During the last two decades the dissonance between democracy and the granting of basic human rights, especially in newer (second and third wave) democracies, has been a matter of academic and political argument. While more countries are nominally democratic today than ever before, few would argue that respect for human rights has followed a similar trajectory. Zakaria (1997, p. 23) has forcefully advanced this point, arguing that there is a disconnection between civil and political rights. In his view, protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property—freedoms that he calls constitutional liberalism—are “theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy.” He adds that liberalism may have coincided with the rise of democracy, but it has not been unambiguously linked to its practice, and that while constitutional liberalism has led to democracy, democracy does not seem to bring constitutional liberalism (Zakaria 1997, p. 23, 28).

More recently, Diamond (2002, p. 27) echoes the same point, arguing that during the “third wave” of democratic expansion both the number and proportion of democracies in the world have more than doubled. He points out that there is a dwindling proportion of politically closed regimes but that the trend toward democracy has been accompanied by an even more dramatic trend toward pseudo democracy. And Jelin and Hershberg (1998, p. 216) argue that the linear sequence of civil, political, and social rights followed by European countries bears little resemblance with the experience of Latin American countries, as in these countries rights are revoked and reversed and political rights do not imply that civil rights can be taken for granted.

The persistent if not widening discrepancy between nominal democracies and respect for human rights has opened up political and academic debates in the literature about three important issues related to democracy and human rights. First is the idea, mostly implicit but until recently unquestioned, that popular and free elections would open the door to the establishment of other rights. Second, related to the first, is the issue that the historical sequence in which core democracies granted rights does not matter for the successful establishment of rights in newer democracies (Carothers 2007); with the adoption of free elections, other rights will follow. The third issue concerns the degree in which rights can be successfully adopted. By focusing on the institutions that support rights this article aims to shed light into the last of these issues: which, if any, rights can be successfully adopted, and why? An answer to this question will improve our understanding of why political rights do not necessarily lead to other rights and whether the sequence in which rights are acquired does matter.

Rights are the result of specific political bargains between different actors and state authorities (Tilly 1997). Bargaining for rights is encoded in institutions that develop independently from each other and these institutions adopt organizational characteristics that make certain rights easier to establish than others. The subject of the bargaining, the conflict involved in the bargain, and the actors involved, all shape the institutions that support citizens’ rights. I propose that these institutions vary along two dimensions that affect the extent to which states can adopt rights successfully: one dimension is the extent to which institutions (re)distribute economic resources and the second is the depth or extension of the rules that frame a given right. This article focuses on the institutional differences between property rights, especially land property, and political rights (such as the rights to vote and be elected), and on the consequences of those differences for their adoption and expansion.

I illustrate the elements of my argument with examples from Colombia since 1980. Colombia stands out as a country, which, since the 1990s, has expanded political rights and deepened its democracy through greater political participation, but it simultaneously has been unable to implement and expand property rights.

I first look at the different approaches to the origin of citizenship rights; next I map out the different types of institutions that support rights, concentrating on the institutional differences between political and property rights, and on how those differences help understand the adoption of rights. And last, I look at how those differences played out in Colombia.

Approaches to the study of rights

The literature on rights is rich and long and for reasons of space I cannot do justice here to either aspect. I sought responses to two broad issues: first, what is the origin of rights? Second, what are the institutional characteristics of rights and how do these characteristics affect the adoption of rights?

Explanations of the origins of citizenship rights are broadly divided into three major approaches: (1) human rights, (2) democratic or political rights, and (3) bargaining. In spite of different arguments, these approaches are not always irreconcilable.

The human rights approach is preoccupied with rights as the set of minimal universal rights that every human being should enjoy. It is modeled on citizens’ rights in the most advanced countries, and essentially holds that human rights should be available everywhere, regardless of economic or historical conditions (Arat 1999; Richards 2000; Sen 1999). In this approach—which informs the work of human rights activists—rights are to be gained through either popular national and local mobilization or through international pressure. That is, rights can start from the bottom or from the top. In either case, however, this model emphasizes adoption through international pressure, and through international and local organizations that oversee human rights and mobilize local communities in third world countries.

