A Study of Powers and Institutions

 

THE PROGRESSIVE PERSONALIZATION OF INSTITUTIONS

          Power, Republican Credit, Institutional Health, and Institutional Normalit

Arion Ronaldo Ribeiro Louzada

            A legal scholar and former university faculty member, Arion Ronaldo Ribeiro Louzada has devoted part of his academic career to the study and teaching of Constitutional Law, Economics, and Public and Private International Law. He holds a Master’s degree in Law from Universidade Católica and has taught at Universidade Paulista, Centro Universitário Projeção, and other higher-education institutions in Brazil. His work spans legals and economic analysis, with particular attention to institutional design, economic development, and public policy. He is the author of Brazil, a Power by Choice — Labor, Capital, Productive Sovereignty, and Legal Certainty for a New Development Cycle and FROM CONCENTRATION TO DEPENDENCE: The Structural Vulnerability of Brazilian Exports. His books are available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions through Amazon marketplaces in Brazil, the United States, Europe, Japan, and other countries.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the progressive personalization of public institutions and the temporal preservation of control capacity in constitutional orders. It begins with the distinction between person, office, and institution and confronts the proposed framework with classical and contemporary traditions concerning separation of powers, legal-rational authority, non-domination, legality, integrity, institutional corruption, accountability, democratic erosion and resilience, endogenous institutional change, entrenchment, and informal norms. It argues that independence is not immunity, finality is not sovereignty, and leadership is not equivalent to personalization. The expression “republican institutional health” is proposed as a synthetic formulation and analytical hypothesis describing the relational and temporal quality of an order in which the exercise of public power remains effectively subject, over time, to legally established mechanisms of limitation, review, and accountability, without the trajectory of those powers substantially reducing the future capacity of such controls to operate. The concept is not presented as an autonomous source of duties, powers, or sanctions and remains subject to legal closure. The Brazilian context is treated as a field in which the theoretical question becomes urgent, without personalized accusations or anticipatory judgments of liability. The study concludes that depersonalization of power and preservation of the operability of controls are relevant conditions of republican normality, whose assessment requires identifiable causal mechanisms and a rigorous distinction between institutional criticism and legal findings of unlawfulness.

Keywords: public institutions; institutional personalization; republican institutional health; control of public power; accountability.

             INTRODUCTION

There are moments when the ordinary operation of institutions raises questions that outlast the events that make them visible. Contemporary Brazil offers one such moment. Serious controversies involving officials serving in institutions vested with exceptionally consequential judicial, investigative, and prosecutorial powers have brought to the center of public debate problems that cannot be resolved by approving or rejecting particular individuals. The academically relevant question begins once proper names are removed and one asks what remains: what relationships among the individual officeholder, the office, the institution, and mechanisms of control are compatible with a republican order capable of exercising power while preserving meaningful limits on it?

This study begins from that circumstance but deliberately does not turn it into a chronicle. 

The notoriety of the episodes does not dispense with proof; the seriousness of the allegations does not authorize anticipatory judgments of responsibility; the importance of institutions does not immunize them from criticism. 

Adjudication, investigation, and prosecution are functions without which the constitutional order loses its capacity to protect rights and enforce the law. 

Precisely for that reason, the independence necessary to perform them cannot be confused with self-sufficiency, just as scrutiny of their officials cannot be confused with hostility toward the institutions they serve.

The central problem is the progressive personalization of public institutions. The expression does not refer to the inevitable presence of human personality in the exercise of power, nor does it condemn leadership, prominence, or intellectual authority. It refers to an erosion of the distance between person and office through which powers, prerogatives, instruments, or prestige belonging to the institution begin to operate, objectively or symbolically, as extensions of the officeholder's personal authority or standing. 

The phenomenon matters to constitutional law because public powers are not the property of those who exercise them. They are functionally assigned powers, temporarily conferred and bound to purposes that precede the official and must survive that official.

This first question leads to another, less visible and perhaps more difficult. Can a constitutional order formally preserve its institutions, powers, and control procedures while altering the practical conditions under which those controls will operate in the future? Put differently: can the ordinary exercise of public authority, without a corresponding textual reform, contribute to making the later operation of legally existing mechanisms of limitation, review, and accountability over the same center of power more difficult, costly, unlikely, or institutionally risky?

The question does not arise on empty ground. Montesquieu and Madison placed the containment of power at the center of constitutional design. Weber made the separation between the authority of office and the personal attributes of the officeholder decisive. 

The contemporary republican tradition, especially Pettit (1997), restored non-domination and contestability to the core of political freedom. Fuller showed the importance of the internal conditions of legality; fiduciary theory examined the functional and entrusted character of public power; 

O'Donnell demonstrated that the formal existence of oversight agencies does not guarantee effective horizontal accountability. In different ways, the literature on institutional corruption, democratic erosion, resilience, feedback, endogenous institutional change, entrenchment, parties, informal norms, and forbearance has shown that institutions can silently alter the conditions of their own operation.

This state of the art rules out two easy moves. The first would be to present as novel what political theory, public law, and political science have already explained with precision. The second would be to conclude, conversely, that the abundance of existing categories eliminates any problem still worth investigating. The path taken in this study is narrower. 

Theories are brought together, tested against one another, and separated in order to determine what each explains and where their objects cease to coincide.

The category of republican institutional health will be used in this inquiry with deliberately modest status. No new general theory of the republic is announced, nor any principle capable of creating powers, offenses, or sanctions. Republican institutional health functions as a synthetic formulation and analytical hypothesis for examining a relational and temporal quality of the institutional order: the preservation, throughout the exercise of power, of the effective capacity of legally established controls to operate upon that power. 

Its usefulness will depend on whether it can distinguish this relationship from neighboring phenomena—legality, integrity, accountability, non-domination, entrenchment, resilience, and erosion—without unnecessarily duplicating them.

The same caution applies to other expressions used in this study. 

Republican credit designates the asymmetry by which authority, prerogatives, and institutional protection are conferred before individual performance is known, without thereby implying advance personal trust. Institutional modesty does not describe temperament; it denotes a non-proprietary relationship to official power. Republican distance does not purport to establish an abstract metric; it names the functional separation required between person and office, protection and immunity, decision and control, prestige and irresponsibility. None of these categories dispenses with the legal basis required for state action.

Legal closure is therefore an internal condition of the argument. Concepts of sound institutional order cannot, by themselves, create state power. A republic may enforce as law only what the legal order authorizes it to enforce. 

Society, however, remains free to assess the public exercise of authority, and private institutions such as universities, the press, the legal profession, civic associations, and the broader intellectual community legitimately participate in that scrutiny without becoming organs of state accountability.

The inquiry thus proceeds along two lines that must ultimately converge. 

The first examines the depersonalization of power: why the institution does not belong to the official and why the replaceability of officeholders is a sign of republican maturity. 

The second examines the temporality of controls: why it is not enough to know which powers of oversight, review, and accountability exist on paper, and why one must ask whether they remain materially operable after successive exercises of the power they are meant to control.

The Brazilian context will return at the end not as automatic proof of the thesis, but as the reason for its urgency. Theory will not be permitted to conclude about facts what the facts do not establish. Its role is more demanding: to offer criteria by which present controversies may be examined without cults of personality, without hostility toward institutions, and without the convenience of confusing formal legality with institutional health. 

The question is whether a republic can preserve strong institutions without producing institutionally indispensable officials, and whether it can confer sufficient power without allowing the exercise of that power to consume, for those who come later, the capacity to control it.

            1 Public Power and the Distance Between Person, Office, and Institution

            Impersonality

Impersonality commonly appears in legal vocabulary as an administrative-law principle. Here it is taken in a more elementary sense: as a civilizing constraint on power. 

Public office can survive the succession of its holders only if what belongs to the office can be distinguished from what belongs to the person. That separation does not eliminate personality, leadership, or conviction. It prevents institutional attributes from being absorbed into the officeholder's personal symbolic capital.

            Institutional Personalization

Institutional personalization occurs when that distance narrows. 

Powers, prerogatives, instruments, protections, or prestige belonging to the institution begin to function, objectively or symbolically, as extensions of the personal position of the person who occupies it. 

The phenomenon may be overt, but it may also occur without any declaration of ownership: it is enough that criticism of the person be treated as an attack on the institution, that protection of the office follow the individual beyond its institutional purpose, or that the continued service of a particular officeholder become confused with preservation of the institution's mission itself.

            Finality Is Not Sovereignty

A legal order must bring controversies to an end. It therefore gives certain authorities the final word in specified proceedings. That finality, however, does not make the decision-maker sovereign. Sovereignty and legal competence operate on different planes. A court may finally decide a dispute without acquiring the power to determine, by itself, every limit, control, and form of responsibility governing its own conduct. 

No public power should close the entire circuit of its own legitimation upon itself.

            2 Montesquieu and Madison: Virtue, Fallibility, and the Design of Power

            Montesquieu

Montesquieu (1989) offers two warnings that must be read together. A republic requires political virtue, but power cannot depend exclusively on the virtue of those who exercise it. Moderation is not merely a moral recommendation; it must find expression in institutional architecture. 

Hence the famous need for power to check power. The lesson prevents two symmetrical errors: imagining that good people make controls unnecessary, or assuming that good controls make the conduct of officials irrelevant.

The formulation becomes more precise when one recalls the problem Montesquieu sought to solve. Political liberty is not understood as unlimited individual license, but as security produced by moderate government. 

The risk arises from power's tendency to advance until it encounters a limit. Containment therefore cannot depend only on the ruler's subjective disposition. It must be built into the institutional arrangement itself. 

On this reading, separation of powers matters less as a geometric design of sealed compartments than as a technique intended to prevent a public will from becoming sufficient to define, execute, and judge the limits of its own action.

This warning is especially important for institutions whose contemporary legitimacy rightly rests on guarantees of independence. Independence and institutional freedom are not synonymous with the absence of counterweights. Independence protects the function against interference incompatible with its purpose; counterweights protect the order against the possibility that protection of the office will be reinterpreted as exemption from control. 

The problem is not the recognition of strong powers, but allowing the strength conferred to eliminate the external standpoint capable of containing it.

            Self-Restraint and Institutional Restraint

This tension permits a distinction between self-restraint and institutional restraint. The first concerns the duty of the person vested with authority: to recognize limits, resist the temptation to convert possibility into authorization, and understand that the purpose of the office constrains how its powers may be exercised. 

The second belongs to institutional design: the mechanisms that must continue to operate precisely when self-restraint fails. A mature republic educates for duty and designs for fallibility.

            Madison

Madison (2003) places fallibility at the center of the constitutional problem. If men were angels, neither government nor controls would be necessary; because they are not, the political order must both empower government and require government to control itself. The decisive point is not anthropological pessimism. It is institutional realism. 

Constitutions cannot be designed for the rulers we trust today, because tomorrow they will be used by people with different interests and convictions.

The Madisonian argument adds an element that a purely legal reading of separation of powers tends to miss: institutions do not operate through abstractions, but through people with interests, ambitions, loyalties, and incentives. 

The Constitution must use that reality without surrendering to it. The familiar formula that ambition must be made to counteract ambition does not celebrate selfishness; it recognizes that a prudent constitutional system does not stake its survival on a permanent coincidence between personal virtue and public duty. Dependence on the people remains the primary control, but it does not dispense with auxiliary precautions.

A relevant consequence follows for constitutional orders in which certain officials are not directly subject to electoral renewal. Freedom from electoral dependence may be necessary to secure impartiality or technical autonomy, but it makes the existence of legally appropriate controls tailored to the nature of the function even more important. A guarantee that removes an authority from majoritarian pressure cannot, without contradiction, be converted into an argument for removing that authority from republican mechanisms of review, responsibility, and criticism as well.

            Institutional Modesty

This gives rise to the idea of institutional modesty. It does not require an authority to think little of itself, nor does it purport to diagnose personality. It requires an appropriate relationship to official power: conviction does not create jurisdiction; jurisdiction does not eliminate limits; authority does not confer ownership of the office. 

Institutional modesty means doing neither more nor less than the function legitimately requires.

            Tests of Substitution and Reciprocity

Two questions make this requirement intelligible outside specialized vocabulary. First: would we accept the same prerogative if tomorrow it were in the hands of someone whose convictions were opposed to ours? Second: does the institution accept forms of oversight over itself comparable to those it considers legitimate when directed at others? The answers create neither offenses nor sanctions; they help reveal when the defense of a principle may be giving way to the defense of a person or a contingent position.

            3 Weber: Authority Belongs to the Office

            Legal-Rational Authority

Weber (1978) helps explain why modern bureaucracy, far from necessarily being synonymous with personalization, emerged as a force of depersonalization. Under legal-rational authority, obedience is directed to an impersonal order and to legally delimited powers, not to the private person of the officeholder. 

