Justiça criminal, justiça civil e ordem e segurança como proxies de Estado de direito e o seu nível de associação e dispersão em relação aos regimes políticos na América Latina e na Europa.

Abstract

The present work seeks to understand the association between the level of institutionalization of the rule of law and the quality of democracies in the Latin American context. The focus here is on procedural democracy, that is, on democracy based on rules or procedures. To this end, literature relevant to the concept of contemporary democracy was surveyed and a historical digression was made about it and its paths, along with this, a theoretical framework to define the perspective on the rule of law and its relationship with its quality. The problem of the research is to determine whether a rule of law with a high level of institutionalization impacts or influences the quality of democracy. However, we seek to demonstrate that both are inseparable. The work is based on two hypotheses: H1. Based on the theoretical construction regarding democracy and its quality, a high and positive sign is expected in the correlation between the dependent variable and the independent variables; H2. The low and negative sign of the correlation is in line with what is theoretically expected. This study is descriptive in nature with correlation tests, aiming to compare the political regimes in this region based on the rule of law. Three indicators were used: Criminal Justice, Civil Justice and Order and Security, to verify the degree of institutionalization of the former and the democratic index to classify political regimes. In analyzing results, correlation tests, multivariate regression and descriptive analysis of each set of data are performed. It was demonstrated that the majority of countries in Latin America are formed by hybrid regimes with low average indicators in the proxy variables above, especially when compared to European countries. However, the correlations show that both in the context of Latin American and European countries there is a high association between the variables, indicating that the rule of law becomes essential for the democratic quality of those political regimes.