The democracy or the political rights approach is not explicitly preoccupied with the origins of discrete or specific rights. First, researchers deal with rights only as embedded in democracy. Because the emphasis is on democracy—on the existence of free elections—this approach implicitly favors political over other rights, and overshadows the importance of other rights. When newer democracies lack the full set of rights that is present in older democracies, scholars in this approach discuss, normatively, the minimum or essential set of rights that must be present to call a regime democratic (Dahl 1998; Diamond 2002; Diamond and Morlino 2004; Kraxberger 2007; Rueschemeyer 2004). Second, researchers focus on the diffusion of democracy and on a series of preconditions for the establishment of a democratic regime, more than of individual rights. These preconditions are invariably complex and multiple, often favoring the convergence of internal, economic, and political conditions over international factors (Carothers 2007; Przeworski 2003).

The bargaining approach focuses on the historical formation of citizenship, considers that rights are the result of bargaining between collective actors and the state, and makes explicit the collective actors’ claims and the role of power, of both states and citizens (Hanagan 1999; Mann 1987; Tilly 1999, 1997). As Hanagan (1999, p. 3) notes, “rights depend on power” and governments “must have power to enforce citizens’ claims, yet citizens must possess sufficient power to defend rights even when they impede government policy.” Two points are essential in this approach. First, because rights depend on power, and power is changeable, rights can contract and expand even in core democracies. Second, for Tilly (2007) state capacity stands in a delicate relation with citizenship rights: high levels of state capacity are dangerous for rights (as mutually binding consultation between states and citizens becomes more difficult), while low levels are unfavorable for the enforcement of rights: “democratic regimes are rare, contingent, recent creations” (Tilly 2007, p. 18). Balanced levels of state capacity and citizen power are best for rights and democracy.

Thus, the bargaining approach offers a frame to study the development of discrete rights in a complex relationship with central states; the human rights approach contests the need for historical and structural preconditions for rights, suggesting that adoption and diffusion of rights are possible; and the democracy approach, by empirically showing that there is no fixed relationship between a set of rights and democratic regimes, underlines the need to understand the interrelationship (if any) between rights.

These three approaches, however, do not look at rights in terms of the institutions that they produce and this omission has obscured our understanding of the unequal difficulties in the establishment of rights. Additionally, looking at rights individually and institutionally will help clarify the relationship between rights and the state, and the limited ripple effect that rights have on each other.

I next discuss the different types of rights and institutions, with focus on property and political rights.

Institutions and rights

In a famous formulation North (1990, p. 3) points out that institutions are “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction” and structure incentives, whether political, social, or economic. More directly, Knight (1992, pp. 19–20) argues that institutions are the product of the “efforts of some to constrain the actions of others with whom they interact.” In addition, Knight (1992) makes two related relevant points: the first is that institutions are the result of bargaining, and the second is that they have distributional effects on a society. Citizens’ rights, in particular, are “mutually enforceable claims relating categories of persons to agents of governments,” and they result from bargains between state agents and collective actors (Tilly 1997). Agents of the government are the enforcers and guarantors of rights. As Holmes and Sunstein (2000, p. 44,182) argue, all rights are “positive.” Freedom of speech, or of religion, commonly understood in the United States as “negative” freedoms, as rights that seek to keep the state out, in fact entitle citizens to judicial remedies (at the cost of taxpayers) when public officials infringe those freedoms. Negative freedoms are rights insofar as they are claims to an affirmative state response. Effective rights require the state to enact, define, and maintain them, and therefore cost money.

Further, all citizens rights imply a degree of redistribution of a society’s resources, but some more directly than others. For example, property rights directly pertain to the distribution of wealth and assets in a society as they entail the expropriation from one group to benefit another; while social (welfare) rights call for an indirect redistribution, through taxation and subsequent state expenditures. Although the maintenance of property rights may not involve continuous expropriation, rules initially created for that purpose are most likely maintained for defense against domestic and international threats.