The office has continuity of its own; the official is temporary.

Weber's contribution is decisive because it shifts analysis from the ruler's character to the form by which authority is legitimated. Under legal authority, the official does not receive a personal territory of power. The official receives powers defined by rules, exercised within an organization that precedes and should survive the individual. Continuity belongs to the office; transience to the officeholder. 

This difference explains why impersonality is not administrative coldness, but protection against the private or charismatic appropriation of public power.

Modern bureaucracy, in this sense, contains both a republican promise and a risk. The promise lies in replacing personal loyalties with defined powers, procedures, and responsibilities. The risk arises when specialization, informational command, or accumulated prestige makes the officeholder practically inseparable from the function. 

The organization's formal rationality may remain intact while, at the symbolic and relational level, a growing dependence on particular officials develops. 

Contemporary personalization therefore need not abolish bureaucracy; it can settle on top of it.

            Repersonalization

This does not preclude repersonalization at the apex. An administrative machine may preserve rational procedures while the figure occupying its highest position concentrates public identification, deference, and authority to such a degree that the distinction between institution and officeholder weakens. 

The problem, therefore, is not leadership. It is the transition from legitimate leadership to a relationship in which institutional prestige becomes inseparable from the person.

            Proportionality

A Weberian sense of proportion also matters. Not all public functions require the same degree of depersonalization. 

Electoral politics permits leadership, programmatic identity, and personal communication to a greater extent. Adjudication, because it depends on impartiality, public reasons, and application of law, requires greater distance between personality and function. 

Depersonalizing the ownership of power does not mean dehumanizing its exercise.

            4 Republican Credit and the Fiduciary Tradition

            Credit Conferred in Advance

Every appointment to public office contains an asymmetry. The legal order confers power before it knows the concrete performance of the person who will exercise it. It provides resources, protection, authority, and, in some cases, coercive capacity. The official receives first and demonstrates afterward how what was received will be used. It is in this sense that one may speak of republican credit.

            Authority, Trust, and Justification

Authority follows from lawful appointment; trust depends on conduct; justification permanently accompanies the exercise of power. 

Probity, civility, discretion, and respect for limits therefore are not favors that place society under a debt of gratitude. They are ordinary forms of performance of the duties associated with the power received.

            Fiduciary Theory

Fiduciary theory of public power prevents the image of power as a trust from being presented as a recent discovery. 

The literature collected in Fiduciary Government records a long lineage of the idea that authorities exercise entrusted powers for purposes distinct from their private interests, while also showing that the transposition of private fiduciary law to the state is contested. Paul B. Miller, in addressing fiduciary representation, offers a contemporary elaboration of this tradition; the collective volume, however, contains diverse conceptions of the state, representation, legitimacy, duties, and beneficiaries. Use of this literature therefore requires more than the trustee metaphor: it requires recognition that the plurality of purposes and subjects within the public order prevents a simple reproduction of the private fiduciary structure.

The consequence for republican credit is limiting. The idea that public authority is not the official's property is already extensively covered by fiduciary traditions and by public law itself. 

The concept retains a distinct function only insofar as it emphasizes the temporal asymmetry of investiture: powers, prerogatives, and institutional protection are conferred before individual performance is known; personal trust, by contrast, remains contingent and revisable. 

Authority is conferred; trust is variable; justification is owed.

            The Concept's Specific Function

Republican credit remains useful at a more specific point: it makes the temporal structure of public appointment explicit. Institutional power is delivered before individual performance can be assessed. Personal trust, by contrast, must be produced and renewed. 

Fiduciary theory also warns against simplification: the state does not have a single beneficiary, its purposes are plural, and the private-law analogy cannot replace the structures proper to public law.

            5 Pettit: Non-Domination and the Limits of the Analogy

            Non-Domination

Philip Pettit (1997) recasts republican freedom in terms of non-domination. It is not enough to be free from present interference; what matters is not living at the mercy of a power capable of arbitrary interference. The theory requires contestability, controls, and conditions that prevent dependence on another's will. This argument occupies much of the terrain that a theory of power subject to control might otherwise claim.

The republican distinction between interference and domination prevents a common simplification. Not every state interference is arbitrary, just as the momentary absence of interference does not secure freedom. The problem lies in a capacity to interfere without sufficient controls, according to a will not constrained to track publicly relevant interests and reasons. 

A benevolent authority, if able to act arbitrarily, still occupies a position of domination. This structure is particularly fruitful for examining institutions that concentrate exceptional powers: republican assessment cannot depend on trust in the officeholder's intentions.

Contestability therefore occupies a central position. Citizens need not govern every decision in order to avoid domination; they need institutions through which decisions can be challenged according to recognizable reasons and effective procedures. 

The proximity to the problem examined here is clear. The difference is that republican institutional health does not seek to replace freedom as non-domination. Its focus is narrower: whether the institutional conditions of contestation and control themselves remain operable over time.

            Difference in Object

If republican institutional health has analytical autonomy, it should not compete with Pettit (1997) by offering another definition of freedom. Its question is institutional and temporal: does the order preserve the conditions that allow legitimately established controls to continue operating upon power? Non-domination examines the status of freedom in the face of arbitrary power; institutional health examines preservation of the relationships that make power controllable.

            6 Fuller and Legal Closure

            Legality

Lon Fuller (1969) reminds us that legality is not exhausted by the existence of formally issued commands. His account of the internal morality of law gathers requirements such as generality, publicity, prospectivity, intelligibility, possibility of compliance, relative stability, and congruence between announced rules and their actual administration. 

These requirements allow legality to be assessed as an institutional achievement subject to degrees of success and failure. 

Fuller should not, however, be credited with the theory of gradual institutional change developed in other traditions. 

The relevant point here is narrower: legality can be compromised even when the external form of a rule does not exhaust the way it is administered.

            Closure

The most important consequence for this study is a limit. Concepts such as institutional health, prudence, temperance, reputation, or normality cannot become autonomous sources of state power.

 None creates jurisdiction, an offense, or a sanction. If a theory designed to contain power authorized the state to punish on the basis of vague metalegal assessments, it would produce precisely the expansion it seeks to diagnose.

            Purpose

Purpose must also be handled with care. Asking whether a prerogative remains connected to the public purpose that justified its conferral is a legitimate analytical exercise. It does not authorize the interpreter to replace law with a personal conception of good administration. 

The test is diagnostic and argumentative; legal invalidation remains dependent on the sources, powers, and procedures of the legal order.

            7 Institutional Integrity: Kirby and Dworkin

            Kirby

Nikolas Kirby (2021) links institutional integrity to an institution's robust disposition to pursue its purpose efficiently while respecting legitimacy constraints and its commitments. 

The formulation is broad enough to absorb much of the idea that institutions should remain oriented toward the purposes that justify their powers.

            The Relational Unit

The comparison nevertheless produces a useful shift. Perhaps the elementary unit of institutional health is not the institution considered in isolation. 

An institution may operate internally in a coherent manner while participating in a relationship that weakens reciprocal controls. The object then becomes the institutionalized relationship between those who exercise power and those vested with authority to limit, review, or hold them accountable.

            Dworkin

Integrity in Dworkin (1986) operates primarily as an interpretive ideal: legal decisions should present the practice of law as a coherent enterprise of principle. 

The dialogue is valuable for the idea of justification, but it does not coincide with the problem examined here, which is the material preservation of the operability of relationships of control.

The notion of institutional integrity requires additional care because it offers an important alternative to the habit of assessing public quality by beginning with the personal virtue of the official.

 Nikolas Kirby proposes an institution-first conception: an official's integrity can be understood only through the contribution the official makes to the integrity of the institution. The analytical order matters. 

If institutional purpose, commitments, and legitimacy constraints come first, individual conduct is not judged by the subjective intensity of conviction but by the way it sustains an institutional practice that must remain justifiable regardless of who occupies the office.

Kirby defines public institutional integrity as a robust disposition to pursue the institution's purpose efficiently, within legitimacy constraints and consistently with its commitments. The formulation contains two checks against common simplifications. 

The first prevents efficiency from being treated as a sufficient value: an institution may vigorously pursue a particular end and still violate the conditions of legitimacy that make its power public. 

The second prevents the opposite move, in which ritual observance of procedure substitutes for the capacity to perform the function for which the institution exists. On this account, integrity requires purpose, legitimacy, and commitment to operate together.

This contribution reaches a significant part of the personalization problem. If official excellence is derivative of institutional integrity, personal prestige cannot function as an autonomous criterion of institutional correctness. An authority that presents itself as indispensable to the public mission reverses the relationship: instead of the person being assessed by the contribution made to the institution, the institution comes to be assessed by its fidelity to the person. 

This inversion is not a category formulated by Kirby, but the institution-first conception makes it easier to see.

Dworkin introduces an idea of integrity situated on another plane. In Law's Empire, integrity in law is tied to the requirement that legal practice be interpreted as a coherent expression of principles of justice and fairness. It is therefore not a theory about the robustness of relationships of control among institutions. 

The comparison is useful because both approaches reject public decisions understood as isolated acts: decisions belong to practices that must be justifiable as a whole. The difference, however, is decisive. 

Republican institutional health does not primarily ask whether law speaks with principled coherence, but whether power remains subject, over time, to effectively operable mechanisms of limitation, review, and accountability.

The distinction preserves the usefulness of both concepts. An order may display a high degree of interpretive coherence while simultaneously concentrating, in problematic ways, the capacity to define its own limits; it may also possess vigorous controls while living with profound interpretive disagreement. Integrity and institutional health may reinforce one another, but they are not interchangeable. 

The first dialogue prevents a theory of control from becoming a mere ethics of personality; the second prevents institutional quality from being reduced to the internal coherence of decisions.

            8 Lessig and Thompson: Corruption Without the Envelope of Cash

            Lessig

Lawrence Lessig (2013) broadens the concept of corruption by showing that institutions can become dependent on influences incompatible with their purpose even without individual bribery. Institutional corruption can result from an economy of influence that alters incentives, priorities, and trust. The central question becomes: on whom or on what has the institution become dependent?

            Thompson

Dennis Thompson (2018) moves beyond the figure of the venal official. Normal, lawful, and even respectable practices may, in the aggregate, produce corrupting effects on an institution. This shifts attention from individual culpability to structure. 

In some situations, the appropriate response is not to punish someone who followed the rules, but to reform rules whose aggregate operation produces outcomes incompatible with institutional purpose.

            Limit

These theories, however, do not exhaust the problem. The capacity for control may deteriorate without a captor, private beneficiary, quid pro quo, or external dependence. An institution may become progressively self-referential through its own trajectory of action. 

Institutional corruption is one possible pathology of institutional health, not its synonym.

The move from integrity to institutional corruption shifts the question. Instead of asking only what qualities an institution should possess, it becomes necessary to understand how apparently normal practices can draw it away from its own purposes. 

Lawrence Lessig framed institutional corruption around influences and dependencies that improperly weaken institutional effectiveness, including through deterioration of public trust. 

The contribution is especially important because it dispenses with the simplifying image of the venal official. An institution may suffer corruption in a structural sense even when its members take no bribes, do not intend to betray it, and believe they are properly performing their duties.

Dennis F. Thompson deepens the usefulness of this distinction by showing that institutional corruption may be associated with benefits directly useful to an institutional purpose and with practices embedded in the routines of respectable officials. The problem arises when the systematic relationship producing those benefits also weakens procedures necessary to the institution's primary purposes. 

The ambiguity is central: what helps an institution along one dimension may simultaneously impair the conditions that justify its operation.

This point offers a particularly fruitful warning for oversight institutions. 

Cooperation, information sharing, deference, and coordination may be functionally useful. There is no reason to presume that institutional proximity is pathological. 

The question arises when a institutional advantage produces dependence or compromises procedures whose purpose is to preserve sufficient separateness, oversight, or contestability. Analysis must therefore resist both the naiveté that treats all cooperation as benign and the exaggeration that labels every intense relationship among public institutions as corruption.

Institutional corruption likewise cannot be used as a generic label for every loss of institutional health. In Lessig, improper dependence is central; in Thompson, the structure of benefit, service, and impairment of institutional purpose is constitutive of the category. Controllability may decline without an identifiable benefactor, external advantage, quid pro quo, or even an institutional benefit in Thompson's sense. 

A procedural precedent, an informational asymmetry, or a repeated practice may raise the future cost of control without constituting institutional corruption in the technical sense.

The methodological consequence is important. The more serious the term, the greater the discipline required in its use. “Corruption,” “capture,” “abuse,” “authoritarianism,” and “erosion” cannot function as rhetorical synonyms for disapproval. Institutional analysis gains precision when it identifies the specific mechanism: dependence, conflict of purpose, concentration of institutional functions, loss of sufficient separateness, entrenchment, expansion of power, difficulty of reversal, or deterioration of the capacity for control. 

