Las reformas de reelección local en América Latina: escenarios y evidencia comparada

Abstract

In the last decade, half of the Latin American countries changed the rules of re-election of local executive positions. However, these reforms have had different modalities and have gone in different directions, towards either more permissive or more restrictive rules. Despite its importance and frequency, comparative literature has devoted little attention to the reforms of subnational electoral systems. This article describes the reformist processes and offers a classification of the mayors’ reelection reforms in order to better understand the ways, strategies and reasons of these reforms. The study shows that subnational electoral reforms rarely take into account local political dynamics and their actors, and mostly follow national political logic.