In addition to the direct or indirect distributive consequences, institutions supporting rights vary according to a second dimension: the density of their rules. By definition, all types of rights connect collective actors and the state, but some rights regulate vertical interactions between the state and diverse social groups whereas others regulate vertical and horizontal interactions, between social groups and the state and among the groups themselves. Social rights, like unemployment benefits, or food stamps, mainly define rules between groups in a society and the state. Alternatively, property rights regulate relations among groups of citizens and between the groups and the state. Women’s rights, rights to a fair trial, and antidiscrimination (minority) rights are also in this category.

Political rights, however, defy an easy placement in the above classification because they involve several dissimilar rights: popular vote or franchise, freedom of expression, and freedom of association, at a minimum. As a consequence of the diversity of rights involved, political rights form distinct institutions some of which are directly distributive (the popular vote as it grants control of the state to a few individuals), while other political rights are not. Similarly, the vote for example is implemented with a relatively sparser set of rules, while freedom of speech or of association may require a denser set of laws that not only keep the “state out” of the individuals’ preferences for speech or association, but also regulate conflicting individual preferences.

Figure 1 shows the variation of institutions supporting rights.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Rights as institutions

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Indeed Marshall (1965) argues that the institutional apparatus supporting rights develops distinct organizational forms and distinct mechanisms to reach the groups of people they are supposed to serve. In his view, access to social rights, unemployment or pension benefits, etc., requires means testing or other easily obtainable certifications. According to this author, major obstacles to the institutional and organizational establishment of the universal vote are not insurmountable either, but institutions involving civil rights (freedom of thought and association) develop more slowly and are accessible only through the legal profession, implying litigation and greater expense.

Thus, while the institutional rules and organizations supporting social rights—and to a lesser extent, voting rights—can be (and have been) successfully adopted in newer democracies, institutions and organizations enacting individual freedoms (of speech and association) as well as property rights, are considerably less so. The latter are less organizationally insulated and more sensitive to context and culture. Let me explain this further with focus on property and political rights.

Property rights

Private property is the result of political deals pressed forward by propertied classes. It is a legally constructed social relationship meaningful only if public authorities use coercion to exclude non-owners. Private property specifies, on the one hand, relations that distribute economic resources and, on the other, relations between owners and non-owners, and between them and the state.

That private property rights encode the distribution of valuable resources is a well-accepted proposition (Richardson and Bogart 2008; Campbell and Lindberg 1990). And early on, Hume already argued that private property is a monopoly granted and maintained at the public’s expense (cited in Holmes and Sunstein 2000).

Institutions such as property rights that are distributive and with a dense set of rules are difficult to establish for three reasons: first, they require multiple and complex regulations that lead to a bulky state; second, they rest on relatively stable power relations between losers and winners of property; and lastly, because the economic stakes are high, property owners need to trust state agents.

  1. (1)

    Bulky or relatively high capacity state. Distributive institutions require multiple regulations to prevent state agents from seizing private property, on the one hand, and threats from domestic and foreign interlopers, on the other. Furthermore, the defense of property, especially land, requires actual state territorial control. As a consequence, the role of the state in enacting and defending property is extensive and expensive. It must include among other entities a police and an army, criminal courts, and an extensive bureaucracy in charge of recording, surveying titles, and registering transactions, etc. (De Soto 1989). A main consequence is that property rights demand a central state able to enact and support expensive rights. To this extent, property rights are more difficult to establish and expand.

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    Stability of power relations. Farrell and Knight (2003, p. 540) argue that stability in power relations is a key factor in the stability of institutions. Since property rights define a particular balance of power valid at a given historical period, it can be argued that working and stable property rights are suited to stable and relatively egalitarian economies: those with stable power relations (Sonin 2002). Both stability and relative equality minimize political challenges to property, which reinforce trust in the law and in turn make economic transactions more automatic and less dependent on the actual use of courts and laws that regulate them. Conversely, the economic instability and high levels of inequality that usually characterize Third World countries (Rueschemeyer 2004) make property rights less legitimate and trusted, more evidently unfair, more subject to challenges, and ultimately more costly to enforce.