Critical force comes from demonstrating the mechanism, not from the intensity of the adjective.

            9 Democratic Erosion: Bermeo, Ginsburg, Huq, Scheppele, Varol, Levitsky, Ziblatt, and  Landau

            Bermeo

Nancy Bermeo (2016) showed how contemporary democratic backsliding often abandons the classic coup and operates through gradual forms: executive aggrandizement, strategic electoral manipulation, and other mechanisms that preserve institutional appearances. 

The lesson is decisive: gradual deterioration is not a theoretical novelty.

            Ginsburg and Huq

Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq (2026) describe constitutional retrogression as the incremental deterioration of essential components of constitutional democracy. 

Controls may weaken without disappearing all at once. Here too lies much of the difference between formal architecture and practical effectiveness.

            Scheppele and Varol

Kim Lane Scheppele (2018), with autocratic legalism, and Ozan Varol, with stealth authoritarianism, show that legality can be instrumentalized to weaken constitutionalism. Legally recognized procedures can serve ends of concentration and repression. 

Legal form therefore does not immunize a practice from institutional assessment.

            Levitsky and Ziblatt

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) emphasize informal norms and institutional forbearance: democratic actors must resist maximizing formally available powers when doing so destroys the conditions of institutional coexistence. The proximity to institutional modesty is clear. The difference is that modesty, as used here, remains a functional category describing the official's relationship to authority and does not purport to create obligations beyond those recognized by law.

            Landau

David Landau (2013) shows that constitutionalism itself can be used abusively. Amendments, constitutional replacements, and other instruments legitimate in the abstract can serve to concentrate power. His contribution prevents formal constitutionality of a mechanism from being confused with the democratic health of its use.

            Delimitation

Institutional health, however, should not become a synonym for democratic erosion. A democracy may suffer a localized loss of institutional quality without being on an authoritarian trajectory. 

Severe democratic erosion will probably involve deterioration of institutional health; not every deterioration of institutional health constitutes erosion of the regime. This difference in scale preserves analytical usefulness.

The literature on democratic erosion imposes another important limit on diagnostic language. Nancy Bermeo demonstrated that classic forms of rupture, such as overt coups, have relatively given way to gradual processes in which elected actors weaken controls, manipulate institutions, or expand prerogatives without immediately abandoning the democratic framework. 

Ginsburg and Huq examine the incremental deterioration of essential components of constitutional democracy; Scheppele describes forms of autocratic legalism; Varol identifies the use of constitutional instruments with democratic appearances for authoritarian ends; Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize the importance of informal norms that restrain the maximal exploitation of formally available powers.

David Landau (2013) adds an especially useful contribution by showing that mechanisms of constitutional change can be used to weaken the democratic order itself. His abusive constitutionalism has a defined object: constitutional amendments and replacements used to make incumbents difficult to remove and to weaken institutions of accountability. The category should not automatically be extended to every controversial interpretation or expansive exercise of authority. Precision requires preserving the connection between the constitutional instrument of change and the democratic deterioration that characterizes the concept.

Taken together, these theories teach prudence in two directions. On the one hand, the appearance of legality is not enough to exclude institutional deterioration. Processes of weakening may employ formally recognized instruments and occur cumulatively. 

On the other hand, not every serious controversy warrants a diagnosis of regime-level democratic erosion. A democracy may suffer localized pathologies, imbalances among institutions, or episodes of institutional expansion without the elements necessary to establish a broad process of autocratization.

At this point, republican institutional health occupies an intermediate analytical scale. It permits inquiry into the quality of relationships between power and control before concluding that democracy as a regime is regressing. The distinction matters in the Brazilian debate because it prevents institutional criticism from depending on a maximalist claim. One can maintain that a particular relationship among adjudication, investigation, prosecution, and control presents serious republican problems without asserting, on that fact alone, that democracy has ceased to function or that its officials consciously pursue an authoritarian project.

            10 Resilience and Repair: Merkel, Boese, Lieberman, Mettler, Roberts, Daly, and Rosenfeld

            Resilience

The literature on democratic resilience removes another possible false claim of novelty. Wolfgang Merkel (2026) treats resilience as the capacity to resist, adapt, and recover without losing democratic character. 

Vanessa Boese and her coauthors distinguish resistance to the onset of deterioration from resistance that prevents collapse after deterioration has begun. Robert Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, and Kenneth Roberts likewise include the strength of controls and accountability in democracy's capacity to withstand threats.

            Repair and Self-Correction

Tom Gerald Daly (2025) develops the idea of constitutional repair: degraded systems need instruments capable of restoring constitutional conditions. Michel Rosenfeld, by another route, examines the legitimacy of constitutional democracy in pluralist societies and insists on the articulation among limited power, the rule of law, fundamental rights, and democracy. His contribution is useful here for a reason distinct from the repair literature: the mere formal continuity of institutions does not exhaust the requirements of constitutional legitimacy. Regeneration, repair, and self-correction therefore should neither be presented as discoveries of this study nor merged into a single category.

            The Relevant Distinction

The possible difference lies in the analytical moment. Resilience asks how democracy responds to threat, shock, or deterioration. Institutional health can ask how ordinary relationships of power change even before an identifiable external event occurs: the regular exercise of authority itself may slowly alter the conditions of future control.

Democratic resilience introduces a different question: not only how institutions deteriorate, but how they withstand pressures, preserve democratic properties, and, when necessary, recover impaired capacities. 

Contemporary literature seeks to avoid equating resilience with mere survival. A regime may formally continue to exist while losing characteristics that justified calling it democratic. To withstand means preserving normatively relevant properties, not merely keeping organizations and procedures operating.

This distinction is particularly important for powerful institutions. Organizational survival is not a sufficient criterion of institutional health. A court may continue deciding cases, a police agency investigating, and a public prosecution service bringing actions while relationships of control, expectations of impartiality, or mechanisms of accountability change. The question of institutional health lies precisely in this interval between existence and the quality of operation.

The literature on constitutional repair adds the dimension that follows injury: how to rebuild institutions after profound deterioration. That problem does not coincide with the central object of this study. The concern here is earlier and less dramatic: to identify conditions under which controls remain operable before the order requires extraordinary reconstruction. 

The difference resembles that between capacity for recovery and preventive preservation. Both matter, but they address different moments in institutional life.

A practical consequence follows. The earlier an order can recognize changes in the operability of its controls, the less it may later need disruptive reform. Republican prevention does not mean freezing institutions or preventing adaptation. It means observing whether adaptation preserves the relationships that make power contestable, reviewable, and accountable.

            11 Pierson, Mahoney, Thelen, Greif, Laitin, and Vermeule: Time Within Institutions

            Pierson

Paul Pierson (1993) demonstrates that public policies do not merely produce effects; their effects reshape future politics. Resources, organizations, expectations, and incentives are redistributed, creating feedback and self-reinforcing paths. Path dependence explains why small choices may acquire great weight over time.

Pierson's importance lies in reversing the usual direction of causation. Policies are not merely results of earlier disputes; once adopted, they redistribute resources, alter incentives, form expectations, and provide actors with new interpretations of what is possible or legitimate. Effect becomes cause. This idea prevents constitutional analysis from treating each institutional decision as an isolated event. 

A practice may be legally bounded in the present and still produce conditions that favor its repetition, broaden its acceptance, or raise the cost of challenging it in the future.

The concept of feedback, however, does not authorize the conclusion that every precedent produces deterioration. Some feedback stabilizes rights, strengthens controls, and consolidates sound practices. The normative direction must be demonstrated. For the hypothesis of institutional health, only feedback that affects the future operability of controls is relevant, and even then a causal mechanism must be identified: altered incentives, informational dependence, reputational cost, changed expectations, redistribution of resources, or another demonstrable relationship.

            Mahoney and Thelen

James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (2010) show that institutional change does not require formal replacement of rules. Layering, drift, conversion, and other mechanisms permit gradual transformation through addition, contextual displacement, or reinterpretation. 

The proposition that a rule can remain while the institution changes is therefore already firmly established.

Mahoney and Thelen make it even less defensible to assume that textual continuity guarantees institutional continuity. Rules contain margins of interpretation and application; actors operate within those margins; changes in context may alter a rule's effects without changing a word. Layering adds new elements to existing arrangements; drift allows environmental change to transform the effects of rules that are not updated; conversion redirects institutions toward different purposes or uses; displacement gradually replaces prior arrangements. The taxonomy matters because it provides mechanisms, not merely the generic observation that institutions change.

For constitutional analysis, the lesson is severe. The question “did the rule change?” is necessary but insufficient. One must also ask whether the conditions of application, officials' incentives, the meanings assigned to a power, and the relationships between those who exercise power and those who should control it have changed. 

Institutional transformation may occur precisely because legal language remains available for uses that were not previously central.

            Greif and Laitin

Avner Greif and David Laitin (2004) examine endogenous institutional change: institutions can generate processes that modify the conditions of their own stability. Endogeneity, by itself, is likewise not open ground for an originality claim.

            Vermeule

Adrian Vermeule (2005; 2009) adds a systemic perspective and selection effects. Constitutional rules can alter who occupies positions, which incentives predominate, and how the system stabilizes or weakens. 

The relevant point here is that constitutional feedback exists; the specific problem sought must therefore be narrower than the simple claim that institutions transform themselves.

            The Remaining Problem

The remaining question is whether a particular type of feedback deserves separate attention: one in which the trajectory of a power's exercise modifies the future conditions under which legally unchanged controls can operate upon that same power.

            12 O'Donnell: When Control Exists but Does Not Work

            Horizontal Accountability

Guillermo O'Donnell (1998) is an especially important theoretical adversary because he already formulates the difference between having institutions of accountability and having institutions effectively capable of acting. Agencies may possess legal authority to oversee, investigate, or sanction other state bodies and still be weakened, neutralized, or unable to perform their mission.

O'Donnell (1998) defines horizontal accountability through the existence of state agencies legally authorized and actually willing and able to act in response to actions or omissions by other state officials or agencies that may be classified as unlawful, ranging from routine oversight to sanctions and impeachment. The formulation is decisive because it does not treat written competence as sufficient: legal authority, willingness, and capacity to act must coexist. 

A formal mechanism of control may therefore be institutionally fragile when the agency charged with operating it lacks effective conditions for action.

This perspective also prevents an institution's autonomy from being assessed solely by the formal guarantees of its members. The question is relational: autonomy to do what, vis-à-vis whom, and at what cost? An institution may be independent of hierarchical commands while simultaneously depending on information, cooperation, precedents, or deference supplied by the very center it is supposed to control. 

The existence of such dependence does not prove capture; it merely indicates that the effectiveness of control must be examined in the institutional relationships through which it actually operates.

            The Delimitation Imposed by the Literature

The conceptual consequence is unequivocal: the difference between formal and effective control already belongs to the field of horizontal accountability and cannot be claimed as an autonomous contribution of this study. The specific problem arises only when a temporal and reflexive dimension is added: the possibility that the exercise of the power subject to control itself participates in changing the future conditions under which legally unchanged controls can operate.

            The Subsequent Question

Instead of asking only whether B has the authority and capacity to control A today, one asks whether the trajectory of A's exercise of power contributes to changing the conditions under which B will tomorrow be able to exercise the same control it continues legally to possess.

            13 Levinson and Pildes: Checks Depend on Political Relationships

            Separation of Parties, Not Merely Powers

Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes (2006) show that the classic image of constitutionally rival branches can be misleading. When the same parties control different institutions, incentives for oversight diminish; under divided government, they may increase. Formal separation of powers alone does not determine the intensity of control.

            Relational Independence

Levinson and Pildes's analysis suggests a broader caution but does not formulate the category of “relational independence” used in this study. Their article demonstrates, within U.S. constitutional design, that partisan incentives can reorganize cooperation and conflict between the executive and legislative branches, making it inadequate to expect formal branch separation automatically to produce vigorous oversight. 

The category proposed here begins with that warning and shifts it: in assessing a control, the question is not only whether the institution exercising control has legal autonomy, but whether it retains institutional conditions sufficient to bear the costs of opposing the power subject to control.

The expression relational independence seeks to capture precisely this difference between status and operation. 

Legal autonomy is an important condition, but it does not exhaust the independence relevant to control. If B's action against A requires resources supplied by A, information monopolized by A, discretionary cooperation from A, or the assumption of institutional costs B cannot bear, the relationship may become asymmetric without any change in legal competence. 

Dependence may be partial, sector-specific, and contingent; it therefore should not automatically be converted into a diagnosis of subordination.

