This article tests functional and institutional explanations for the different levels of formal independence of regulatory agencies in Latin America. The analysis is grounded in an original database of the formal independence level of 104 regulators in 8 countries and 13 regulatory sectors. The results challenge a central claim of the credible commitment hypothesis as they indicate that privatization is not a significant determinant of agency independence nor are utility regulators more likely to be independent than other economic regulators. Veto players are positively correlated with formal independence, indicating that in developing countries they operate together as credibility‐enhancing mechanisms, rather than as functional equivalents, as previous studies on developed countries have shown. Democratization is positively correlated with formal independence, whereas trade opening and vulnerability to international pressures has no significant impact. Hence, this article enhances the understanding of the delegation of regulatory powers to formally independent agencies in developing countries.

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Anti-corruption reforms introduced in Latin America in the last decade require active citizenry. In particular, efforts to strengthen transparency laws assume citizens are able to identify, condemn, and denounce corrupt acts. Thus, tolerance of corruption among citizens is problematic for these institutions. Using data from IEA's International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016, this chapter analyzes which students are at higher risk of tolerating corruption and address how schools may promote the endorsement of anticorruption norms. A series of multilevel models were used to predict tolerance of corruption. The main findings suggest that civic knowledge and endorsement of authoritarianism are the main predictors of tolerance of corruption among students, accounting for 49% of the variance at the population level. In multilevel models, open classroom discussion is negatively related to tolerance of corruption. However, once civic knowledge is entered into the model, the relationship seems to be indirect. This chapter discusses how promoting open classroom discussion and civic knowledge in schools may prevent tolerance of corruption.

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Studies on judicial decision-making on constitutional courts have shown that the judges' ideology is a good predictor of their judicial behavior. However, it remains unclear to what extent this finding is generalizable to courts of cassation without constitutional control powers and integrated by career judges, who arrive at the court after decades working within the judiciary and who have been characterized as source of legal formalism and political neutrality within the court. To study this puzzle, the article analyzes 10 years of votes on split decisions by the Chilean Supreme Court's Public Law Chamber (N=14.135), where both career and non-career judges participate. The study applies an IRT model to identify the ideal points of each judge, as a latent variable that represent the propensity of judges to vote with the rest of judges, in non-unanimous cases. Against the myth of the ideological neutrality of career judges, the results show that career judges are divided in distinguishable poles in the ideological cleavage of the Court.