  3. (3)

    Trust. An additional related aspect to the legal frame to back up market transactions is the issue of trust. Scholars concur that market economies require trust to work smoothly (Tilly 2008; Warner 1998). These authors underline that market economies conduct self-enforcing transactions with goods exchanged for other goods or for money instantly, and transactions that involve time and distance may be hampered for lack of trust. The point here is that the close relationship of private property with the market economy distinctly links private property to confidence in the state capacity to enforce the law. As Hall (1986) argues, for the market economy to work smoothly consensus must precede contract. Consequently property rights are based on delicate and comprehensive political negotiations between owners and non-owners, as well as between them and the state. Complex and multidimensional agreements are more difficult to orchestrate from above.

Political rights

Three brief points are important here. The first is that popular voting creates a type of institution that is, one the one hand, narrow in its regulations and, on the other, potentially distributive. The second point is that voting, to be meaningful, has to be bundled with other rights. The third is that while the characteristics of the institution supporting the popular vote make it easier to implant, the fact that other rights are typically involved complicates its successful establishment.

It is possible to define political rights in a restricted manner, as the right to vote and be elected. With this narrow definition, the rules that support political rights connect citizens and government, and the franchise rests on institutional rules that have a sparse set of regulations. Indeed, the organizational basis of voting rights is, compared with property rights, simpler: voting is periodical, predictable, and relatively (locally) centralized. Thus, only along the dimension of the scope of the rules, and if redistribution issues are not at stake, it is an institution that is easier to adopt.

But political rights are potentially distributive rights. While by design the popular vote is not intended to give elected government officials the power to use the state machinery for their personal benefit or for the benefit of their own group, and in a working democracy there is a system of checks to impede their doing so, the danger is always latent. So is the danger, especially in newer democracies, to use political power to redistribute resources in the interests of the poor majority. Thus, even though property rights are designed to distribute resources and popular elections are not, they may be used to that purpose.

But minimally, voting requires two accompanying rights: freedom of expression, including freedom of the press, and freedom to join and to form associations. These rights grant the ability to get the information necessary for the formation of voting preferences, as well as the ability to elect and be elected (Mainwaring et al. 2001; O’Donnell 2001; Schedler 2002). As mentioned above, these freedoms (from state interference) are freedoms only if the state itself guarantees them. And, in politically, ethnically, or religiously divided societies the legal adjudication of these rights calls for a strong state presence regulating horizontal interactions among conflicting segments of civil society. As such, the density of the rules regulating the behavior of individuals to preserve these freedoms is largely contingent on how politically divided a society is at a given point. In this fashion these three rights shape a mixed bundle of institutions and organizations. Voting rights rest on rules that are potentially distributive but have a narrow or sparse scope, as they define a vertical interaction between voters and the government. Yet the freedom of expression and association, while not directly distributive, contains extensive and dense rules, especially in politically divided societies.

Compared with property rights, voting rights are easier to manage or, for that matter, to mismanage, and therefore these rights are easier, yet much more risky than the traditional (welfare) social rights, to establish. When combined with other freedoms, their mixed distributive and scope characteristics contribute to the explanation of why they are often imperfectly adopted. This difficulty is altogether evident in the history of US international pressures to implant the popular vote in Latin America.

In this respect, Markoff (1996) argues that the end of the Cold War meant that not only international pressures for democratization increased but also the main rival alternative to democracy ceased to exist. The establishment of political rights and their expansion, at least formally, became easier. Markoff (1996, p. 111) adds that while “… in the late eighteenth century claiming that governments should derive their powers from the consent of the governed was a dramatic and daring act…[i]n the twentieth century, making such a claim is easy, but determining what reality there is to such claims is often rather difficult.”

Indeed, the adoption of popular elections and the expansion of the voting franchise have been clustered in time and space (Levitsky and Way 2005). The bulk of Latin American countries adopted the popular franchise within about 50 years, from 1900 to 1949 (Tilly 2007). And the time frame for granting women the right to vote was even more condensed. Ramirez et al. (1997) show that throughout the twentieth century the influence of national political and organizational factors declined in the effort to grant women the right to vote while the importance of international links and influences became more important. They show that in Latin America female suffrage was adopted in most countries in the space of 15 years.