The caution is decisive when transporting Levinson and Pildes's thesis. Their central mechanism is partisan and was developed for the U.S. separation of powers. Its comparative value does not lie in assuming that Brazil reproduces that structure, but in recognizing the more general proposition the case reveals: the behavior of checks depends on effective relationships among actors and institutions.

Applied to Brazil, that proposition requires independent demonstration of the relevant mechanisms, not analogy based on superficial resemblance.

            Beyond Parties

The partisan mechanism does not exhaust the phenomenon. Even without partisan identity, capture, or collusion, precedents, conventions, deference, and accumulated costs can reduce the willingness or capacity to activate controls. Levinson and Pildes's insight opens the door to a broader analysis of the concrete relationships that make a check work.

            14 Levinson, Sachs, and Barber: Entrenchment

            Functional Entrenchment

Daryl Levinson and Benjamin Sachs (2015) demonstrate that political entrenchment has functional counterparts that do not depend on formal changes to the rules. Substantive policies can strengthen allies, weaken adversaries, alter the composition of the political community, or change decision structures, producing obstacles to change comparable to classic forms of entrenchment. 

The contribution is especially important because it shows how politics can make victories more resistant to reversal without rewriting the formal rules of the game.

            The Distinction

Functional entrenchment approaches the problem but does not absorb it. Entrenchment concerns the difficulty of changing or reversing positions, policies, or advantages; controllability, as used here, concerns the possibility of bringing existing mechanisms of oversight, review, and accountability to bear. The phenomena may coincide empirically, but the analytical distinction remains necessary.

            Barber

N. W. Barber (2016) shows that forms of entrenchment may be external, self-imposed, or self-entrenching. This reinforces the need to observe how institutions participate in creating the conditions that protect them. Even so, self-entrenchment is not identical to self-legitimation: an institution may not make its power irreversible and still make its controls less operable.

            Three Phenomena

It is therefore useful to separate three movements. Expansion of power: the institution becomes able to do more. Entrenchment: it becomes more difficult to remove or reverse the power or its result. 

Deterioration of controllability: it becomes more difficult to make legally applicable controls operate upon it. The three may occur together, but they are not equivalent.

            15 Tushnet, Balkin, and Institutional Aggrandizement

            Hardball

Mark Tushnet (2004) describes constitutional hardball as the aggressive use of legally defensible practices that challenge established understandings and conventions. The category shows that constitutional relationships can be transformed without evident illegality.

            Constitutional Rot

Jack Balkin (2018) broadens the focus to accumulated constitutional deterioration. Norms, parties, institutions, and practices can degrade, and the very mechanisms intended to protect democracy can become part of the problem. 

The generic idea of deterioration of controls therefore already has a robust literature.

            Aggrandizement

The literature on institutional and judicial aggrandizement examines the gradual expansion of institutional authority, including through interpretation and the use of existing powers. It is important, however, not to confuse expansion with loss of control. An institution may acquire power and remain fully subject to oversight; another may retain the same formal authority while becoming less susceptible to controls that have always existed.

            16 Carpenter, Moss, and Vermeule: Capture and Self-Dealing

            Capture

Daniel Carpenter and David Moss (2014) treat regulatory capture as the systematic diversion of regulation for the benefit of regulated parties, associated with the action and influence of the capturing sector. The category is powerful, but it requires a vector: someone captures, influences, or redirects the institution.

            Self-Dealing

Problems of self-dealing, discussed by Vermeule and other traditions of institutional design, reveal a different situation: the autonomy necessary to protect a function may allow the institution itself to decide questions that benefit it. A genuine trade-off arises between independence and control.

            Non-Maximization

The answer cannot simply be to maximize control. Maximum control can destroy independence; maximum transparency can destroy legitimate confidentiality; maximum stability can immobilize; maximum accountability can intimidate. 

Constitutional orders work with values in tension. Institutional health means functional compatibility, not maximization of any one of them.

            17 Pozen: Controls Also Live Through Informal Norms

            Self-Help

David Pozen (2014) shows that branches of government resort to forms of institutional self-help, retaliation, cooperation, and accommodation that do not fit entirely within the description of formal powers. Second-order norms can restrain or encourage escalation.

            Operability

The lesson is decisive for the idea of operability. A control does not work merely because the Constitution says that B may control A. B must obtain information, possess sufficient independence, bear costs, withstand lawful or unlawful retaliation, and operate within conventions that make exercise possible. 

Legal authority is a necessary but insufficient condition.

Entrenchment helps distinguish another dimension of the problem. A decision may produce lasting effects without making the actor who made it less controllable; conversely, a center of power may remain formally subject to the same rules while the costs of activating control increase. Difficulty of reversal and difficulty of control often move together, but they are not the same property. This separation prevents all stability from being interpreted as pathology and all pathology from being described as excessive stability.

The literature on regulatory capture offers a similar caution. Capture is not mere proximity, influence, or convergence of positions. In its analytical sense, it presupposes mechanisms through which organized interests divert an institution from public purposes for their own benefit. The concept is powerful precisely because it is demanding. 

Using it without demonstrating who captures, by what mechanisms, and for whose benefit turns an explanatory category into a vague accusation.

The same discipline applies to self-dealing and self-reference. An official or institution may adopt decisions that expand its future capacity without any demonstrable personal benefit; it may also protect legitimate prerogatives whose preservation is necessary to the function. 

The republican problem does not lie in the mere existence of an institutional interest in its own autonomy, but in the absence of sufficient separateness to assess when protection ceases to serve constitutional purpose and begins improperly to impede control.

David Pozen demonstrates that U.S. separation-of-powers analysis must take seriously forms of interbranch self-help and a set of unwritten or quasi-legal norms governing cooperation and retaliation among institutions. These countermeasures may be functionally necessary, but they are also susceptible to error, abuse, and escalation. 

The contribution reinforces the idea that the material operation of checks is not exhausted by the text allocating powers. Its transplantation to Brazil, however, requires identifying functional counterparts rather than assuming that U.S. conventions and incentives recur in institutions of different design.

The result of these comparisons is a requirement of more rigorous causation. To speak of deterioration of controllability, it is not enough to show that power has grown, that a decision has become difficult to reverse, or that oversight bodies maintain intense relationships with one another. It is necessary to identify how the trajectory of a particular power's exercise, combined with precedents, dependencies, incentives, practices, or asymmetries, reduced the future probability, independence, or effectiveness of a legally unchanged control. Without that link, the category remains merely descriptive.

            18 PRESERVING THE OPERABILITY OF CONTROLS

            Delimitation After Reviewing the Literature

After traversing these traditions, much less remains than at the point of departure—and that is intellectually healthy. Impersonality, containment of power, non-domination, accountability, gradual change, feedback, institutional corruption, capture, entrenchment, resilience, repair, the difference between formal rule and practice, and institutional expansion are not new.

            The Specific Problem

There remains, however, a relationship sufficiently specific to warrant its own formulation: the ordinary and legally recognized exercise of a power may, in interaction with precedents, dependencies, practices, incentives, and institutional relationships, reduce the future capacity of controls that legally remain in force to operate upon the same center of power.

The statement contains four requirements that prevent the category from becoming a generic label. First, there must be a legally established control; without one, there is no operability to preserve, but rather a possible normative gap. Second, a practical reduction in that control's capacity to operate must be identifiable, not merely dissatisfaction with its outcome. Third, the reduction must bear a plausible causal relationship to the trajectory of the power subject to control's exercise, even if in interaction with other factors. 

Fourth, the formal authority of the institution exercising control must remain substantially preserved; if it has been legally abolished, the phenomenon is different and can be described directly as elimination or reform of the control.

These requirements also delimit the evidentiary reach of the category. It is not enough to say that an institution has become powerful, that a decision is final, or that a particular official has acquired prestige. 

Power, finality, and prestige may coexist with robust controls. Deterioration is characterized only when there are grounds to show that mechanisms of limitation, review, or accountability have become less capable of operating upon the relevant center of power despite their continued legal existence.

            Formulation

Institutional health deteriorates when the trajectory of the exercise of public authority contributes, in interaction with institutional relationships, practices, or dependencies, to reducing the effective future capacity of legally unchanged controls to operate upon that same center of power.

            Preservation Test

The operational question is simple: if the legal powers of control remained formally unchanged, could repeated exercise of the power subject to control make them practically more difficult, costly, unlikely, or institutionally risky to activate in the future? An affirmative answer does not prove abuse, intent, illegality, or authoritarianism. It indicates only that the relationship warrants examination.

            Sufficient Separateness

Every control presupposes some separateness between those who exercise the power and those who may limit, review, or hold them accountable. That separateness need not be absolute or always external to the institution, but it must be sufficient to prevent the institution or official subject to control from determining, in practice, the conditions under which its own control operates.

            19 Republican Institutional Health

            Definition

Republican institutional health may therefore be defined as the relational and temporal quality of an institutional order in which the ordinary exercise of public power remains effectively subject to legally established mechanisms of limitation, review, and accountability, without the trajectory of that exercise substantially impairing those controls' future capacity to operate.

Republican institutional health can thus be understood as a relational and temporal quality of the institutional order. It is relational because it does not reside solely in an authority's virtuous conduct or in an institution's abstract integrity: it depends on how powers and controls connect. It is temporal because assessment does not end at the moment of decision. What matters is what present exercises of power leave behind as conditions for future decisions and future controls.

The category does not function as a source of jurisdiction, an autonomous standard of invalidity, or authorization for sanctions. Its usefulness is diagnostic and analytical. Where positive law already provides a particular control, the concept allows one to ask whether institutional dynamics preserve or deteriorate the conditions under which that control operates. Any legal consequence remains dependent on the applicable rules of jurisdiction, procedure, responsibility, and guarantees. 

This closure is indispensable if a theory designed to contain power is not, paradoxically, to become a vague basis for expanding it.

            A Deliberately Narrow Category

The definition is deliberately narrow. Institutional health does not replace democracy, republican government, legality, separation of powers, integrity, non-domination, accountability, or resilience. Nor is it a moral scale for public officials. Its usefulness lies in naming a question that cuts across these fields: do the controls that legitimately exist remain practically capable of operating upon the power they are meant to control?

            Sovereign Error

An institutionally healthy order is not an error-free order. Constitutional systems are designed precisely because error is inevitable. What it cannot tolerate is sovereign error: error whose review depends decisively on the acquiescence of the power benefited by it, or whose repetition changes conditions so that the possibility of review remains merely nominal.

            20 Personalization, Republican Distance, and Dispensability

            Republican Distance

Personalization now returns in a more precise context. It is not merely an aesthetic or behavioral issue. It can reduce distances necessary for control: between person and institution, interest and authority, criticism and retaliation, the institution exercising control and the institution subject to it. It can therefore be a symptom or mechanism of deterioration in institutional health.

            Dispensability

A healthy institution must be able to replace its officeholders without treating replacement as a threat to its mission. Personal indispensability, when it ceases to be simple recognition of talent and becomes structural dependence, is an institutional liability. Institutions were invented, among other reasons, to outlive people.

Institutional personalization can now be stated more strictly. It is not the same as public visibility, leadership, personal style, intellectual authority, or popularity. 

Institutions are inevitably operated by people, and some political functions require intense public identification. Pathology begins when attributes belonging to the office or institution operate as extensions of the officeholder's personal authority or standing, making it more difficult to separate criticism of conduct from criticism of the institution, protection of the office from protection of the official, and institutional continuity from the continued service of a particular person.

There is therefore an objective dimension that does not require inquiry into the official's inner psychology. 

Diagnosis can observe patterns: concentration of decisions in one figure, persistent public association between institutional mission and person, use of official prerogatives in controversies involving the official personally, difficulty of replacement, personal deference confused with respect for the institution, or an increased institutional cost of criticism. None of these elements alone proves personalization. Their combination and persistence may reveal a narrowing of the distance among person, function, and institution.

The permissible intensity of personal presence varies with the function. Electoral politics tolerates and often requires personalized leadership because representation, program, and electoral responsibility attach to identifiable persons. Judicial, investigative, and prosecutorial functions operate under a different logic. In them, impartiality, replaceability, procedure, and impersonal justification carry greater weight. The official need not be dehumanized; individuality simply must not become an autonomous source of authority.

This difference among institutional functions also explains why institutional modesty should not be confused with temperament. An official may be personally expansive yet institutionally disciplined; another may behave discreetly while exercising authority in a proprietary manner. 

Institutional modesty describes an observable relationship to office: recognizing in practice that conviction does not create jurisdiction, jurisdiction does not eliminate limits, and prestige does not transfer symbolic ownership of the institution to the officeholder.

Replaceability offers an additional test. Mature institutions must survive turnover among their officials without the continuity of their mission appearing to depend on specific biographies. This does not mean that all officials are equal in quality or that exceptional leadership cannot have positive effects. It means only that individual excellence should not be built into the architecture as a condition of operation. When the order comes to need a particular person to preserve legitimacy, capacity, or identity, public admiration has become institutional debt.

