Journal of Democracy

Despite the improvement of democratic institutions in Peru during the last fifteen years, Peruvians are strongly dissatisfied with democracy in their country. We argue this dissatisfaction results from weak vertical accountability. In our article, we show how Peru has regained meaningful horizontal accountability since the authoritarian years of the 1990s, but has struggled to develop complementary channels of vertical accountability beyond elections. The absence of strong parties and civil society combined with the Peruvian economy’s rapid growth in recent years has allowed presidents to abandon their reform promises and, consequently, generate public disappointment in the democratic system.