| Why do presidents attempt to change their countries' constitutions to overstay in office or expand their powers? Join the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology (CMIST) as we celebrate the release of Ignacio Arana Araya's new book, Presidential Personalities and Constitutional Power Grabs in Latin America, 1945-2021. While most research on democratic backsliding focuses on institutions or structural factors, Arana argues that the personalities of leaders also play a crucial role. Drawing on an original dataset of 228 Western Hemisphere presidents from 1945 to 2021, Arana shows that dominant and politically inexperienced presidents are more likely to challenge their term limits, while risk-taking and assertive leaders are more inclined to expand their powers. This talk explores why studying the individual differences of national leaders is essential for understanding democratic backsliding.
About our Speaker:
Ignacio Arana Araya, an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology (CMIST), is a comparativist specializing in elite behavior by analyzing how the personality traits and other individual differences of national leaders impact executive governance. He also studies the consequences of variation in political institutions across countries, with an emphasis on Latin America. Arana examines executive-legislative relations, informal institutions, gender and politics, and judicial politics.
His first book, Presidential Personalities and Constitutional Power Grabs in Latin America, 1945-2021, was recently published by Oxford University Press, and he is currently writing his second book, The Psychology of Presidents, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He has also published in numerous academic journals and contributed book chapters to several books.
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