Republican distance gathers these requirements without pretending to turn them into a mathematical metric. It is the functional separation required between person and office, interest and authority, protection and immunity, decision and control, prestige and irresponsibility. Too little distance favors appropriation; too much may produce bureaucratic isolation and unresponsiveness. 

The constitutional question is not to maximize distance, but to preserve enough of it for authority and control to remain distinguishable.

            21 Public Scrutiny, Normality, and Limits

            Society

Not every relevant control is governmental. Academia, the legal profession, the press, legal legal educators, civic associations, and citizens produce scrutiny, criticism, and reputation. These activities carry no state sanctioning authority, but they help prevent the institutional universe from becoming self-referential. Public criticism does not necessarily weaken institutions; under some circumstances it can contribute to their legitimacy by keeping social conditions of scrutiny open. Institutional suppression of criticism, by contrast, impairs an important dimension of republican contestability.

            Normality

Institutional normality is not silence, harmony, or the absence of conflict. Courts disagree; branches clash; officials err. Normality means that conflict and error remain processable by institutions that distinguish person from function and accept the operation of legitimately established controls.

            No New Power

Normality must not be converted into an artificial subjective right or an open-ended clause for punishing disagreeable behavior. 

The requirement of legal closure remains categorical: no requirement of institutional health can create jurisdiction, an offense, or a sanction without a prior legal basis.

            22 CONCEPTUAL LIMITS AND DOCTRINAL ATTRIBUTIONS

Conceptual precision requires distinguishing, in each dialogue, three levels: the proposition actually supported by the literature examined; the inference that may legitimately be drawn from it; and the specific formulation developed in this study. This distinction is indispensable because neighboring concepts are not necessarily equivalent. Separating these levels also prevents the authority of canonical authors from being used to conceal argumentative leaps or to claim originality for ideas already established in the field.

            22.1 Montesquieu: Do Not Turn Moderation into Psychology

Montesquieu supports the need to arrange power so that power checks power and associates forms of government with principles that set them in motion. From this one may draw a warning against architectures dependent exclusively on the virtue of rulers. One should not, however, attribute to him the contemporary category of “institutional modesty” or suggest that he formulated a modern theory of accountability. Self-restraint and institutional restraint are analytical tools of this study for organizing a tension his work helps illuminate. The distinction must remain visible: the source supplies the problem; the terminology is ours.

            22.2 Madison: Design for Fallibility, Not a License for Cynicism

Federalist No. 51 provides strong support for the proposition that government must be able to control the governed and then be obliged to control itself. The famous hypothesis of non-angelic men justifies institutional mechanisms that do not depend on perfect virtue. It would be contradictory, however, to turn this realism into a claim that virtue and personal responsibility are irrelevant. Madisonian design itself presupposes incentives, ambitions, and duties operating within a constitutional order. 

The correct conclusion is that the official's ethics do not substitute for architecture, not that architecture dispenses with ethics.

            22.3 Weber: Repersonalization Is an Inference of This Study

Weber's distinction among forms of domination and his characterization of legal-rational authority support the separation among person, office, and impersonal order. The idea of “repersonalization at the apex,” however, should not be presented as a Weberian concept. It is an inference constructed from the contrast between the ideal type of impersonal administration and situations in which prestige, authority, and public identification concentrate in the officeholder. 

The same caution applies to the use of a sense of proportion: it assists reflection on responsibility and the exercise of power but does not, by itself, provide a ready-made constitutional scale for comparing judges, police, prosecutors, and elected politics.

            22.4 Pettit: Non-Domination Occupies Broad Territory

Pettit (1997) occupies territory particularly close to this inquiry by linking republican freedom to non-domination and developing a conception of democracy in which government must remain open to systematic contestation. It would therefore be indefensible to present the simple requirement that public power be controllable and contestable as new. 

The possible difference lies in the analytical object: non-domination asks about the status of freedom in the face of a capacity for arbitrary interference; institutional health, in the strict sense proposed here, asks about the temporal preservation of the institutional conditions that make legally existing controls effectively operable. This is a shift in focus, not a supersession of neo-republican theory.

            22.5 Fuller: Legal Closure Is a Deduction, Not a Quotation

The internal morality of legality supplies strong reasons to distrust powers exercised according to obscure, incongruent, or unpredictable criteria. Yet the “principle of legal closure of power,” as formulated here, is not a Fullerian category. It is a normative deduction: if the purpose is to contain informal expansion of power, concepts such as institutional health, temperance, or normality cannot function as autonomous sources of jurisdiction and sanction. Scholarly fidelity requires saying clearly where Fuller ends and the present construction begins.

            22.6 Fiduciary Theory: Power as a Trust Already Has a Tradition

The literature applying fiduciary ideas to government shows that there is nothing novel in stating that public power is entrusted for purposes that do not belong to the official. It also shows that translating the private fiduciary relationship to the state is contested: who is the beneficiary, which duties are fiduciary, and how do representation, sovereignty, and plural interests relate? “Republican credit” adds something only if it remains narrower: it describes the temporal asymmetry by which authority and prerogatives are conferred before personal performance is assessed, while trust depends on conduct and justification remains due.

            22.7 Kirby and Dworkin: Integrity Is Not Institutional Health

Kirby offers a particularly close institutional formulation by linking public integrity to an institution's robust disposition to pursue its purpose within legitimacy constraints and its commitments. This absorbs an important part of the functional thesis. Dworkin, in turn, works with integrity primarily as an interpretive ideal of legal practice. 

The conclusion of this study—shifting the unit of analysis from the isolated institution to the relationship between power and control—should not be attributed to either author. It is a response to the insufficiencies that appear when one asks not only whether an institution has integrity, but whether the relationships surrounding it remain capable of limiting it.

            22.8 Lessig and Thompson: Institutional Corruption Is Not Synonymous with Loss of Control

Lessig and Thompson permit abandonment of an exclusively venal view of corruption. Improper dependencies, ordinary incentives, and legally permitted practices can produce institutional deviation without classic bribery. The proximity to institutional health is real but incomplete. Loss of a control's operability may occur without a captor, private beneficiary, or identifiable external dependence. Institutional corruption should therefore be treated as one possible pathology, not as a genus that absorbs the entire phenomenon.

            22.9 Democratic Erosion: Do Not Diagnose Authoritarianism Where the Pathology Is Localized

Bermeo, Ginsburg and Huq, Scheppele, Varol, Levitsky and Ziblatt, and Landau (2013) show through different paths that democracy can be weakened gradually and through legally recognizable instruments. This literature forecloses any claim of novelty based on gradualism or legal appearance. At the same time, it requires prudence in diagnosing Brazil. A serious controversy involving judicial, investigative, or prosecutorial institutions does not, without additional demonstration, establish that the entire regime has entered an authoritarian process. The category of institutional health must be able to identify important relational pathologies without automatically inflating them into a diagnosis of democratic death.

            22.10 Resilience and Repair: Distinguishing Prevention, Resistance, and Reconstruction

Merkel conceptualizes democratic resilience as the capacity to withstand challenges while preserving democratic properties; Boese and her coauthors distinguish stages in the resilience process; Lieberman, Mettler, and Roberts examine institutional and social sources of resistance under polarization. 

Daly, in a post-damage register, develops a theory of constitutional repair for democracies that are deeply degraded but not extinct. These contributions remove any exclusivity from terms such as regeneration, resistance, recovery, and repair. The residual object of this study comes earlier: the ordinary conditions that preserve control capacity while the system is still functioning.

            22.11 Pierson, Mahoney-Thelen, and Greif-Laitin: Institutional Time Already Has a Theory

Pierson (1993) shows that public policies can produce feedback through at least two general mechanisms: they redistribute resources and incentives among actors, and they supply information and interpretive signals that reorganize perceptions of the political world. Greif and Laitin, by a different route, seek to explain how institutions persist or change endogenously and how processes they trigger can contribute to their own transformation or disappearance. 

These contributions eliminate any claim of novelty for the generic proposition that institutions modify the conditions of their own continuity.

            22.12 O'Donnell: The Most Important Course Correction

O'Donnell's (1998) horizontal accountability produces an especially important correction. He already distinguishes the existence of agencies legally authorized to control other authorities from the effectiveness with which they can do so. 

The difference between formal control authority and practical capacity to exercise control therefore cannot be presented as an innovation. The additional step here is temporal and reflexive: to investigate whether the trajectory of the power subject to control itself participates in the future deterioration of the conditions under which the existing control can operate.

            22.13 Levinson and Pildes: Caution in Generalization

The thesis of “separation of parties, not powers” shows, in the U.S. context, that partisan incentives may explain the intensity of interinstitutional control better than the mere formal separation of branches. The relational insight is valuable, but generalizing it to Brazil requires care. The Supreme Federal Court, the Public Prosecutor's Office, and the Federal Police do not reproduce the partisan structure of the U.S. executive and Congress. What can be transported is the methodological warning: legal independence alone does not guarantee functional antagonism or effective control. Brazilian mechanisms must be demonstrated on their own terms.

            22.14 Levinson and Sachs: Entrenchment Comes Very Close to the Problem

The theory of functional entrenchment is one of the closest approximations. Substantive policies can alter resources, coalitions, and decision structures, making future reversal more difficult without formally changing the rules. 

The distinction defended here is between reversibility and controllability. To entrench is to make removal or reversal of a position more difficult; to deteriorate controllability is to make it more difficult for legally existing mechanisms of oversight, review, or accountability to operate. 

This distinction must be demonstrated case by case, because in concrete situations the phenomena may coincide.

            22.15 Barber: Entrenchment Is a Constitutional Tool, Not a Synonym for Self-Legitimation

Barber examines entrenchment as a technique that makes legal change more difficult and discusses reasons that may justify it. The fact that a rule or institution is protected against ordinary change is not, by itself, pathological. The relevant inference for this study is negative: reinforced stability should not be confused with a right of the institution sovereignly to control its own controls. The move from entrenchment to the idea of a closed circuit of legitimation is our own.

            22.16 Tushnet, Balkin, and Aggrandizement: Separating Intensity, Expansion, and Control

Constitutional hardball shows that actors can aggressively exploit legally defensible powers; constitutional rot describes broader deteriorations of the democratic order; the literature on judicial aggrandizement seeks to disaggregate different forms of judicial power expansion. 

The bibliographic audit also corrects a material point in an earlier version: the essay “Clarifying Judicial Aggrandizement” is by Allen C. Sumrall and Beau J. Baumann, not the names previously recorded. The correction matters because bibliographic precision is part of the very discipline the text demands of institutions.

            22.17 Carpenter, Moss, and Capture: A Mechanism Must Be Shown

The regulatory-capture literature warns against loose use of the word “capture.” Capture requires a mechanism of influence and diversion in favor of the capturing group. Disagreement with decisions or a perception of proximity is not enough. 

For the Brazilian problem treated abstractly here, it is preferable to speak of dependencies, alignments, costs of control, or self-reference where evidence is insufficient to sustain capture in the technical sense.

            22.18 Pozen: Conventions and Self-Help Do Not Authorize Automatic Analogy

Pozen demonstrates that conflicts among branches are also governed by conventions and forms of self-help that can generate escalation and countermeasures. The contribution matters for understanding why controls depend on more than legal text. But his immediate object is U.S. separation of powers and its conventions. Applying it to Brazilian relationships among adjudication, investigation, and prosecution requires identifying functional counterparts, not merely importing vocabulary.

            22.19 Resulting Delimitation

The comparative examination leads to a deliberately restricted formulation. Impersonality, checks and balances, non-domination, accountability, gradual institutional change, resilience, entrenchment, institutional corruption, and expansion of power have traditions of their own and are not relabeled as republican institutional health. The proposed category concentrates on the temporal preservation of the operability of controls: whether the exercise of public authority, in interaction with precedents, practices, incentives, or institutional dependencies, contributes to reducing the future capacity of controls that legally remain applicable to the same center of power. 

The proposition is analytical and remains subject to empirical demonstration when applied to concrete cases.

            23 INTERNAL COHERENCE AND LIMITS OF THE FORMULATION

The proposed categories are useful only if they can coexist without contradiction and remain subject to the same cautions applied in reviewing the literature. Internal coherence therefore requires confronting legal closure, independence, control, finality, personalization, public scrutiny, and temporality in order to determine the reciprocal limits of each concept.

            23.1 Legal Closure and Standards of Conduct

The first tension arises between legal closure of power and categories such as institutional modesty, temperance, republican distance, and normality. If these categories could themselves produce offenses or sanctions, the theory would commit precisely the vice it seeks to combat: expanding state power through open-textured concepts. Reconciliation requires separating planes. Law may impose legal consequences only where a previously recognizable normative basis, jurisdiction, and procedure exist. 

