Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems (Oxford Studies in Democratization) 9780198817208, 0198817207

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COALITIONAL PRESIDENTIALISM IN C O M PA RA TI VE P ER S P E CT IV E

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OXFORD STUDIES IN DEMOCRATIZATION Series editor: Laurence Whitehead

........... Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Regimes and Democracy in Latin America: Theories and Methods Edited by Gerardo L. Munck Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific Benjamin Reilly Democratic Accountability in Latin America Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna Democratization: Theory and Experience Laurence Whitehead The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism Andreas Schedler The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia: The Dominance of Moral Ideologies Garry Rodan and Caroline Hughes Segmented Representation: Political Party Strategies in Unequal Democracies Juan Pablo Luna Europe in the New Middle East: Opportunity or Exclusion? Richard Youngs Turkey’s Difficult Journey to Democracy: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back İlter Turan Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America Edited by Eduardo Alemán and George Tsebelis The International Politics of Authoritarian Rule Oisín Tansey Building Trust and Democracy: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Countries Cynthia M. Horne

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Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems ...........

PAUL CHAISTY NIC CHEESEMAN TIMOTHY J. POWER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy J. Power 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956288 ISBN 978–0–19–881720–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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........... Acknowledgements ........... Writing a book about politics in nine countries on three continents required intensive collaborative work. As principal investigators on the Coalitional Presidential Project (CPP), we were fortunate to have the support of an exceptional group of colleagues. At the University of Oxford, where the project was based, the CPP benefited from the encouragement of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) and the Department of Politics and International Relations. We are especially grateful to the Heads of SIAS, Joe Foweraker and Ian Neary, for giving our project strong institutional support. We are also indebted to the John Fell OUP Research Fund of the University of Oxford for providing seed money to organize a ‘proof of concept’ workshop in November 2009. This event allowed us to invite a number of distinguished colleagues to discuss our initial ideas. They included Andrés Mejía-Acosta, Joel Barkan, Nancy Bermeo, John Carey, Robert Elgie, Matthew Kroenig, Leany Lemos, Staffan Lindberg, Mariana Llanos, Scott Morgenstern, Oleh Protsyk, Petra Schleiter, Donna Bugby Smith, and Elizabeth Teague. The Fell Fund workshop helped shape a successful application to the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/1008241/1 without which this book would not have been possible. We are also grateful to Anand Menon for helpful feedback on this application. ESRC funding enabled us to hire an outstanding project manager and research fellow, Svitlana Chernykh. We learned a great deal from our discussions with Svitlana, who also co-taught with us a graduate seminar on Comparative Presidentialism during each of her three productive years in Oxford. Her effortless ability to coordinate a large team of research consultants was central to the success of the CPP. The project was blessed with an excellent group of field researchers who helped us to gather legislative data, conduct and translate interviews, and collect case study material. In Armenia, our team consisted of Alexander Markarov, Apig Gasparyan, Hamazasp Danielyan, Narek Galstyan, and Amalya Khachatryan; in Benin, Azizou Chabi Imorou and Michaela Collord; in Brazil, Wladimir Gramacho, André Jacomo, Marcelo Pimentel, and Carlos Nepomuceno; in Chile, Germán Bidegain Ponte; in Ecuador, Santiago Basabe-Serrano; in Kenya, Dominic Burbidge, Dan Paget, Kennedy Opalo, and Stanley Kamau; in Malawi, Emmanuel Desiderio Liwimbi; in Russia, Andrei Kulikov; and in Ukraine, Olexiy Haran and Petro Burkovsky. We are deeply grateful to all of the consultants for their support, and to the ESRC for funding their work.

