Prof. Dr. Mariana Llanos

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, political leaders reacted by containment measures that, next to combating the spread of the pandemic, also presented a window of opportunity to bolster executives’ personal grasp on power. Personalization of power has been particularly worrying in the Global South where constraints on the chief executives were often already weak prior to the pandemic. This project assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the personalization of executive power in 36 countries of the Global South.
DFG, 2021-2024

This project contributes new knowledge on the functioning of democratic institutions in the Global South, their (in)efficacy to constrain powerful executives, and the effects of particular institutions on both democratic quality and regime stability. The focus is on countries with presidential constitutions, i.e., those with directly elected presidents, an institutional choice that extended worldwide in the last decades.
Leibniz Competition, 2021-2026

This seminar studies the formal institutions that must converge in order to deliver a policy outcome. We concentrate on five major themes: the electoral cycle, dynamics of executive-legislative relations, decision-making between national and sub-national levels of government, the judiciary and the protection of rights, and mechanisms for direct democracy.

Universität Erfurt Erfurt

According to the latest Freedom House’s report, global democracy is in further decline, with the number of countries experiencing deterioration outnumbering those with improvements by the largest margin since this negative trend began to be observed 15 years ago. In this course, students are familiarized with three successive developments in global democracy as well as with the political science concepts and literature that have accompanied these trends: first, the inception of the third wave of democratization in the 1970s-1990s; second, democratic recession and problems in the quality of consolidating democracies; third, developments leading to democratic erosion and backsliding. Students will learn to work with key concepts and indicators related to each of these trends. They will work with case studies.