Academic analysis and public scrutiny, by contrast, may assess the institutional quality of lawful conduct without converting that assessment into state sanction. Republican institutional health therefore is not an autonomous source of legal duty.

This distinction also limits the prescriptive language of the study. To state that a practice narrows the distance between person and office is not to declare it unlawful. To argue that an arrangement impedes controls does not mean its participants committed an offense. The theory describes institutional properties and risks; only positive law, applied by competent authorities with corresponding guarantees, can turn particular facts into legal responsibility.

            23.2 Independence and Control

The second tension concerns independence. If the study maintains that judicial, investigative, and prosecutorial powers must remain controllable, it might appear to propose subordinating them to external bodies capable of directing the substance of their decisions. That conclusion would be incompatible with the constitutional function of guarantees designed to protect such institutions against political pressure and contingent interests. 

Control and subordination, however, are not equivalent. A mechanism of review, accountability, or oversight can preserve decisional autonomy while preventing independence from becoming immunity.

The notion of sufficient separateness must be read in that light. It does not require every control to be exercised by an institution wholly external to the controlled one, nor does it imply an infinite regress of controllers. It requires only that no center of power possess, alone and without a legally relevant counterweight, final authority over all the conditions of its own accountability. The concrete form of this separateness varies with the power, the Constitution, and the type of control at issue.

            23.3 Finality Without Infinite Regress

The proposition that finality is not sovereignty must confront an obvious objection: every legal order needs final decisions. If each act of control required another controller, the system could never bring controversies to an end. The thesis does not eliminate the final procedural word. It distinguishes the finality of a decision from the claim that the institution issuing it is self-sufficient under law in every dimension of its conduct. 

A court may finally resolve a particular controversy while remaining subject, in other respects, to rules of jurisdiction, disqualification, responsibility, transparency, composition, and constitutionally established control.

Capacity for Correction therefore does not mean unlimited reversibility of every decision. It means that the system retains legally recognized mechanisms for addressing errors, excesses, or deviations in areas where the legal order itself permits review or accountability. Where the Constitution makes a decision final, the theory of institutional health creates no nonexistent appeal. Its object is whether existing controls remain practically capable of operating.

            23.4 Republican Credit and Impersonal Authority

Republican credit could contradict the Weberian conception of legal-rational authority if understood as advance personal trust in the officeholder. The category remains coherent only if it denotes institutional credit: the legal order confers powers, prerogatives, resources, and protections on the office in advance and, derivatively, on the duly appointed officeholder. It does not anticipate a favorable moral judgment of the person. 

Personal trust is variable; legal authority follows from lawful appointment; the obligation to justify the exercise of power accompanies the office.

This correction prevents institutional legitimacy from depending on popularity. An official may enjoy little public trust and remain legally competent; another may enjoy enormous prestige and remain strictly limited. Republican credit is not charismatic capital. It is the asymmetry by which power is delivered before individual performance can be known.

            23.5 Personalization Without the Fiction of Personless Institutions

Criticism of personalization must also avoid the opposite extreme. Institutions do not act without people, and democratic responsibility often requires decisions to be attributable to identifiable officials. Republican depersonalization does not seek to erase authorship, leadership, biography, or responsibility. Its object is to prevent appropriation of institutional authority. The official must be recognizable as the author of a decision without the decision turning the institution into an extension of the official's identity.

This distinction is especially important because different public functions permit different degrees of legitimate personalization. Political representation allows a greater association between program and person; adjudication, investigation, and prosecution depend more heavily on replaceability, procedure, and impersonality. 

The theory would be incoherent if it imposed the same degree of distance between person and function on every institution.

            23.6 Non-Maximization and Proportionality of Control

Another possible contradiction would arise if defense of controllability became a defense of the maximum possible control. Controls also impose costs. They can paralyze decisions, reduce independence, encourage conformity, displace responsibility, and enable opportunistic interference. Republican institutional health does not maximize accountability, transparency, stability, independence, or impersonality in isolation. It seeks to make them compatible according to the constitutional function at issue.

The expression “sufficient separateness” deliberately contains this limitation. Control must be strong enough to prevent self-sufficiency but not so intrusive as to destroy the power subject to control. 

The proper intensity cannot be deduced from an abstract formula; it depends on the nature of the power, the gravity of its effects, the reversibility of decisions, and the available legal mechanisms.

            23.7 Temporality Without the Post Hoc Fallacy

The temporal dimension of institutional health presents a causal risk. The fact that a control becomes more difficult after a particular exercise of power does not show that the exercise caused the deterioration. 

Political, technological, economic, or organizational changes may alter control capacity for independent reasons. The category has explanatory force only when it identifies a plausible mechanism connecting the trajectory of power to the future reduction in the operability of control.

This requirement prevents purely sequential reasoning: after does not mean because of. Analysis must show, for example, how a particular precedent altered incentives, how a practice produced informational dependence, how concentration of authority raised the costs of contestation, or how a convention changed expectations of action. Without a mechanism there is temporal correlation, not a demonstration of endogenous deterioration of controllability.

            23.8 Public Scrutiny and State Authority

The role assigned to civil society must also remain compatible with legal closure. 

Universities, the press, the legal profession, civic associations, and the broader intellectual community are not state reviewing bodies and do not replace accountability procedures. Their function is different: to produce information, criticism, reputation, interpretation, and public contestation. Such scrutiny may increase the reputational costs of certain conduct, but it cannot be confused with punishment or used as a sufficient basis for state restriction of rights.

The distinction preserves two freedoms at once: the institutional freedom necessary to perform public functions and society's freedom to form judgments about the way power is exercised. 

A republic need not choose between authority and criticism. It must prevent either from acquiring the power to extinguish the other.

            23.9 Application to Contemporary Brazil: Hypothesis, Not Verdict

Coherence finally requires that the Brazilian context be treated with the same rigor imposed on the theory. The existence of serious controversies surrounding judicial, investigative, and prosecutorial institutions justifies the question organizing this study, but does not prove its answer in advance. 

Personalization, loss of sufficient separateness, or deterioration of controllability must be demonstrated through identifiable relationships, practices, and effects; they cannot be inferred merely from officials' notoriety, the intensity of public debate, or disagreement with particular decisions.

For that reason, this study deliberately remains at the institutional level. It identifies risks, criteria, and mechanisms capable of guiding analysis of contemporary events, but it does not substitute for specific factual investigation or formal accountability proceedings. This self-limitation is part of the argument. 

A theory designed to contain power would lose coherence if it used its own vocabulary to dispense with proof, jurisdiction, or procedure.

            23.10 Synthesis of the Limits

Subjected to these tests, the construction remains coherent only in a restricted form. Republican institutional health is not comprehensive public morality, nor is it synonymous with democracy, integrity, legality, resilience, or accountability. 

Personalization is not leadership; independence is not immunity; control is not subordination; finality is not sovereignty; criticism is not sanction; stability is not entrenchment; great power is not, by itself, loss of controllability. The usefulness of the formulation depends precisely on these negatives.

The positive core can then be stated more precisely: an institutional order is healthier to the extent that it can exercise sufficient power to fulfill its constitutional purposes while preserving over time the effective operation of legal mechanisms designed to limit, review, and hold that power accountable. 

The specific pathology appears when the trajectory of the exercise of a power contributes, through identifiable mechanisms, to reducing the future capacity of those controls without a corresponding formal change that explains or legitimates the shift.

            24 POSITION OF THE FORMULATION WITHIN THE STATE OF THE ART

The formulation's position within the state of the art depends less on verbal priority than on conceptual delimitation. The question is whether the object already receives sufficiently equivalent treatment in the literature, merely reorganizes known categories, or concentrates on a relationship that appears dispersed across different traditions.

Additional examination of neighboring theories further reduces the space for expansive claims. The literature already explains that institutions can produce effects that reinforce or erode the conditions of their own persistence; that formally stable rules can operate differently depending on incentives and political relationships; that policies can entrench actors and outcomes without altering the rules of change; that excessive controls can block government action; that voluntary restraint in the use of prerogatives can contribute to democratic stability; and that the effectiveness of checks depends on a broader institutional ecology. 

None of these propositions should be presented as a discovery of this study.

            24.1 Greif and Laitin: Institutions Can Produce the Conditions of Their Own Transformation

Greif and Laitin approach the problem at a deep level by asking how institutions persist in changing environments and how processes triggered by institutions themselves can lead to change or even institutional disappearance. The concept of endogenous change prevents attributing originality to the general idea that an institution, through its own operation, modifies the conditions of its continuity. The relevant point for the formulation developed here must therefore be more specific than endogeneity.

The possible specificity lies in the object affected by the endogenous process. 

The concern is not the survival of the institution as a whole, but a particular relationship: the future capacity of legally unchanged controls to operate upon the relevant center of power whose exercise participates in the change. An institution may remain stable, retain its powers, and continue to enjoy social recognition while particular controls become less effective in practice. 

This difference in object does not prove originality, but it prevents a simple identification of institutional health with a general theory of endogenous institutional change.

            24.2 Pierson and Feedback: Present Exercises Reshape Future Politics

Policy-feedback theory already demonstrates that present decisions redistribute resources, reorganize incentives, produce interpretive effects, and alter future political possibilities. This mechanism reaches a substantial part of the temporal dimension of the argument. If a policy strengthens groups, changes expectations, or raises reversal costs, it ceases to be merely the result of an earlier dispute and begins to shape the next one.

The simple claim that power exercised today conditions power tomorrow therefore belongs to familiar terrain. The narrower question is whether feedback operates on the relationship of control over power itself: not only who will possess resources, which policies will be reversible, or which coalitions will survive, but whether legal mechanisms already established to limit, review, or hold a particular center of power accountable will retain a practical capacity to act.

            24.3 Levinson and Sachs: Functional Entrenchment Comes Very Close

Levinson and Sachs's functional entrenchment is one of the strongest approximations. Political actors can protect themselves or favored policies through substantive means that alter resources, the composition of the political community, or decision structures, achieving entrenchment effects without formally modifying the rules of change. The proximity to the temporal thesis is evident: a present decision changes the difficulty of future reaction.

Even so, difficulty of reversal and difficulty of control are not necessarily identical. A policy may become extremely difficult to repeal while remaining fully subject to oversight, judicial review, or accountability. Conversely, a substantive decision may remain reversible while contributing to making a particular controller dependent, uninformed, or institutionally constrained. 

The distinction between entrenchment and controllability deserves to be maintained only when that difference can be demonstrated; where the mechanisms coincide, there is no reason to multiply concepts.

            24.4 Aghion, Alesina, and Trebbi: Too Much Control Can Also Impair State Capacity

Constitutional political economy adds an indispensable objection. Aghion, Alesina, and Trebbi treat the amount of unpower subject to control a society delegates to its rulers as a design problem. Too few controls increase the risk of tyranny; excessive controls can block legislative action. Their contribution matters because it prevents republican institutional health from being conceived as a monotonic function of the amount of control.

The argument must therefore preserve two capacities at once: capacity to act and capacity to control. An institution paralyzed by vetoes does not become healthier merely because it is intensely controlled. Likewise, an effective institution does not become healthy merely because it produces results. 

The question is relational: sufficient authority to fulfill public purposes and sufficiently operable controls to prevent appropriation, abuse, and self-sufficiency.

            24.5 Holcombe and the Effectiveness of Constitutional Constraints

The checks-and-balances literature also directly formulates the difference between having good rules and being able to enforce them. Holcombe argues that constitutional constraints limit government only when institutions exist that can interpret and enforce those constraints against the holders of power themselves. 

This formulation further reduces any claim of novelty associated with the idea that the text of a control may remain while its effectiveness weakens.

The residual usefulness of institutional health therefore does not lie in discovering that controls must be effective. It lies in treating effectiveness as a property that can be preserved over time and potentially affected by the trajectory of the power subject to control. The difference is small enough to counsel caution and specific enough to justify independent inquiry, provided the causal mechanism is demonstrated.

            24.6 Forbearance: Voluntary Restraint and the Future Capacity for Resistance

The literature on institutional forbearance comes especially close to the temporal concern. Levitsky and Ziblatt popularized the idea of restraint in the use of formally available prerogatives. Later work by Sean Ingham offers a more precise formulation: actors practice forbearance when they refrain from actions of uncertain legitimacy even though those actions are compatible with democracy's constitutive rules. The proposed reason is dynamic. Such actions can produce divergent reactions, sow doubts about others' commitment to democratic rules, and weaken the future capacity for social coordination against genuine abuses.