But when exported, political rights have been slanted to benefit the elites and to decrease or eliminate the potential distributional effects of elections. This trend has been vigorously documented and does not need to be repeated here. Suffice it to say that it is particularly true in the long history of the United States’ efforts to promote democracy in Latin America. The ways that power holders decreased the potential economic (re)distributional impact of elections have been multiple and sometimes creative. Restricting the franchise, rigging elections, or intimidating voters is, for Latin Americans, just an imitation of older democracies. But other alternatives have been at hand: establishing elections without political competition, or restricting competition by, for example, ruling out the participation of third parties. Freedom of the press and of association for most of the twentieth century was literally a “bourgeois right” and often did not have to be restricted (Mainwaring et al. 2001; Schedler 2002). But military coups, resulting from electoral outcomes that risked economic redistribution, if not invented in Latin American, have been perfected there.

Overall, the institutional characteristics of citizens’ rights underlie their adoption. Institutions that are directly economically distributive and have an extensive and dense set of rules and regulations are more difficult to establish and expand than institutions which are non-distributive and have a sparser set of regulations. Property rights are a prime example of the former, while social rights exemplify the latter. The popular vote and the freedoms needed for the exercise of free voting are mixed institutions. Rights are therefore not equal, and as they result from political deals, some of these deals are more difficult to achieve than others.

In the next section, I illustrate my argument using the case of Colombia. I first briefly introduce the political system, then discuss the expansion of political rights and the establishment of new cultural rights as agreed by the constitutional reform of 1991, and, lastly, look at the impact of strong challenges on land property.

Colombia: success with electoral democracy and failure with civil and property rights

During the second half of the twentieth century, Colombia has been a land of paradoxes. It is a country characterized by violent political conflict, among the most persistent and lethal of Latin American countries, and yet it has had a continuous civilian government since 1958, conducive to one of the most stable (after Costa Rica) democracies in Latin America. In spite of its fractured and conflictive polity, Colombia has been a model of economic stability, and enjoyed relative economic prosperity since 1945. Between 1945 and 1995, its economy grew at an annual average rate of almost 5%, and escaped the deep economic recession that affected most Latin American countries during the 1980s. Still, in 1999 the country faced a deep economic crisis. In spite of a weak, or possibly even failing, state and of a dismal record in protecting political dissidents, however, the constitutional reforms of 1991 invigorated democratic practices, drastically decentralizing a historically deeply centralized state.

In 1958, the leaders of the two major liberal and conservative political parties created a political accommodation, the National Front, which required the alternation of the presidency by the two parties and the equal sharing of the governmental positions for a total of 16 years (Bushnell 1993). The National Front pact that was ratified by popular referendum was responsible for the country’s remarkable political stability (by Latin American standards).

Popular elections with limited party competition were stable because the National Front solved some of the most contentious economic distributional issues that could result from elections. In particular, the National Front pact addressed critically disputed issues that had bitterly divided the parties and the economic elites: use of the governmental machinery and the military to enhance the power of the party in power and the land tenancy system. Partly because the pact made the economic elites confident that state agents would not seize land or redistribute it through land reform, elections continued largely undisturbed. This situation, however, changed with the expansion of illicit economic activities that intensified in the 1980s and with rapid economic growth.

Property rights of rural lands

I have argued above that property rights institutions have distributional consequences, involve conflict, and operate through a dense set of rules and regulations. I also argued that as a consequence of these institutional characteristics, the enforcement of property rights needs a relatively efficient and bulky state, a modicum of trust in state agents, and political stability to preserve the power relations that originally configured them. Since the 1980s, Colombia has had a low capacity state, a crisis of legitimacy, and rapid economic growth that has resulted in massive changes in property and power relations in large sections of the country.

