Murillo

Minority Presidents and Types of Government in Latin America

Gabriel L. Negretto Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (C.I.D.E)

Draft: March 2003

Prepared for delivery at the 2003 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Dallas, Texas, March 27-29,2003

2

Abstract A widely accepted argument among students of presidential regimes is that interbranch cooperation isimpaired when the president´s party does not control a majority of seats in congress. This argument, however, fails to take into account three variables that should affect the performance of minority presidential governments: the location of the president´s party in the policy space, the strength of the executive veto and the formation of executive coalitions. Based on a new typology ofpresidential regimes, I propose the hypothesis that the most conflictive forms of minority government are those in which the president´s party does not control the median legislator, the president lacks effective veto power, and a majority or median minority executive coalition is not formed. Preliminary evidence to sustain this hypothesis is provided with data on interrupted Latin American presidencies inthe period 1980-2002

3

Introduction A rich literature on presidential regimes has repeatedly associated party fragmentation, and its likely effect, minority presidents, with ineffective government, high levels of executivelegislative conflict, and even democratic instability. So far, however, neither single-case studies provide an accepted causal explanation of this association nor large-nstatistical studies prove beyond doubt that the relevant variables are significantly correlated. This paper argues that the absence of conclusive theories or results is due to the lack of attention to variables other than the share of seats of the president´s party in congress to explain the different performance of minority presidential governments. This paper proposes that there are severalpossible categories of minority government, not all them in principle related to poor government performance. Using an analytic model of executive-legislative relations, I argue that the most conflictive forms of minority presidential government are those in which the president´s party does not control the median legislator in congress, the president lacks effective veto power, and majority or medianminority executive coalitions are not formed. Preliminary evidence to sustain this hypothesis is provided with data on interrupted Latin American presidencies in the period 1980-2002. The argument is presented as follows. In section I, I critically review the literature on

minority presidential governments. Section II proposes a new typology of presidential regimes and a series of hypothesesabout inter-branch cooperation based on whether or not the party of the president controls the pivotal legislators necessary to pass a bill or sustain a veto. Section III analyzes the frequency at which majority coalitions or coalitions including

4 the median party in congress are formed in each type of government. In section IV, the level of inter-branch conflict in new Latin Americandemocracies is tested using data on the early termination of a presidential term. I conclude by indicating the lines of research that should follow from this study.

Presidentialism and minority government The separate origin and survival of presidents and assemblies has been the source of several hypotheses about the comparative performance of presidential democracies. The most radical of them wasinitially proposed by Linz (1990, 1994) and other ‘critics’ of presidentialism (Valenzuela 1994; Skach and Stepan 1994; Linz and Stepan 1996), who argued that separate elections and fix terms induce inter-institutional conflict and make difficult if not impossible the resolution of political crises. According to this view, the ‘fusion’ of powers induced by the logic of parliamentary constitutions...