The Formation of Cabinet Coalitions in Presidential Systems

Cabinet coalitions are central to the functioning of Latin American presidential systems. However, the reasons for their formation remain unclear. While recent studies suggest that presidents invite parties to the cabinet to facilitate governability and lawmaking, this study argues that the composition of cabinet coalitions is largely predetermined by commitments made before presidential elections. To analyze this argument, the study introduces the conditional logit model as a new empirical strategy for modeling cabinet choice under this type of regime. Based on a new dataset of 107 cabinets in 13 Latin American democracies, the study shows that pre‐electoral commitments strongly affect cabinet formation and thereby also confound the relationship between cabinet formation and governability.     

Presidential activism and government termination in dual-executive Ukraine

The limits on presidential authority in premier-presidential regimes permit legislatures to wield preeminent influence over government formation and termination. This article shows that even without formal powers to dismiss the prime minister, the president may play a decisive role in government replacement. The article compares three successful and one failed attempt by the president to unseat the prime minister in Ukraine under a premier-presidential system. Based on a review of the significance of 10 variables accounting for presidential activism, it finds that the president’s informal control over institutional veto players as well as the unity of his party faction and cooperation of opposition groups were necessary for the success of attempted cabinet turnover.     

Coalitional presidentialism and legislative control in post-Soviet Ukraine

Two political scientists explore the significance of pro-presidential legislative coalitions in Ukrainian politics since 2000. They draw on an original survey of MPs and cabinet data to engage with the extant analysis of coalitional politics in Ukraine. Using the framework of “coalitional presidentialism,” which was first developed in the study of Latin American presidential systems, they find evidence to suggest that legislative coalitions are a meaningful feature of Ukrainian legislative life, and point to the tools that presidents use to maintain them.     

A Two‐Level Theory of Presidential Instability

This article analyzes the conditions that facilitate the ousting of Latin American presidents and the mechanisms that prevent their downfall. Drawing lessons from the impeachment of Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo, it extends previous arguments about the “legislative shield” to show that the same forces that sometimes conspire to terminate an administration at other times work to resist its demise. The argument underscores the interaction between legislators and social movements, two prominent actors in the literature on presidential instability. The article presents a two‐level theory to identify possible configurations of mass and legislative alignments, and tests some implications of the theory with data for 116 Latin American presidents over 28 years. Multiple comparison tests based on random effects logistic models show that popular protests can be neutralized by strong support in Congress, and hint at the possibility that legislative threats can be neutralized by loyal demonstrators in the streets.     

Rules of Procedure as a Cause of Legislative Paralysis: The Case of Costa Rica, 2002–2012

Research on executive‐legislative relations in Latin America has focused on the impact of minority presidents and multiparty legislatures on legislative productivity. But an additional deadlock scenario, the blocking of a majority president by a minority through filibustering, has been understudied. This article analyzes filibustering in Costa Rica and explains the legislative paralysis in the wake of the nation's transition to a multiparty system in 2002. Legislative paralysis is seen as a product of the interaction between increased legislative fragmentation and polarization and the legislature's preexisting rules of procedure, which enable legislators easily to block bills they oppose, even when those bills are supported by supermajorities. This argument is tested through a comparison of major economic reforms in the 2000s to the reforms tackled in the 1990s. The role of filibustering, well acknowledged in U.S. politics, should also be studied in comparative politics.     

Can Anyone Stop the President? Power Asymmetries and Term Limits in Latin America, 1984–2016

Since the late twentieth century, numerous Latin American nations have launched efforts to relax presidential term limits, often successfully. This article discusses the conditions under which countries succeed in relaxing term limits. Drawing from bargaining models and reviewing 36 cases, it makes three arguments. First, actors' preferences are fairly predictable on the basis of officeholding: presidents are the most prominent actors pushing for expansion of term limits; opposition parties lead the resistance. Second, power asymmetry, measured by presidential approval ratings, is the best predictor of success, better than ideology or share of seats in Congress. Third, the only hope for stopping popular presidents rests with ruling parties and the courts, but only when the latter are sufficiently independent.     

Legislative Coalitions in Presidential Systems: The Case of Uruguay

The article analyzes executive‐legislative relations in Uruguay between 1985 and 2005. It demonstrates that even after controlling for ideological affinity and acknowledging that ideology affects presence in the cabinet, legislators whose factions hold ministerial positions behave in a more progovernment way than their ideology would predict. This result not only shows that coalitions “work” but suggests that they work because the presidents use resources under their control to attract support from legislators. This article presents a systematic analysis of executive‐legislative relations in multiparty settings that builds on the finding that nonideologically contiguous coalitions often form to separate the ideological from the strategic determinants of legislative behavior. It also contributes to the literature by presenting a new set of roll call data and, more generally, highlights the risks of attempting to infer ideology directly from legislative behavior in presidential multiparty settings.     