Low state capacity

The low capacity of the Colombia state from the 1980s to the beginning of the twenty-first century is not disputed. The Colombian state is weak because it has been unable to defeat military challenges from right- and left-wing militias; does not control significant parts of the territory under its nominal jurisdiction; and has an undermined capacity to tax, redistribute resources, and adjudicate justice (Orjuela 2000; Velasco 2007; Thoumi 1995).

Guerrilla groups gained military and economic strength since the 1980s policy failure to integrate them into the political system. The main guerrilla group, FARC, grew from 600 fighters in the 1980s to about 15,000 in the 1990s; and from being ill-financed in the 1970s to an operation of $300 million dollars a year, according to some estimates, by tapping drug money (Rangel Suarez 2000). Economic resources have enabled FARC to control territories, tax, and protect populations from paramilitary forces and from military government agents. In addition, paramilitary groups connected to narcotics traffickers have also become stronger. In 2002, they had 18,000 troops, up from 10,483 in 1994 (The Economist June 1, 2002, US edition; Sanchez 2001: 15). They also tap drug money directly and indirectly through taxation of drug businesses; and they protect populations, including rich narcotics traffickers who have invested in land and cattle ranchers, from guerrilla attacks as well as from peasants who occupy private lands.

Rubio (in Bejarano et al. 1997: 24–26), who studied the effects of high levels of criminality on the civil and criminal justice systems, shows that the probability that a crime was investigated was 20 to 30% for several decades (from the 1940s to the 1960s). In 1987, however, the rate was only close to 5%, and the probability of being sentenced was 3%. In fact, criminal impunity, according to Rubio, has made crime a profitable business: the average gains from a single crime committed was 3.5 million pesos, while the average annual income for licit work was 3 million.

Trust and credibility

From the 1980s until the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been little argument about the lack of credibility of the Colombian state with respect to its basic functions of protecting land and property and punishment of criminal activity. Scholars variously cite a legitimacy crisis, the lack of a national integrative political project, the perception of weakness and impunity for crime, etc. (Leal Buitrago 1992; Shifter 1999). Indeed, for more than three decades state authorities were unable to establish peace, either through negotiations or military victory, although different administrations tried both. The failure to control the territory under its nominal jurisdiction demonstrated the state’s weakness, which in turn decreased its credibility and supported the perception that the central state would not or could not defend life or property or adjudicate justice. Rubio (1998:17) showed that lack of credibility in the justice system was the norm: in 1994, for example, more than 50% of close relatives of homicide victims never contacted any state authorities; only 38% filed a police report.

Instability of power relations

Colombian scholars have recently arrived at a consensus about the close interaction among illegal activities, violence, land property changes, and economic growth (Bejarano et al. 1997; Richani 2002). Several studies analyzing the regional distribution of violent activities in Colombia show that the most violent regions are those where property rights are challenged. Challenges to property rights come from three sources: (a) colonization of marginal frontier lands by peasants displaced from richer lands; (b) illegal mining and illegal agriculture; (c) the acquisitions of land that had been settled previously by peasants without land titles (Bejarano et al. 1997; Thoumi 1995, p.77).

A significant cause of changing power relations in rural parts of the country was the rapid economic growth brought about by immensely profitable illegal (coca) and some legal (banana) crops that increased the value of land very rapidly. Indeed, regions with high economic growth during the 1960–1989 period, and those where wages were at least 30% higher than the national average, presented simultaneously rapid economic growth and the highest murder rates (Bejarano et al. 1997).

As mentioned, in many cases land was settled by peasants without titles and in frontier territories where the administrative and judicial reach of the state was weak. The rapid valorization of assets and the state’s weak capability to punish illegal transactions interacted closely to generate incentives to expand illegal activities and challenge property rights. Richani (2002, p. 95), for example, shows that coca plantations expanded in regions where the presence of the state was weak, sometimes not beyond a small police force of less than 15 officers stationed in the departments’ urban centers. In turn, with impunity, illicit crops expanded very quickly, about 400% between 1978 and 1998 to cover close to 100,600 ha (about 247 thousand acres).

