Institutional Stability Beyond Quality: Structural Coherence, Regime Persistence, and Developmental Trajectories in Latin America
Why do some developing countries sustain coherent institutional trajectories over long periods, while others cycle between reform, crisis, and incomplete recovery? Conventional measures of institutional quality emphasize levels of democracy, governance, or rule of law, yet they struggle to explain why countries with similar scores exhibit sharply different patterns of institutional persistence and rupture. This article advances a structural perspective on institutional stability, conceptualizing institutions as interdependent subsystems whose coherence, or misalignment, shapes long-run developmental trajectories.
To operationalize this framework, the article introduces the Institutional Regime Stability Index (IRSI), a dynamic measure that captures the persistence of coherent institutional configurations rather than static institutional levels. Using comparative data for nine Latin American countries between 1900 and 2024, the analysis identifies three recurrent patterns of institutional development: resilient coherence, adaptive stability, and recurrent misalignment. Higher IRSI values are systematically associated with lower GDP growth volatility and greater capacity to attract foreign direct investment, linking institutional coherence to economic risk and policy credibility. By reframing institutional stability as a property of systemic coherence, the IRSI offers a new comparative lens for analysing development and institutional change.
© The Author(s) 2026. Published by RITHA Publishing. This article is distributed under the terms of the license CC-BY 4.0., which permits any further distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited maintaining attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and URL DOI.
Article’s history: Received 10th of January, 2026; Revised 27th of January, 2026; Accepted for publication 2nd of February, 2026; Available online: 6th of February, 2026; Published as article in Volume II, Issue 1(3), 2026.
Vallarino, D. (2026). Institutional Stability Beyond Quality: Structural Coherence, Regime Persistence, and Developmental Trajectories in Latin America. Applied Journal of Economics, Law and Governance, Volume II, Issue 1(3), 37-58. https://doi.org/10.57017/ajelg.v2.i1(3).02
Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgment/Founding: N/A
Data Availability Statement: The data that support the findings of this study are derived exclusively from publicly available secondary sources, including the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset, the Polity V project, and publicly accessible constitutional and historical records. These datasets are cited in the References section and can be accessed directly from their respective repositories. No proprietary, confidential, or restricted data were used in this study.
Ethical Approval Statement: This study is theoretical and empirical in nature and relies exclusively on the analysis of publicly available, anonymised secondary data. It did not involve human participants, personal data, experiments, surveys, or animal subjects. Therefore, ethical approval was not required.
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