In 1994, Guillermo O'Donnell, one of Latin America's most prominent political scientists, identified a "new species" of democracy that was now present throughout most of Latin America, and labeled this phenomenon "delegative democracy," a type that is neither representative nor institutionalized. The basic premise of a delegative democracy is that once an individual is elected president he/she is "thereby entitled to govern as he or she sees fit." Power falls into the hands of a single person, but, unlike authoritarianism, the leader is still held accountable at the ballot box by the electorate. O'Donnell has used his theory to accurately describe variants of democracies in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. Colombia, though, didn't seem to comfortably fit the delegative democratic model. However, since Alvaro Uribe, a Liberal Party dissident rose to power in 2002, Colombia's democracy has increasingly become more delegative, and thus less representative. The populace, tired of decades of corruption and complacency under an ineffectual bipartisan model, chose a leader who is the epitome of the presumptive delegative democratic model: a highly individualistic, paternalistic figure who sits above all other institutions as "the embodiment of the nation."