Carlos Menem

And neither have the left populists on the Peronist side.

And there were real efforts in the 90s by Menem to do some of those things, and they were resisted.

So there's a real sort of public commitment to those institutions, the liberal institutions of democracy, and a real concern about giving too much power to executives.

And that's sort of an interesting institutional legacy that Argentina has.

And I studied recently six cases in which presidents try to activate top-down referendums to introduce re-election.

In Argentina with Menem, in Honduras with Zelaya, I'm talking about cases in different moments in time, but all after the first transition to democracy.

In Colombia, with Uribe, in Peru, Fujimori, Morales, in Bolivia, and Chavez in Venezuela, which are six cases with many similarities.

But the outcome is super different.

In Colombia, Uribe tried to activate that, and the constitutional court said, this is unconstitutional, no plebiscite, it won't work.

In Argentina, Menem signed a decree to call for a referendum, and then the leader of the opposition party, Raúl Alfonsín, arrived at an agreement, so there was no popular consultation, but there was an election.

In

Colombia, no re-election, no plebiscite.

The term caudillo, it's also very close term.

to the populist leader, and we can remember Juan Peron in Argentina, also Carlos Menem in Argentina, Getulio Vargas in Brazil, and obviously, more recently, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Nicolas Maduro that was just ousted at the beginning of this

year in that operation by the U.S. military.

In our research, let's say the econometric exercise covers from 1970 to the present.