By Carlos Meléndez
Peru’s democracy is eroding not through aspiring autocrats but through exhaustion. Beneath the turmoil lies a subtler form of decay: entrenched informality hollowing out authority and turning governance into a marketplace of deals rather than a system of rules.
In just nine years, Peru has seen seven presidents, two attempted congressional dissolutions (one successful, one televised flop), and waves of street protests violently suppressed by state forces, killing more than fifty citizens. Ministers rotate out of office every 20 days on average, while legislators change party affiliations faster than models swap outfits on a runway. Approval ratings for the executive and legislature hover in the single digits. If this is authoritarianism, it is certainly not the efficient kind.
This essay argues that Peru’s apparent democratic collapse is not a case of authoritarian takeover, but the result of entrenched informality that undermines formal authority and replaces it with transactional rule. In other words, what we are witnessing is not the consolidation of power but its disintegration through chronic informality and non-enforcement—a process best described as democratic entropy. This entropy refers to the gradual loss of institutional energy: Rules exist but are not obeyed, authority persists but is not respected. The result is a form of governance where deals, not laws, determine outcomes.
Political scientists—ever eager to name the decay before fully describing it—have rushed to file the Peruvian case under democracy’s expanding obituary. For Barrenechea and Vergara, Peru exemplifies “democratic hollowing”: a state where political amateurs, fragmented parties, and absent linkages to society dilute power to the point of collapse. Meanwhile, Sosa, Incio, and Arce describe a more sinister process, “legislative authoritarianism,” in which congressmen—through no apparent ideology or party—nonetheless manage to concentrate power, hijack oversight bodies, and shield themselves from accountability.
But what if neither diagnosis quite fits? What if Peru’s democracy is not being hollowed out or hijacked by political actors, but slowly swamped by its own informality, institutional fragility, and absence of enforceable rules? In this reading, no one—and at the same time, everyone—is driving the breakdown.
The central paradox in both readings is that these allegedly weak and amateurish actors somehow manage to resolve the most complex problems of collective action. Fragmented, party-less, ideology-agnostic congressmen suddenly act in concert to dismantle democracy? We are asked to believe that a legislature with a higher turnover rate than interns in an unpaid NGO can erode checks and balances, co-opt judicial institutions, and shield itself from scrutiny—all without stable leadership or long-term strategy. These are political actors who can’t pass a budget, yet somehow orchestrate a slow-motion constitutional capture.
This leap of faith requires what Schedler warned against: ”labeling without mechanism.” The assumption that a particular outcome (institutional erosion) implies a particular intention (authoritarianism) skips the analytical work of tracing cause and consequence. Democratic backsliding, like democratization, rarely follows blueprints—especially in regimes where the only stable feature is instability.
Instead of top-down agency, we should adopt a bottom-up sociological perspective. Peru’s regime is best understood not as a democracy with failing elites, but as a political system increasingly shaped by informales con plata—wealthy informal actors whose primary political demand is to avoid and/or substitute the state. Their growing influence does not amount to capturing the state, but it does erode its regulatory and representative functions. Informality in Peru is not merely a socioeconomic condition: it is a regime logic that bends institutions toward non-enforcement and transactionalism. When 80 percent of the labor force operates outside formal protections and tax obligations, the median voter is not invested in state-building. Quite the opposite: There is a political economy of disarticulation.
Peru’s regime is best understood not as a democracy with failing elites, but as a political system increasingly shaped by informales con plata—wealthy informal actors whose primary political demand is to avoid and/or substitute the state.
These informal elites—in mining, logging, transport, and trade—have no particular ideological preference for democracy or authoritarianism. What they seek is impunity, deregulation, and transactional politics. Legislators, reliant on short-term resources and campaign machines, legislate accordingly. As reflected in congressional initiatives that protect illegal extractive activities, shield parties under investigation, and neutralize oversight bodies, the primary legislative output in Peru is not authoritarianism per se, but deregulated informality.
To frame this as democratic backsliding is to misdiagnose the disease. The state is not being captured by a cohesive autocratic project; it is being transformed by actors whose coordination is minimal but whose incentives converge around non-enforcement. What we observe in Peru is not the consolidation of power but its fragmentation and redistribution. It is not regime control expanding, but formal authority dissolving and diffusing across informal middle and upper classes whose political engagement is transactional and deregulated. There is no authoritarian father figure—only a decentered ecosystem of veto players defending their slice of the informal pie.
What we observe in Peru is not the consolidation of power but its fragmentation and redistribution. It is not regime control expanding, but formal authority dissolving and diffusing across informal middle and upper classes whose political engagement is transactional and deregulated.
Which brings us to the ironic heart of the matter: If the authors of The Federalist Papers feared anything, it was precisely this kind of legislative overreach. ”An elective despotism was not the government we fought for,” wrote Jefferson, warning against a Congress unmoored from checks, balances, or popular will. But in Peru, even that fear is misplaced. There are no aspiring despots here, only dealmakers. Our version of legislative excess is not driven by aristocratic ambition or ideological zeal, but by the relentless pragmatism of new informal elites. Their currency is not authority but transactions, and their power stems not from institutional control but from the capacity to obstruct, delay, and extract. In this context, legislative entropy does not pave the way to dictatorship—it stabilizes a regime of informal vetoes, where governance becomes a negotiation among actors who mistrust rules but master deals.
Our version of legislative excess is not driven by aristocratic ambition or ideological zeal, but by the relentless pragmatism of new informal elites.
The challenge, then, is not to decide whether Peru is a democracy in decline or a hybrid regime in formation. It is to understand the political output of a system governed by chronic informality. Just as Barrington Moore linked the rise of democracy to the consolidation of a bourgeois class, Peru reveals the opposite: a fragmented, informal, rent-seeking lumpen-bourgeoisie whose primary political product is institutional entropy. This is not a prelude to authoritarianism, but a stable dysfunction—an equilibrium where no one governs effectively, yet everyone extracts just enough to preserve the system.
What we are witnessing is not democratic decay in the classic sense, but the consolidation of a low-quality democracy perfectly compatible with economic growth and elite reproduction: a market economy without a Weberian state, a representative system without representativeness. The result is not a pathology imported from comparative politics textbooks, but a native-born model of governance—indeed, an anti-model—deregulated, disjointed, and surprisingly durable. It is a democracy governed not by laws or leaders, but by transactions, impunity, and negotiated disorder.
Carlos Meléndez is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and a Research Affiliate at CEU Democracy Institute.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