This theory comes very close to a central element of this study: a present exercise of power can reduce a future capacity for restraint. The difference lies in mechanism and object. Ingham focuses primarily on mutual trust, common knowledge, and coordination among defenders of democracy; institutional health, in the strict sense, concentrates on the future operability of legally established controls over a center of power. The two relationships can interact. Erosion of social trust can weaken formal controls, and institutional practices can affect social capacity for resistance. But one should not be presented as a simple reformulation of the other.

The comparison also produces a terminological correction. “Institutional modesty” cannot be used as though it denoted a general duty to refrain from exercising legally available prerogatives. In some circumstances, failure to exercise a necessary power can be as institutionally harmful as exercising it excessively. 

The modesty relevant here is narrower: a non-proprietary relationship to authority, practical recognition of its limits, and willingness to remain subject to controls legitimately established by the legal order.

            24.7 The Ecology of Controls and the Insufficiency of the Isolated Controller

Recent work on the ecology of checks and balances reinforces another intuition already present in O'Donnell (1998), Levinson, and Pildes: the effectiveness of a control mechanism depends on the institutional environment in which it operates. Resources, information, incentives, autonomy, interorganizational relationships, and mobilization capacity can alter the real strength of formally identical controls. The unit of analysis therefore cannot be the controlling institution taken in isolation.

This literature recommends replacing any mechanical image of checks with a relational one. A legally robust control may be weak in a particular ecology; another, formally modest, may become significant when supported by independent institutions, the press, civil society, and information mechanisms. 

The concept of institutional health adds something only if it can explain how that ecology changes over time and, especially, how the exercise of the power subject to control participates in that transformation.

            24.8 Scope of the Hypothesis

The scope of the hypothesis is deliberately limited. The formulation is not a general theory of the republic, a new theory of democracy, or the discovery of an unknown principle for limiting power. The literature already explains endogenous change, feedback, loss of control effectiveness, entrenchment, institutional restraint, and the importance of informal relationships. 

The problem examined is narrower: the possible modification, through the ordinary exercise of public authority, of the practical conditions under which legally unchanged controls will in the future operate upon the same center of power.

The inquiry thus concentrates on the progressive personalization of public institutions and the temporal preservation of control capacity. Traditions usually examined in separate compartments are brought together to determine whether this relationship has distinct analytical usefulness without duplicating established categories. The answer depends on the theoretical inquiry and demonstration of the mechanisms involved, not on a presumption of novelty.

            24.9 Sustainable Results

The inquiry supports several determinate propositions: the republican quality of an order depends on more than the formal allocation of powers; independence and control must be made compatible; the separation among person, office, and institution has structural significance; and the effectiveness of controls is relational and temporal. Precedents, dependencies, incentives, and practices can alter that effectiveness without a corresponding textual reform.

Within this framework, “republican institutional health” designates a synthetic formulation for the relational and temporal quality of an order in which power remains effectively subject over time to legal mechanisms of limitation, review, and accountability. Its status is that of an analytical hypothesis, not an autonomous theory already validated. Its usefulness will depend on its capacity to distinguish phenomena only partially addressed by existing categories and to produce verifiable explanations in concrete cases.

            24.10 The Resulting Position

The work's position within the state of the art thus becomes clearer. The study does not present itself against the traditions examined, but after them. 

Montesquieu and Madison supply the elementary architecture of containment; Weber separates office from person; Pettit (1997) provides the grammar of non-domination; Fuller closes the door to metalegal creation of powers; the fiduciary tradition reaffirms the functional character of authority; Kirby, Lessig, and Thompson shift attention toward institutional properties and pathologies; the literature on erosion and resilience shows deterioration and resistance; Pierson, Mahoney, Thelen, Greif, and Laitin incorporate time; O'Donnell makes the effectiveness of accountability unavoidable; Levinson, Pildes, Sachs, and Barber reveal political relationships and entrenchments; Pozen shows the weight of conventions; and the literature on forbearance demonstrates that present uses of prerogatives can affect future capacities for democratic defense.

After these contributions, little room remains for grand proclamations—and that benefits the work. The remaining question is sufficiently determinate: how should one describe and assess situations in which the exercise of public power, without necessarily changing the legal powers of control, contributes to modifying the future conditions under which those controls can operate upon the relevant center of power itself? The proposed answer articulates institutional personalization, sufficient separateness, controllability, and republican institutional health. Its merit will not depend on being first, but on being conceptually precise, legally closed, and empirically useful.

            25 CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL AS AN INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM

The national context therefore functions as the field in which the theoretical question operates, not as proof of its conclusions. The institutional gravity of recent events arises precisely because they involve centers of power whose independence is indispensable and whose decisions can have intense effects on liberty, property, reputation, the political process, and the operation of other institutions. The greater the constitutionally entrusted authority, the less satisfactory the choice between personal trust and institutional hostility becomes. 

The republican problem requires a third position: respect for the function accompanied by rigorous examination of its limits.

This position avoids two symmetrical simplifications. The first holds that criticizing officials of institutions charged with protecting the constitutional order necessarily weakens the order itself. The second presumes that the existence of serious controversies proves abuse or illegality by itself. Neither is adequate. 

Major institutions must withstand scrutiny proportionate to the power they exercise; allegations against their officials, in turn, remain subject to the requirements of proof, jurisdiction, and procedure that characterize the rule of law.

The choice not to personalize the exposition does not remove the context that makes the problem urgent. In contemporary Brazil, controversies involving institutions vested with jurisdictional, investigative, and prosecutorial powers of the first order raise questions that cannot be resolved by simple allegiance to or rejection of their officeholders. 

The republican problem precedes political preferences: what limits remain effectively operable when institutions charged with protecting the constitutional order, investigating wrongdoing, and pursuing accountability of public officials exercise exceptionally consequential powers?

The problem becomes especially sensitive when different powers draw close within the same institutional circuit. Investigating, requesting measures, authorizing measures, producing information, adjudicating, supervising legality, and protecting the institution itself are functions that may have distinct constitutional foundations and distinct actors. 

A republic does not require absolute distance among them, because institutional cooperation is often indispensable. It does, however, require that functional proximity not dissolve the separateness necessary for control.

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court, by virtue of its position in the constitutional system, possesses powers designed to secure the authority of the Constitution and resolve controversies that no other tribunal can finally close. That position justifies strong guarantees of independence. Precisely for that reason, asking about its limits is not hostility toward the Court. It is a consequence of the importance assigned to it. The more difficult a center of decision is to replace and the more final its decisions, the greater the need to distinguish adjudicative finality from institutional sovereignty.

The Federal Police, in turn, needs sufficient technical autonomy to investigate powerful persons without subordinating investigations to political convenience. That protection does not turn investigative activity into self-legitimating power. Investigation is an exercise of state authority over persons, information, property, and liberty. Its legitimacy depends on jurisdiction, purpose, judicial control when required, legal supervision under the Constitution, and the possibility of subsequent scrutiny. Operational independence and responsibility are not rival values; one protects investigation against interference, the other protects citizens against investigation without limits.

The Public Prosecutor's Office occupies an equally distinctive position. The Constitution grants it independence and functions essential to the legal order, democratic government, and nonwaivable social and individual interests. Those guarantees would be useless if its members could be politically directed to suit the government of the day. Yet the same independence makes it especially important to maintain controls capable of distinguishing institutional autonomy from irresponsibility. An institution that exercises oversight does not, by virtue of overseeing others, cease to be a public institution subject to law.

The common point among these three structures is not a common accusation, much less a claim that they always act in coordination. It is a design question: indispensable powers can develop relationships of proximity, precedents, deference, and dependencies that alter the cost of controlling them. 

The risk need not take the form of conspiracy, shared intent, or a conscious project. Institutions produce aggregate effects that no single actor planned. It is precisely this possibility that the literature on institutional change, feedback, accountability, and institutional corruption teaches us to take seriously.

It would likewise be a mistake to turn the argument into hostility toward judicial, police, or prosecutorial independence. Brazil's experience with political capture is sufficient to explain why these guarantees exist. 

The republican solution is not to return these institutions to the tutelage of temporary governments. It is to build controls compatible with their independence: controls capable of operating without turning oversight into hierarchical command and without depending on the consent of the institution or official subject to control.

The gravity of contemporary events therefore arises less from the celebrity of the officials involved than from the kind of institutional precedent exceptional practices may leave behind. People pass. Precedent, convention, deference, and the cost imposed on the next controller may remain. A present controversy becomes a lasting constitutional problem when it changes what future officials will regard as normal to do, tolerate, or leave uncontrolled.

It is here that institutional personalization connects with institutional health. When institutional prestige follows the person too closely, criticism can be reinterpreted as an attack on the function; when protection of the function is projected onto the officeholder, control can take on an attack on the institution itself; when the official becomes a necessary symbol of the mission, replacement begins to look like a threat. None of these situations proves illegality. All, however, warrant scrutiny because they raise the cost of distinguishing the institution from the person who temporarily represents it.

Civil society has a decisive role in this environment. Universities, the press, the legal profession, professional associations, researchers, and citizens do not replace constitutional oversight bodies and cannot create sanctions. They can, however, refuse to transform authority into sacredness. Reasoned, factual, and legally responsible scrutiny is part of the republican ecology. An institution that considers itself respected only when it is not criticized has already begun to confuse prestige with immunity.

A test of impersonality helps reveal the consistency of an institutional argument: would the same interpretation of authority, the same protection of the office, the same concentration of powers, and the same difficulty of control be considered acceptable if the offices were held by officials of opposite political, moral, or ideological orientations? When the answer varies with the identity of the officeholder, the justification risks resting on personal trust rather than on a generalizable institutional principle.

Analysis must remain especially careful because the notoriety of contemporary controversies encourages two shortcuts incompatible with academic method. 

The first is to presume illegality from exceptionality. 

The second is to presume legitimacy from the declared purpose of defending democracy or institutions. Neither inference is sufficient. Exceptional measures may have a legal basis; constitutionally noble ends may be pursued by improper means. Jurisdiction, procedure, purpose, necessity, proportionality where legally required, and the possibility of control must be examined separately.

The same caution applies to the circulation of arguments among institutions. Cooperation among judicial, police, and prosecutorial bodies is normal and, in many contexts, indispensable to enforcement of the law. The problem arises only when cooperation substantially reduces the functional distance that allows one institution to control, contradict, or review another's action. Proximity is not itself pathological; loss of separateness may be. This distinction prevents legitimate coordination from being converted into generalized suspicion.

Institutional criticism should likewise not be confused with institutional delegitimation. Constitutional courts, police agencies, and public prosecution services are strengthened when their powers can be defended by reasons that survive turnover among officeholders. 

Criticism that demands demonstrable authority, reasons, procedure, and control does not necessarily weaken public authority; it can help separate that authority from the personal prestige of those who exercise it. Durable institutions must be able to withstand alternating social admiration and disapproval without their validity depending on either.

On this account, contemporary Brazil offers a particularly demanding field for the substitution test. Prerogatives defended in one political moment must remain defensible when used by officials of an opposing orientation. Constitutional structure cannot be calibrated to the trust placed in current officeholders, because power conferred on the office will be available to their successors. An institutional justification is more robust to the extent that it depends less on the name of the person who holds the office today.

Finally, institutional gravity does not arise only from possible completed excesses. It also arises from the learning produced by repeated practices. The exceptional can become part of the repertoire; the repertoire, an expectation; the expectation, a cost for anyone seeking to restore a narrower interpretation. It is along this path that the contemporary question meets the literature on feedback and gradual change. An event ceases to be merely episodic when it alters the horizon of possibilities for the next official.

            26 CONCLUSION — INSTITUTIONAL POWER AND REPUBLICAN RESPONSIBILITY

The path traveled permits a return to the circumstance that motivated the inquiry without remaining captive to it. Controversies involving central institutions of the Brazilian state reveal their historical importance precisely when they cease to be treated merely as episodes and begin to test general categories for organizing power. 

The result of that test does not authorize a total theory of the republic, nor does it turn institutional disagreement into automatic proof of democratic erosion. It supports more determinate—and therefore more resilient—conclusions.

The first is old in foundation and permanent in consequence: public power does not belong to those who exercise it. Montesquieu and Madison show, for different reasons, that containment cannot depend exclusively on virtue; Weber supplies the grammar of authority tied to office and impersonal order; the fiduciary tradition reminds us that prerogatives are functionally assigned; Pettit (1997) shows why republican freedom is not satisfied by hope in the benevolence of those who possess the capacity to interfere. What these traditions make untenable is the substitution of trust in particular persons for institutional architecture.

From this follows the importance of depersonalization. It does not require faceless institutions, officials without convictions, or invisible authorities. It requires the person to remain distinguishable from the office, protection of the function not to become personal shielding, and the institution to remain capable of replacing even its best officeholders without losing identity, legitimacy, or capacity to act. Individual excellence may enrich an institution; it should not become a structural condition of its survival. 