Changes in land ownership also occurred in regions with large and underutilized tracts of lands owned by traditional hacendados who, threatened by the guerrillas, would sell their property as well as the land occupied by colonos, to drug traffickers (Reyes Posada 2009, p. 120). Reyes Posada (2009, pp. 34–40) argues that the crisis of property rights brought about by rapid changes in land ownership and possession, resulted in the emergence of a new landed elite, composed of owners whose capital was illegally obtained and members of paramilitary forces who took land by force. In particular, according to Reyes Posada, the new narco-land owners were interested in land as a means to legalize capital, as a refuge, or as a territory where they could do illegal business.

Crumbling property rights in the countryside expelled close to 1.5 million peasants from their lands since 1991, and killed over 35,000 in armed conflicts that were largely centered on the control of land (Caballero 2000:90). Recently the government began to implement several projects to protect legal ownership and to return land to owners, who because of threats and intimidation were obliged to sell or to abandon their land (Reyes Posada 2009, pp. 74–75).

Once the state showed that it could not, or was not willing to defend land property, land owners created private armies to secure life and property, initiating a circle of increasing violence and criminality that overwhelmed the civil and justice system and undermined confidence in the state capacity to defend almost any kind of citizenship rights. And this in turn expanded the need and the benefits derived from counting on private armies, reinforcing the cycle of dispossession of land, etc. Sonin (2002), argues that dominant elites actually benefit from absent or weak property rights because they can dispossess peasants. This is undoubtedly the case of Colombia where a new economic elite forced its way into land ownership.

Electoral and other political rights

During the 1990s many Latin American states enacted constitutional reforms with two fundamental common characteristics: first, they introduced far-reaching reforms that substantially decentralized economic, administrative, and judicial activities that were previously in the hands of the states with strong centralizing traditions; second, they introduced expanded political rights, and offered new cultural rights. Colombia’s new charter was approved in 1991. Such a reform enriched political rights, introduced new cultural rights that included the granting of considerably large tracts of land to Afro-descendant and indigenous minorities, and strengthened social rights.

Decentralization in Colombia started in 1983 with laws that increased fiscal resources to municipal governments, followed by a 1986 law that allowed the redistribution of the value added tax to municipalities, and by the first popular election of mayors in that year. These reforms were followed by bolder and more comprehensive reforms consigned in a new charter. The new constitution brought changes that sought to a) increase political representation by the inclusion of new political forces, the transition to a multiparty system and increased political participation at the local level; b) strengthen the state especially justice, defense, and police; c) strengthen Congress and d) increase social expenditures expanding health, education, and social security (Orjuela 2000). The economic and administrative decentralization was based on the transfer to local governments of 45% of the state’s income, about 10% of the GDP in the year 2000. Local governments are now in charge of social services, health, education, sanitation, water, and electricity (Restrepo Botero 2001, p. 355).

In terms of political rights the constitution dismantled the monopoly of the two party-system and created new institutions to promote participation in elections and decision making at the local level. In this respect, according to Bejarano (2001) new mechanisms of political participation were created to expand participation beyond the rights to vote and be elected, including plebiscites, referenda, popular consultations, town meetings, legislative initiatives, and the ability to recall elected officials. With the legislative initiative, for example, citizens could participate in developing laws, ordinances, agreements, or resolutions. In addition, new electoral districts for the Senate and House were created permitting access to actors previously excluded from the political arena, including ethnic minorities. Finally there were also new mechanisms of control and accountability over public power.

Analysts of the constitution are divided about its actual effects on political participation (Ahumada 1996; Bejarano 2001; Uprimny 2001). But minimally the consensus is that compared to the 1970s, the 1991 reform resulted in a significant political aperture. For instance, already during the 1980s, new leftist parties (the Patriotic Union and M19), accepted political participation, the latter fully collaborated in the process of constitutional reform. And a number of mayors and governors, not members of the traditional political parties have been elected. An example is Bogotá, where the last three elections resulted in the election of politically independent mayors. A similar phenomenon is present in Cali, Barranquilla, and other major cities (Bejarano 2001). Bejarano also points out that in contradistinction with previous periods, political campaigns are emphasizing local consensus and platforms, often underlining their differences with traditional parties and with national political programs. And voter turnout in elections has increased, to a record 59% in 1998 (The Economist 2001), which combined with greater local autonomy, has made possible, for example, the remarkable civic resurgence of the city of Bogotá.