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Acknowledgements

Data and interview transcripts from our research have been archived by the ESRC and are available for download from the UK Data Service at http:// reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/852003/. We are grateful to Michael Patefield, Moizza Sawar, and Aaron Watanabe for assistance in cleaning and archiving the CPP interviews. We also received invaluable assistance in translating dissemination reports into a variety of languages. For Armenian translations, we relied on Amalya Khachatryan; for French, Charlotte Serres, Matatea Changuy, and Isabelle Durepaire; for Portuguese, Valéria Power; for Spanish, Eulalia Ferré; and for Ukrainian and Russian, Pavlo Smytsnyuk. The efforts of Malu A. C. Gatto, who collected additional cross-national data that feature in Chapter 1, also helped to strengthen the book. We are especially grateful to José Antonio Cheibub, Oleh Protsyk, Thomas Remington, Petra Schleiter, Sebastián Saiegh, and Daniel Young for kindly sharing legislative data. We owe a debt of gratitude to the many colleagues and friends who helped to organize and participated in the CPP dissemination events in Brazil, Kenya, Russia, Ukraine, and Oxford. We would like to thank Carlos Pereira, David Samuels, Octavio Amorim Neto, Acir Almeida, Gregory Michener, and Jairo Nicolau for participating in a seminar at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro; Magna Inácio, Carlos Ranulfo de Melo, Bruno Reis, and Mário Fuks for organizing and participating in an event at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte; Renato Perissinotto, Luciana Veiga, Fabricio Tomio, and Bruno Bolognesi for an excellent discussion at the Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba; and Fernando Limongi, Argelina Figueiredo, and Andréa Freitas for making us so welcome at the University of São Paulo. We are also grateful to George Avelino of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo, and to Oswaldo Amaral of the University of Campinas for participating in the USP event. While in Brazil, we were given the rare opportunity to present our findings to the Federal Senate. We are especially indebted to Leany Lemos for making this possible, and to Lucio Rennó, David Fleischer, Mathieu Turgeon, João Henrique Pederiva, Antonio Lassance, Rafael Silveira e Silva, Santiago Basabe Serrano, Germán Bidegain Ponte, Wladimir Gramacho, André Jacomo, Marcelo Pimentel, and Carlos Nepomuceno for their roles in this day-long event. The videotaped proceedings can be viewed online at the University of Oxford’s iTunes University page. Events organized in Russia and Ukraine were made possible with the generous support of the Moscow Higher School of Economics and the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. We are especially grateful to Andrei Kulikov and Mikhail Ilyin for organizing the Moscow event, and to Petro Burkovsky and Olexiy Haran for arranging the seminar in Kyiv. In Kenya, a well-attended event at the Nairobi Safari Club was kindly supported by the British Institute in Eastern Africa, and

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benefited from contributions by Kennedy Opalo, Gabrielle Lynch, Emmanuel Liwimbi, and the then Director of the BIEA, Ambreena Manji. We are also grateful to Nicolas Sauger for organising a dissemination event at Sciences Po, Paris. For our main dissemination event in Oxford, the CPP brought together leading scholars from around the world. We were pleased to welcome John Carey, Mariana Llanos, José Antonio Cheibub, Robert Elgie, Scott Morgenstern, Thomas Remington, Robert Mattes, Manuel Alcántara, John Ishiyama, Nicolas van de Walle, Laurence Whitehead, Marcus Melo, Cecilia Martínez-Gallardo, Petra Schleiter, Leonardo Arriola, Carlos Pereira, Andrés Mejía-Acosta, Eugene Huskey, Michael Bratton, Steven Levitsky, Peter Siavelis, Keith Darden, and Staffan Lindberg. The closing CPP event sparked a vigorous debate about the practices and consequences of coalitional presidentialism around the world, and generous feedback from our colleagues was critical to the concluding phase of this project. However, we as co-authors take sole responsibility for the analysis and interpretation presented in this book. Finally, we would like to thank Dominic Byatt, our editor at OUP, and Laurence Whitehead, series editor of Oxford Studies in Democratization, for their strong support of the Coalitional Presidentialism Project. Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy J. Power Oxford, June 2017

