you seen that happen anywhere? Abuses or mechanisms to keep leaders accountable. The latter, the mechanisms to keep. I have seen it and probably some people in the audience probably have seen abusive leaders and unfortunately what I have observed is that there's a long gap in my opinion. So you see abuses that last for a while until there's a decision is made to stop that. And if you think more broadly, that's what the old me too movement unveiled, right, that there were lots of gender abuses and nothing happened and the abuses were not penalized. I think that's changing and for the good, but institutions are for that. So this should not depend on the goodwill of individuals and it should depend on rules that are enforced. Great. Thank you. So you touched on this a little bit in your presentation, but I'm curious about the measurement of personality traits. Can you tell us more about how you measured the president's dominance, risk taking and assertiveness? Sure. So let me share my presentation again because I have, let me see, and I have in the appendix, I have the measurement of the different in individual differences. So, for example, for dominance, I took this, I'm not a psychologist, and I have not. The worst, I mean a big mistake that you can make as a political scientist is to come up with an idea and then also out of the blue create a measurement for a concept. It is much better to take concepts that have been developed by scholars. So that's what I did. I took this a questioner that measures dominance. So if you were an expert on a president, you will have to answer this questioner without knowing that you were answering a questioner about dominance. So the experts who completed this survey didn't know what they were addressing. They knew that some of them were psychological characteristics, but not which questioner was asking what. So you can see here, so this is the measurement of dominance. I took it from Goldberg et al and the risk taking, I took it from the risk taking index. It has 40, no, it has a, it has a, the presence attitude I modified because this is not about presence, but I changed the, this questioners are sometimes for other people. So it can be about your boss, but it can also be about yourself. So I modified them accordingly and I asked something that is very important. I asked the expert to evaluate presidents before the risk taking before they were in the presidency and during their time in office. Why? Because presidents have incentives. Let's say you have a risk taking individual becoming president and that president, let's say, loves to smoke and to drive fast and drink a lot. So you can do that as a politician, you can get away with that, but not in the presidency. So they tend to hide that risk behavior. So my results show that the measurement of risk taking for presidents during office is lower. So I use the true measurement of risk taking, the measurements applied to when presidents were before reaching the presidency. So this questioner measures risk taking in six domain, recreational risks, health risks, career risks, financial safety and social risks. So this is the, this gives you a score that is the average of all of these different components of risk taking. And political inexperience, it's easier to measure. I also use different measurements of political experience that is taking mostly from the literature in comparative politics. So at one extreme, you have high experience politicians, those who have experience in the executive branch and in the legislative branch before reaching the presidency. On the other end, you have presidents that essentially became presidents only after running for office. So that is the case of former president Donald Trump in the US, but that is not uncommon in Latin American countries. And in between you have presidents who have only experience at the subnational level and others that were either had executive experience or legislative experience but not both. Great. So your presentation. Yeah, and this is the measurement for a certainness. It's the same logic applied for that applied for dominance is taking from a well established a question and it's taking it's taking from the international personality item pool, which has something that is very, that I appreciate it very much that they share for free these scales so you don't have to pay them a copyrights for using them. Great. So your presentation focused on Latin America, but have you seen this phenomenon of play in other countries as well, or are there other characteristics of the region that cultivate this style of leadership. That's a great question. And especially with the relaxation of term limits, you can see that that has happened. That is a global phenomena. Recently, recently in the last years, President Vladimir Putin of Russia removed his term limits. And Xi Jinping, a president of China, removed his term limits. And this is a particularly common phenomenon in Sub-Saharan African countries. And although in the last years, a term limits have become more resilient in Sub-Saharan African countries. And this, my theory could perfectly well be tested for African leaders or, or president from any other regions. So that's one of the, my goals is to use, I focus on Latin American presidents, but this is a universal theory. Great. You have a book coming out next year. Have the recent elections and leadership return of the silver in Brazil, for example, caused you to reexamined or revisit any of your book related writing and research. Not, not, not really. Not really what is, I think what is fascinating or that's something that it's validating for my research, for example, is that the last attempt to relax term limits was in a 2021 by president in the book of El Salvador. And it was a very blatant violation of El Salvador's constitution. The constitution of El Salvador has four, four clauses for beating reelection. And a bokelem controls the legislature. It's a unicameral legislature. And this unicameral legislature in which he enjoys an overwhelming majority, more than two thirds of it, they replace the members of the Supreme Court. And the new members of the Supreme Court said that those articles of the constitution that forbid reelection really don't apply. They are outdated. So, I mean, that's a really childish argument to make is has no legal basis, but that has allowed, that will allow President Bukele to run for reelection next year. If nothing drastically changes, he will very likely be re-elected because he is the most popular president in America. His popularity is around 90%. And he has become also an international famous in the last years for different reasons. This is the president who legalized a Bitcoin as a currency. So this next question was submitted