The deepening of democracy through enhanced political participation and a substantial increase in the number of government officials that could be elected was facilitated by the organizational characteristics of voting systems. The point here may be small but is worth making: government officials were elected, more people voted, and party competition for the nomination of candidates was open. Compared to the democracy with limited party competition that existed before, post-1990s elections increased democracy (Davila Ladron de Guevara 2002).

The same could not be said for other political rights. Violations of freedoms of association and speech were rampant: since 1986 more than 2,515 labor organizers have been killed, making Colombia “the world’s most dangerous country for trade unionists” (Rojas 2009, p. 234); 22 journalists were killed between 1988–1989, again making Colombia the world’s most dangerous place for the press (Caballero 2000, pp. 90–91); and between 1988 and 2008, 34 academics who spoke up either against guerrillas or paramilitaries were executed (Aspu 2008).

Thus, democracy consolidated while the Colombian state was unquestionably weakened by civil war, and when all other citizens’ rights were systematically violated. The gap between the formal law and its implementation was narrowest in the case of electoral reform while it remained wide open with all other rights.

Concluding remarks

Because rights reflect bargains that involve class specific interests, the institutions that support them develop separately, and are able to adapt to changes in power relations to different degrees. Institutions that have direct distributional effects and develop dense networks of regulations partly to maintain unequal power relations are more deeply embedded in the process of centralization of power, reflect stable bargains especially over rural land, require real control of the territory under the states’ jurisdiction, and are based on some level of trust. Institutions that are indirectly redistributive and are accompanied by sparser rules and regulations, though, are easier to establish. I argued that property rights are an example of the former, while social rights of the latter. Electoral rights may potentially redistribute economic resources, but are framed by relatively simple rules, which under international pressures, and favorable internal conditions, are easier to adopt. Civil freedoms and antidiscrimination rights are indirectly distributive but are surrounded by dense and complex rules, which make them difficult to enact.

That some rights can be adopted more easily than others, does not say much about the permanence of those rights. The characteristics of their institutions say little about why and when rights are diminished. That is, rights are reversible independently of their institutional characteristics. Tilly (2007, p. 12) was skeptical about the exportability of democracy. For him rights and democracy centered on a continuous struggle between citizens and states, that could not be preempted with decisions from above. “Even a conquering military power such as the western Allies in Japan and Germany after World War II must bargain extensively with citizens to create a new democratic regime where authoritarians previously ruled.” Rights map out power relations and maintaining them depends on maintaining power.

This article suggests that there is no necessary connection among citizenship rights, and consequently the importance of a historical sequence of rights for a given political regime is dubious. The historical record shows that popular and upper class groups can gain rights in autocratic, democratic, or socialist regimes, and they have done so following different sequences. Furthermore, I have argued here that rights imply a relationship between collective actors and state agents, and that the enforcement of rights depends on different levels of state capacity. Empirical evidence suggests that weak central states in developing countries are unequally equipped to enforce rights. They are better, under certain conditions, at supporting voting rights, but are hampered more fundamentally when enacting rights with complex regulations that call for an extensive state apparatus. The implication from this work is thus that citizens’ rights have a variable relation to state capacity. While states in newer democracies may be sufficiently strong and independent for certain rights (those that are more easily established), they may not be strong enough to expand others.

The case of Colombia suggests at least one issue for further research: clearly the enactment of a given set of rights has limited ripple effects on the creation of other rights; however, the dismantling of some rights does generate a “negative” domino effect to eliminate other rights. Citizenship rights seem to be connected to each other more on the down than the up side. In Colombia the violation of property rights generated a massive assault on all other rights, an assault that has lasted for over three decades. No similar effect, or at least not with the same intensity and duration, existed when, in the past, electoral or social rights were dismantled. Thus there may be a “hierarchy” of rights, one that maps the hierarchy of power relations in capitalist economies.