Explaining Electoral Volatility in Latin America: Evidence at the Party Level

Many existing explanations of electoral volatility have been tested at the country level, but they are largely untested at the individual party level. This study reexamines theories of electoral volatility through the use of multilevel models on party‐level data in the lower house elections of 18 Latin American countries from 1978 to 2012. Testing hypotheses at different levels, it finds that irregular institutional alteration increases electoral volatility for all the parties in a country, but the effect is more significant for the presidential party. At the party level, the results show that while a party that is more ideologically distinctive than other parties tends to experience lower electoral volatility, party age is not a statistically significant factor for explaining party volatility.     

Coalition Erosion and Presidential Instability in Ecuador

This article advances the idea that coalition formation and maintenance in highly fragmented presidential regimes is not only crucial to overcoming policy deadlock, but in some cases, critical to ensuring government survival. To advance this argument, the article looks at the formation and demise of legislative coalitions in Ecuador between 1979 and 2006. The empirical data suggest that paradoxically, government coalitions became more difficult to sustain after the adoption of institutional reforms intended to strengthen the president's legislative powers. The adoption of those reforms, it is argued, undermined the legislative incentives to cooperate with the government and helped to accelerate coalition erosion. Not only did the reforms fail significantly to avoid policy deadlock, but in some cases they contributed to the early termination of presidential mandates. This article contributes to the study of coalition survival and how it is linked to policymaking.     

Latin America's Neocaudillismo: Ex‐Presidents and Newcomers Running for President… and Winning

Latin Americans have been voting for a surprisingly large number of ex‐presidents and newcomers in presidential elections since the late 1980s. This article looks at both the demand and supply sides of this phenomenon by focusing on economic anxieties and party crises as the key independent variables. Sometimes the relationship between these variables is linear: economic anxieties combined with party crises lead to rising ex‐presidents and newcomers. At other times the relationship is symbiotic: the rise of ex‐presidents leads to party crises, economic and political anxieties, and thus the rise of newcomers. This article concludes that the abundance of ex‐presidents and newcomers in elections—essentially, the new face of Latin America's caudillismo—does not bode well for democracy because it accelerates de‐institutionalization and polarizes the electorate.     

The International Monetary Fund,Party System Institutionalization,and Protest in Latin America

Extant studies have documented a positive correlation between country participation in International Monetary Fund–sponsored programs and collective protests in Latin America. However, anecdotal evidence indicates that there is a great deal of variation in the number of protests in recipient countries across the region. This article provides a theoretical argument that explains how the fund interacts with the level of party system institutionalization to affect the level of protest. The main prediction is that the level of protest decreases in recipient countries when the level of party system institutionalization is high. Empirical results from a sample of 16 Latin American democracies observed from 1982 to 2007 provide strong statistical and substantive support for the main hypothesis.     

Electoral rules and manufacturing legislative supermajority: evidence from Singapore

Electoral authoritarian regimes usually preserve the dominance of the ruling party through electoral fraud, violence and intimidation. This paper focuses on the subtler forms of manipulation that undermine the electoral integrity and democratic outcomes. Specifically, we examine how an unusual electoral rule, involving multimember districts elected through plurality bloc voting for party slates, exaggerates the legislative seat shares of the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore. This rule, used also by other electoral authoritarian regimes, facilitates the manipulation of district magnitude and gerrymandering, especially the ‘stacking’ form, to produce a large disproportionality which distorts the seats–votes linkage. It operates in an undemocratic fashion by precluding the opposition from gaining anything but token seats as long as the PAP remains the plurality-winning party. The importance of this electoral rule and its manipulation has been overlooked in current work that emphasises redistributive strategies or coercion to repress electoral competition.     

Learning the Limits of Power: Privatization and State-Labor Interactions in Mexico

Despite repeated conflict with organized labor, the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) pushed an aggressive divestment agenda that transformed Mexico into Latin America's leading privatizer. Explanations of Salinas's achievements typically emphasize centralized presidential power (including control over the ruling party) and autonomy; technocratic and political savvy; and weak labor opposition. This article questions such a pure "capacity-outcome" approach. Of equal importance are the learning effects of repeated interaction between the state and labor, which changed the course of divestment struggles and thereby influenced their outcomes. Lessons learned in successive confrontations led to patterns of interaction conducive to widescale privatization. The article develops this argument through comparative analysis of major divestment episodes in the aviation, mining, steel, and telecommunications sectors.     