by an audience member and I find it very interesting. So you mentioned that the judicial branch often serves as a mechanism to force accountability upon the executive presidential branch of government. How do countries with judiciaries, which are appointed by the executive presidential branch, keep an appearance of independence as they act to check and balance? One thing that I would mention and I appreciate this question because judicial independence is key for keeping presidents accountable, but judicial independence is not isolated. Usually you have it, it depends on the environment because the judiciary does not have two powerful sources. They cannot enforce their verdicts and rulings. They need enforcement agencies to do that and they don't control their budget. So they are very, they can be, their independence can be curbed if the other branches of government attempted. Having said that, well, there are different mechanisms for, and I assume that the question alluded more to the Supreme Court. So, which is a controversial topic in the US. So how you can make them more independent? Well, there are different rules of appointment. So for example, in my country, the current members of the Supreme Court justices, they offer five names to the president. So they preselect five potential new justices and the president can choose one of them. So that gives more control to the current Supreme Court. The president chooses one of those five and then that needs to be ratified by the Senate, just like in the United States. So that's a way of taking away a little bit the power of the president because as you can see in the United States, if you have the Senate is controlled by the same party that controls the executive, well, you can, the president can very well appoint justice based on the ideological record of that justice. And there are different mechanisms. So in other countries, you don't have a lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. Also, Supreme Courts in other places tend to be less powerful than the American Supreme Court, which is, I think it's pretty unique, the influence that the American Supreme Court has. If you think about it, the same court can decide whether the constitution legalizes abortion or whether abortion is a constitutional right or it is not. So usually Supreme Courts don't have that power because the constitution says clearly whether abortion is forbidden or not. I think we have time for one more question. The last question kind of brought things back to the United States and since this is Constitution Day, I am going to bring it back to the US a little bit. But do you see any patterns in the policy or actions by current or former US leadership that are similar to the personalities that you researched? Certainly, certainly, I don't think that, and I have data for that, and I have compared like the personality traits of American presidents and Latin American presidents. I don't remember the details, but they are not, I mean, they overlap. I mean, they are not different. They seem to be cut by the same clothes. So, but something that the US strongly has is judicial independence. So that the US has a strong judicial independence and the military is not political, so obeys the constitution, not an individual. So presidents who want, for example, to overthrow their democracy, they can, so key actors are the military and the judiciary. If you control the judiciary, everything that you do becomes legal. There's a legal reasoning and support for whatever you decide because you have a subservient judiciary. And that can numb the military in believing that, okay, we follow the laws and the judiciary is the one that interprets the laws. The other actor, the relevant actor is the military. So the military have been very involved in Latin American politics. Unfortunately, they are, they still in some countries are not under the fact of civilian control. They are under the jury civilian control. And that is a key, I think, in the United States, what I think you cannot count with to defend democracy across countries, including the United States is with the support of Congress, a Congress trying to stop an overreaching president, you do have that. But if the same overreaching president enjoy a majority of the legislature as is currently the situation in El Salvador and other countries. Well, then you, the main institutions that can protect democracy, the judiciary and the armed forces. Well, Professor Rona, thank you again so much for sharing your knowledge and expertise with us here this evening and taking the time to answer those great questions. My pleasure, and I agree with you excellent questions. At this time, I would like to introduce Carnegie Mellon's Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students, Gina Casilino. Lenny, thank you so much and thank you especially to Dr Arana for this really interesting lecture. And Lenny, thanks for facilitating such thoughtful questions posed by our audience. I wondered if we would get to that last question and indeed we did. It is really it's so fascinating to examine the political context of other countries, while we interrogate the landscape here in the US both historic and present. You've given us much to contemplate following your lecture Dr Arana. Thank you again so much for those here in Pittsburgh. I look forward to continued engagement with you as we launch Democracy Day this year, which will be held on Election Day, November 7. Please stay tuned for updates on our scheduled activities that are designed to support civic service and engagement on key ideals of democracy. Tonight's lecture has really given us an interesting lens through which we can examine our foundational democratic values here in the United States. As we wrap up tonight's program, I'd like to recognize the Carnegie Mellon departments who collaborate each year to bring this annual event to the community keep named them at the beginning. And I'll just share a little bit about each the university libraries serve as a physical and spiritual home base to convene and deeply explore the intellect intellectual issues of the day. Likewise here in student affairs, we are committed to the holistic development of our students, including a lifelong commitment to intellectual curiosity. And our colleagues in the alumni and constituent engagement team welcome sharing opportunities with our alumni and friends of the university. So thank you to all of the staff and faculty from these three campus partners who have made tonight's program possible. Finally, I'd like to just say once again thank you so much to Professor Arana for enlightening us with your research and to you our audience for joining this joining us this evening. Have a good night everybody.