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........... Contents ........... List of Figures List of Tables 1. The Rise of Minority Presidentialism: Why Coalitional Politics Matters

xi xiii

1

2. Coalitional Presidentialism in Cross-Regional Perspective

24

3. The Embedded Costs of Power Sharing: Coalition Formation in Multiparty Presidentialism

46

4. Towards a Framework for Analysis: The Presidential Toolbox

75

5. Legislative Powers and Coalition Management

93

6. Cabinet Authority and Coalition Management

120

7. Partisan Powers and Coalition Management

142

8. Budgetary Authority and Coalition Management

167

9. The Exchange of Favours and Coalition Management

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10. Minority Presidents in a Coalitional World: Comparative Perspectives on the Tools of Governance Appendix: CPP Survey Questionnaire (Members of Parliament) Works Cited Index

214 239 249 263

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........... List of Figures ........... 1.1. The rise of directly elected presidents and of party fragmentation of legislatures, 1974–2013 1.2. Proportion of minority presidents and prime ministers, 1974–2013 1.3. Predicted probabilities of minority status for the parties of presidents and prime ministers at varying levels of political competition, 1974–2013 1.4. Proportion of minority executives forming coalition governments, 1974–2013 1.5. Probability of minority status for elected presidents and probability of coalition formation by minority presidents, at varying levels of political competition, 1974–2013 3.1. Percentage of MPs who agree with the statement ‘The president assembles his coalition during election campaigns’ 4.1. Stylized temporal ordering 4.2. The tools of coalition management 5.1. Coalitional necessity and legislative powers of the president in CPP country cases 5.2. Percentage of MPs responding that ‘Parties join coalitions to increase their influence over public policy’ by formal legislative powers of presidents 5.3. How MPs see the role of coalitions in law-making 5.4. Percentage of MPs agreeing that ‘Coalitions encourage the legislature to transfer policy-making authority to the president’ by formal legislative powers of presidents 6.1. Percentage of cabinet seats awarded to coalition partners by month in office, first term of Mwai Kibaki (Kenya) and second term of Leonid Kuchma (Ukraine) 6.2. ‘A party will not join the president’s coalition unless it is directly represented in the cabinet’ (percentage agree or strongly agree)

3 5

6 7

8 59 81 84 97

115 117

118

129

136

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List of Figures

8.1. Proportion of MPs placing ‘Influence over the budget’ as the primary or secondary reason for parties joining the presidential coalition 9.1. Percentage of legislators who agree that ‘Coalitional presidentialism leads to a style of politics based on the exchange of favours’ 10.1. Utility of presidential tools as perceived by legislators (% rankings) 10.2. Mean share of non-partisan ministers in presidential cabinets

183

208 223 230

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........... List of Tables ........... 2.1. Index of coalitional necessity: selected episodes 2.2. Survey sample for MP interviews, 2012–15 3.1. Coalition characteristics on Day One: size, fairness, and heterogeneity 3.2. The challenges of coalition maintenance on Day One 4.1. Variation on system-level factors affecting coalition management strategies: selected presidents and years 5.1. Formal legislative powers of presidents in CPP country cases, representative years 6.1. Why would a political party choose to join a presidential coalition? (percentage of MPs citing factor) 7.1. Membership loss in formateur parties 7.2. Percentage of coalition MPs identifying partisan powers and their effects 8.1. Budgetary powers of presidents and their executives 8.2. Perceived purposes of budget tool deployment (percentage of valid responses placing each category in first or second place) 9.1. Prevalence of the rule of law and of the personal vote as of 2005 9.2. Coalition fragmentation, coalition size, and floor/cabinet asymmetries, selected years 9.3. Tools used to form the coalition (percentage of spontaneous mentions by legislators) 10.1. Stylized properties of the presidential tools 10.2. Observed patterns of tool deployment, selected cases

27 43 66 73 92 96 139 153 161 171 184 196 199 210 222 225

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The Rise of Minority Presidentialism Why Coalitional Politics Matters