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court does not belong to its justices. The Federal Police does not belong to its directors. The Public Prosecutor's Office does not belong to its prosecutors. The state does not belong to those who govern it.

The second conclusion concerns controls. The literature examined rules out simplification. O'Donnell already demonstrated that formal authority for accountability is not equivalent to effective capacity to exercise it. Levinson and Pildes show that political relationships alter the operation of checks; Levinson and Sachs, that outcomes and actors can become functionally entrenched without formal rule changes; Pierson (1993), Greif, Laitin, Mahoney, and Thelen, that decisions and institutions transform the conditions of their own continuity; Pozen, that conventions and informal practices are part of separation-of-powers dynamics; and the literature on forbearance, in turn, that present uses of prerogatives can affect future capacities for democratic defense. The temporality of power is therefore not a discovery of this study.

What the inquiry permits us to isolate is a narrower question. There are situations in which the institution exercising control's legal authority remains substantially the same while its practical capacity to operate upon the power subject to control declines. That reduction may arise from precedents, informational dependencies, incentives, practices, interinstitutional relationships, or accumulated costs. When the trajectory of the exercise of power itself causally participates in that transformation, a problem exists that is not exhausted by expansion of authority, policy entrenchment, capture, institutional corruption, or democratic erosion, although it may coexist with any of them.

It is at this point, and only at this point, that the expression republican institutional health displays a distinct usefulness. It can designate the relational and temporal quality of an order in which the ordinary exercise of public power remains effectively subject, over time, to legally established mechanisms of limitation, review, and accountability, without the trajectory of those powers substantially reducing the future capacity of such controls to operate. 

The formulation is not presented as a proven autonomous theory or as a claim of novelty. It is a conceptual synthesis and analytical hypothesis whose future validity will depend on its capacity to explain concrete cases better than the categories already available.

This conclusion requires a causal condition. It is not enough that control be more difficult today than yesterday. One must show how the exercise of power contributed to that difficulty. Time alone does not explain. Sequence alone does not prove. 

Analysis must identify mechanisms: precedents that alter expectations, dependencies that impair separateness, informational asymmetries that reduce oversight, repeated practices that raise the costs of contestation, or arrangements that make the institution exercising control materially dependent on the institution or official subject to control. Without a mechanism, institutional health degenerates into metaphor; and no metaphor should be admitted as argument.

Nor does it follow that more control necessarily produces a better republic. Aghion, Alesina, and Trebbi remind us that controls can prevent abuse and also block public action. Independence, accountability, transparency, stability, and impersonality are not values to be maximized in isolation. 

The constitutional problem is to combine them. The state must possess sufficient authority to act and sufficient separateness to be controlled. Independence protects the function against improper pressure; control protects society against the transformation of that independence into self-sufficiency.

This reconciliation clarifies the proposition that finality is not sovereignty. Legal orders require final decisions; they do not require officials or institutions capable of defining without counterweight every condition of their own accountability. 

The final word on a particular controversy does not create ownership over the limits of power. Republican capacity for correction creates no appeal the Constitution did not create, but it does require that mechanisms of review and accountability actually provided by the legal order not be emptied by relationships that make their activation merely nominal.

Republican credit likewise finds its exact dimension here. Lawful appointment confers authority before the official's particular performance is known. That advance does not equal personal trust. Authority is conferred; trust is variable; justification is owed. Probity, civility, discretion, respect for the powers of others, and submission to controls are not extraordinary favors rendered to society. Where legally required, they are duties; where they belong to the broader plane of institutional judgment, they remain subject to public scrutiny without that scrutiny manufacturing sanctions or powers that the law does not provide.

Application to Brazil must fully respect these cautions. The notoriety of justices, judges, public prosecutors, police officials, or other authorities does not establish personalization. Cooperative relationships among institutions do not establish loss of separateness. Exceptional decisions do not establish abuse merely because they are exceptional. 

Public criticism does not establish persecution; institutional prestige does not establish the legitimacy of every act. Diagnosis requires facts, mechanisms, and distinctions. It is precisely because current controversies are serious that academic language must refuse the ease of imprecise accusation.

This does not mean neutralizing criticism. Powerful institutions must withstand scrutiny proportionate to the intensity of their powers. Universities, legal educators, the press, the legal profession, civic associations, and civil society need no institutional permission to examine the exercise of public authority. They do not decide cases in place of courts or impose sanctions in place of competent authorities; they form judgments, produce knowledge, contest justifications, and preserve society's capacity to insist that power remains public. 

Public criticism does not necessarily weaken institutions; under some circumstances it can contribute to their legitimacy by keeping the social conditions of scrutiny open. Institutional suppression of criticism, by contrast, impairs an important dimension of republican contestability.

Institutional personalization and deterioration of controllability finally meet without becoming identical. The first narrows the distance between person and function; the second reduces the future operability of controls. Either may occur without the other. When they combine, however, republican risk intensifies: personal prestige may raise the cost of control, while weak control may reinforce identification between official and institution. Analysis must demonstrate this interaction, never presume it.

The work therefore reaches a position more restrained than its point of departure might have suggested and more demanding than a simple defense of checks and balances. It does not propose distrust of all authority, weakening the state, or multiplying veto points. It proposes preserving an elementary property of constitutional power: it must remain the institution's power, exercised by temporary officials for public purposes and under controls whose effectiveness does not depend on the goodwill of those subject to control.

There is an intergenerational dimension to this. Every officeholder receives an institution already shaped by rules, practices, precedents, reputations, and relationships of control that the officeholder did not create alone. During a term of office, these can be strengthened, consumed, or altered. 

A temporary official administers not only present powers but also participates in constructing the conditions under which successors will be judged, reviewed, and limited. Preserving controllability means not spending, for the benefit of present power, a capacity for containment that also belongs to those who come later.

The strength of the state and the limitation of the state thus cease to appear as alternatives. A mature constitutional order needs institutions strong enough to perform their functions without depending on strong individuals, and controlled enough not to produce officials beyond challenge. The opposite of a personalized state is not the absence of the state. It is an institutional state. Republican containment does not presuppose abolishing or weakening power, but institutionalizing it so that functional strength does not become personal appropriation or immunity from control.

The final result can be stated without greater pretension. Republican institutional health offers a language for asking whether the present exercise of authority preserves, for the future, the capacity to subject it to the controls established by law. Institutional personalization offers a language for asking whether the distance between person and function remains sufficient for the institution to survive its officeholders. If these questions produce verifiable distinctions and improve analysis of concrete situations, they will have served their purpose. They need not be unprecedented to be necessary.

A republic should not depend on those who exercise power to know where power ends.

            NOTE ON ANALYTICAL CATEGORIES

The categories “institutional personalization,” “republican credit,” “republican distance,” “sufficient separateness of control,” “institutional modesty,” and “republican institutional health,” in the specific senses used in this study, belong to the analytical formulation developed here. They are not attributed to the authors cited unless the text expressly identifies a conceptual antecedent. Proximity to existing traditions is treated as a problem of delimitation and explanatory usefulness, not as proof of originality.

REFERENCES

AGHION, Philippe; ALESINA, Alberto; TREBBI, Francesco. Endogenous Political Institutions. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, v. 119, n. 2, p. 565-611, 2004.

BALKIN, Jack M. Constitutional Rot. In: SUNSTEIN, Cass R. (ed.). Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America. New York: Dey Street Books, 2018. p. 19-35.

BARBER, N. W. Why Entrench? International Journal of Constitutional Law, v. 14, n. 2, p. 325-350, 2016.

BERMEO, Nancy. On Democratic Backsliding. Journal of Democracy, v. 27, n. 1, p. 5-19, 2016.

BOESE, Vanessa A.; EDGELL, Amanda B.; HELLMEIER, Sebastian; MAERZ, Seraphine F.; LINDBERG, Staffan I. How Democracies Prevail: Democratic Resilience as a Two-Stage Process. Democratization, v. 28, n. 5, p. 885-907, 2021.

CARPENTER, Daniel; MOSS, David A. (eds.). Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

DALY, Tom Gerald. Constitutional Repair: A Comparative Theory. The American Journal of Comparative Law, v. 73, n. 1, p. 1-48, 2025.

DWORKIN, Ronald. Law’s Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

FULLER, Lon L. The Morality of Law. Revised ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.

GINSBURG, Tom; HUQ, Aziz Z. How to Save a Constitutional Democracy: A New Edition for a Damaged Politics. 2. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026.

GREIF, Avner; LAITIN, David D. A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change. American Political Science Review, v. 98, n. 4, p. 633-652, 2004.

HAMILTON, Alexander; MADISON, James; JAY, John. The Federalist Papers. Edited by Clinton Rossiter; introduction and notes by Charles R. Kesler. New York: Signet Classic, 2003.

HOLCOMBE, Randall G. Checks and Balances: Enforcing Constitutional Constraints. Economies, v. 6, n. 4, art. 57, 2018.

INGHAM, Sean. Institutional Forbearance as a Mechanism of Democratic Stability. American Political Science Review, v. 120, n. 2, p. 779-791, 2026.

KIRBY, Nikolas. An ‘Institution-First’ Conception of Public Integrity. British Journal of Political Science, v. 51, n. 4, p. 1620-1635, 2021.

LANDAU, David. Abusive Constitutionalism. UC Davis Law Review, v. 47, n. 1, p. 189-260, 2013.

LESSIG, Lawrence. “Institutional Corruption” Defined. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, v. 41, n. 3, p. 553-555, 2013.

LEVINSON, Daryl J.; PILDES, Richard H. Separation of Parties, Not Powers. Harvard Law Review, v. 119, n. 8, p. 2311-2386, 2006.

LEVINSON, Daryl J.; SACHS, Benjamin I. Political Entrenchment and Public Law. Yale Law Journal, v. 125, p. 400-482, 2015.

LEVITSKY, Steven; ZIBLATT, Daniel. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

LIEBERMAN, Robert C.; METTLER, Suzanne; ROBERTS, Kenneth M. (eds.). Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

MAHONEY, James; THELEN, Kathleen (eds.). Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

MERKEL, Wolfgang. What Is Democratic Resilience? Democratization, v. 33, n. 3, p. 472-493, 2026.

MILLER, Paul B. Fiduciary Representation. In: CRIDDLE, Evan J.; FOX-DECENT, Evan; GOLD, Andrew S.; KIM, Sung Hui; MILLER, Paul B. (eds.). Fiduciary Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. p. 21-48.

MONTESQUIEU, Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

O’DONNELL, Guillermo. Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies. Journal of Democracy, v. 9, n. 3, p. 112-126, 1998.

PETTIT, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

PIERSON, Paul. When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change. World Politics, v. 45, n. 4, p. 595-628, 1993.

POZEN, David E. Self-Help and the Separation of Powers. Yale Law Journal, v. 124, p. 2-90, 2014.

ROSENFELD, Michel. A Pluralist Theory of Constitutional Justice: Assessing Liberal Democracy in Times of Rising Populism and Illiberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

SCHEPPELE, Kim Lane. Autocratic Legalism. University of Chicago Law Review, v. 85, n. 2, p. 545-583, 2018.

SUMRALL, Allen C.; BAUMANN, Beau J. Clarifying Judicial Aggrandizement. University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online, v. 172, 2023.

THOMPSON, Dennis F. Theories of Institutional Corruption. Annual Review of Political Science, v. 21, p. 495-513, 2018.

TUSHNET, Mark V. Constitutional Hardball. John Marshall Law Review, v. 37, p. 523-553, 2004.

VAROL, Ozan O. Stealth Authoritarianism. Iowa Law Review, v. 100, n. 4, p. 1673-1742, 2015.

VERMEULE, Adrian. Selection Effects in Constitutional Law. Virginia Law Review, v. 91, p. 953-999, 2005.

VERMEULE, Adrian. System Effects and the Constitution. Harvard Law Review, v. 123, n. 1, p. 4-173, 2009.

WEBER, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. 2 vols.

WEBER, Max. Politics as a Vocation. In: GERTH, H. H.; MILLS, C. Wright (ed.). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. p. 77-128.

ASSOCIAÇÃO BRASILEIRA DE NORMAS TÉCNICAS. NBR 10520: informação e documentação — citações em documentos — apresentação. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: ABNT, 2023.

ASSOCIAÇÃO BRASILEIRA DE NORMAS TÉCNICAS. NBR 6023: informação e documentação — referências — elaboração. 3. ed. Rio de Janeiro: ABNT, 2025.

ASSOCIAÇÃO BRASILEIRA DE NORMAS TÉCNICAS. NBR 14724: informação e documentação — trabalhos acadêmicos — apresentação. Rio de Janeiro: ABNT, 2024.