Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop as they host Nicole Herscovici, PhD student in Political Science at Northwestern University, for a presentation titled "Why do semi-loyal oppositions initiate extra-democratic impeachments?"
For democracies to function, incumbents must refrain from aggrandizing power and oppositions must accept electoral defeat and allow presidents to govern until the end of their term. Research on democratic erosion has focused overwhelmingly on incumbent overreach and the opposition’s role in violating this equilibrium remains understudied. Since the 1980s, Latin American presidents have been removed by Congress twenty‑two times, either through impeachment or resignation under impeachment threat. Some removals reflected genuine checks on executive abuse, as in the case of Fujimori in Peru. Most, however, were cases in which impeachments were not a tool of horizontal accountability. Instead, the opposition took advantage of the impeachment law to get into power without having to win elections – which I define as cases of extra-democratic impeachments. This paper asks which parties pursue extra‑democratic impeachments and why. I argue that these removals are driven by semi‑loyal oppositions: opportunistic actors that operate within democratic institutions but selectively violate democratic norms when doing so is politically advantageous. I theorize that semi‑loyal oppositions act when weakened normative constraints, favorable power balances, and moments of political instability – whether exogenous or manufactured – create openings to reinterpret institutional rules and repurpose impeachment for strategic gain. By centering opposition behavior, the paper advances an agenda for understanding how mainstream parties, not only incumbents or extremists, contribute to democratic erosion from within.
Nicole Herscovici is a PhD student in Political Science at Northwetsern University. Her research interests include regime change, elites, democracy, political economy.
Ariel Sowers
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