Changes in the Rules of the Lawmaking Process and the Success of Presidential Bills: Chile, 1990–2018

This article assesses the effect of changes in the lawmaking process on the success of the president’s legislative agenda, distinguishing between within-term success (bills that passed during the term) and overall success (including bills that passed after the president left office). With the 2064 presidential bills introduced in seven terms (1990–2018) in Chile’s presidential system, we assess the impact of changes in lawmaking rules on within-term (59.9%) and overall success (70.6%). Changes that decrease attributions of the president and create more opportunities for executive-legislative bargaining—including concurrent elections—increase the chances of success of presidential bills. The use of presidential urgency motions, an agenda-setting tool, makes bills more likely to pass, but the issuance of many urgency motions undermines the bill’s chances to succeed. Presidential bills introduced early in the term and those on issues where there is more policy convergence are more likely to pass.     

Does the early bird always get the worm? First round advantages and second round victories in Latin America

Runoff systems allow for a reversion of the first-round result: the most voted candidate in the first round may end up losing the election in the second. But do voters take advantage of this opportunity? Or does winning the first round increase the probability of winning the second? We investigate this question with data from presidential elections since 1945, as well as subnational elections in Latin America. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that being the most voted candidate in the first round has a substantial positive effect on the probability of winning the second round in mayoral races – especially in Brazil –, but in presidential and gubernatorial elections the effect is negative, though not statistically significant at conventional levels. The positive effect in municipal races is much stronger when the top-two placed candidates are ideologically close – and thus harder to distinguish for voters – but weakens considerably and becomes insignificant when the election is polarized. We attribute these differences to the disparate informational environment prevailing in local vs. higher-level races.