Electoral Systems in Latin America: Explaining the Adoption of Proportional Representation Systems During the Twentieth Century

This article explains the twentieth-century Latin American shift from majoritarian to proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. It argues that PR was introduced when the electoral arena changed significantly and threatened the power of the dominant party. The adoption of PR was therefore an effort by the established party to retain partial power in the face of absolute defeat. Majoritarian systems remained in place when the incumbent party was strong enough to believe that it could gain a plurality of the votes despite electoral changes. An empirical analysis of 20 countries over 104 years (1900–2004) provides support for this argument.     

Splitting and making parties: Analysis of party reconfiguration in Taiwan

The development of Taiwanese party politics reached a milestone in the 2000 presidential and 2001 legislative elections. The island's pre-existing three-party system underwent a marked reconfiguration. With the split of the Kuomintang (KMT), two new parties emerged but one existing party nearly collapsed. Party politics in Taiwan have shown a continuous process of proliferation of new parties. This paper analyzes the underlying logic that drives the reconfiguration of the Taiwanese party system. A political-institution perspective is employed to show how social cleavages, mixed electoral incentives, and government formation work in dictating the transformation of the party system. This paper is supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSC 92-2414-H-001-019, NSC 93-2414-H-001-002, and NSC 94-2414-H-001-012.     

Candidate Recruitment and Selection in Latin America: A Framework for Analysis

This article provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the recruitment and selection of legislative candidates in Latin America. It argues that political recruitment and candidate selection are undertheorized for Latin America yet have determinative impacts on political systems, often overriding the influence of more commonly studied institutional variables. The article elucidates a typology of legislative candidates based on the legal and party variables that lead to the emergence of particular selection methods, as well as the patterns of loyalty generated by those methods. It analyzes the recruitment and selection processes as independent and dependent variables, underscoring the significant effect these procedures have on the incentive structure and subsequent behavior of legislators. Those factors, in turn, have important consequences for democratic governability and the performance of presidentialism.     

Minimum Winning Electoral Coalitions Under Presidentialism: Reality or Fiction? The Case of Brazil

This article studies the motivations of party leaders to form "minimum winning" electoral coalitions—alliances that cease to be winning if one member is subtracted. In Brazil, concurrent elections stimulate political actors' coordination, and electoral alliances are allowed. In 2002 and 2006, moreover, the Electoral Supreme Court obliged those parties with presidential candidates to replicate this electoral arrangement in the district. Under "verticalization," parties with presidential candidates could not form alliances with rival parties in the concurrent legislative and gubernatorial elections. Verticalization arguably pushed party leaders to form minimum winning electoral coalitions. This new rule forced them to reconsider the contributions of each possible ally in the elections for president, federal deputy, and governor. Examining the elections from 1998 to 2006, this study finds that under verticalization, while parties did form more electoral coalitions with those partners they considered crucial to win, they did so at the expense of policy.     

Las reformas políticas en el gobierno de Sebastián Piñera Chile, 2010-2013

This paper analyzes political reforms carried out by Sebastián Piñera’s government in Chile. Te reforms considered are those that his Coalition for Change campaigned on as part of the presidential and legislative elections in 2009. Tese reforms promised an improvement in the quality of democracy, and promised its consolidation, including increased political participation, in order to counter the most common criticisms of institutions of representation. Throughout this process, the government showed little receptivity to proposals coming from other sectors, both of the ruling coalition and the opposition; furthermore, it paid scant attention to growing citizen protests and their demands voiced since his second year of government. Te information analyzed conveys little progress in decentralization and in the importance that players with veto powers were gaining within the ruling coalition.     

Democracy Without Parties? Political Parties and Regime Change in Fujimori's Peru

Political parties are critical to Latin American democracy. This was demonstrated in Peru, where an atomized, candidate-centered party system developed after Alberto Fujimori's 1992 presidential self-coup. Party system decomposition weakened the democratic opposition against an increasingly authoritarian regime. Since the regime collapsed in 2000, prospects for party rebuilding have been mixed. Structural changes, such as the growth of the informal sector and the spread of mass media technologies, have weakened politicians' incentive to build parties. Although these changes did not cause the collapse of the party system, they may inhibit its reconstruction.