Contemporary democracy is marked by two trends: the rise of directly elected presidents, and the increasing fragmentation of party systems. This book is about what happens when these trends intersect. As recently as the early 1980s, well over half of the world’s political democracies were parliamentary systems; by 2010, nearly two-thirds of existing democracies had directly elected presidents of some kind (Samuels and Shugart 2010: 5). Over the past 30 years, political liberalization around the globe has taken diverse paths, but one of the most predictable outcomes of modern democratic transitions is that they will create (or preserve) an executive office that is filled by direct popular election and that enjoys significant policymaking powers. As presidentialism advances, parties proliferate. Traditional political parties, whether inherited from earlier competitive experiences or resulting from the transformation of formerly authoritarian elites, have lost ground to new challengers. The reasons for rising party fragmentation vary tremendously by country and region, whether resulting from the inclusion of new social forces (ideologically underrepresented groups, environmentalists, religious and ethnic minorities), from political decentralization (regional and separatist parties), from self-representation by economic actors in transitional economies, or from the ambitions of personalistic and populist movements virtually everywhere. Regardless of the reasons, the impact on elected legislatures is always the same: they contain more political parties than ever before.1 More presidents, more parties: these trends are easily visible in any crossnational dataset on political regimes.2 In 1974, at the onset of the global ‘Third 1 The few remaining examples of ‘frozen’ party systems wherein traditional parties reign unchallenged—the United States, Malta, Puerto Rico—are exceptions that prove the rule. 2 The empirical analysis in this chapter is based on a dataset first assembled by Cheibub et al. (2004). We thank José Antonio Cheibub and Sebastián Saiegh for supplying these data up to

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Wave’ of democratization (Huntington 1991),3 the average effective number of parties in a competitively elected legislature was 2.94, but by 1995 this had risen to 3.54, and peaked at 3.83 in 2005. Put differently, the probability that two randomly selected legislators would not belong to the same party had risen by more than 27 per cent during this era of liberalization and democratization.4 The global trends toward directly elected presidents and multipartism are depicted visually in Figure 1.1.5 Thus, just when emerging democracies have become more likely to separate executive from legislative power than ever before, their elected assemblies have also become more plural than at any previous time in history. As a result, the odds that executives will enjoy a majority of copartisans in the legislature have fallen dramatically. More than half of all directly elected presidents can now be classified as ‘minority presidents’. And as we illustrate later in this chapter, most minority presidents try explicitly to overcome this status by constructing coalitions. For these leaders, their time in presidential office will be defined by their efforts to build and maintain a working majority in the legislature. If minority presidents seek to enlarge their legislative support base, presumably this is because they expect to improve their political position. They are correct in this expectation. Presidents who cultivate broad cross-party support from a fragmented legislature can expect two things: (1) a higher probability of finishing their term in office, and (2) a higher probability of translating their policy proposals into legislation. Presidents in emerging democracies frequently run into trouble as a result of poor economic performance, street protests or corruption allegations, but the larger their ‘legislative shield’ (Pérez-Liñán 2007)—i.e. their base of supporters in the elected assembly—the more likely they are to survive these exogenous shocks (Hochstetler 2006; Llanos and Marsteintredet 2010). Presidents who move

1999, and we used their coding schema to extend the dataset through the end of 2013. Coding procedures can be found in their original publication. 3 The Portuguese ‘Carnation Revolution’ of 1974 is commonly referred to as the starting point for this period of authoritarian crisis and democratic transition, which later incorporated countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa in the 1980s and 1990s (Huntington 1991). 4 As explained in the next section, these figures refer to all competitive and semicompetitive political systems since 1974, i.e. democracies and hybrid regimes receiving a score of at least 1 on the Polity IV scale. 5 The measure of fractionalization used is drawn from Douglas Rae (1967). Rae’s F estimates the probability that two MPs randomly drawn from the assembly will belong to different parties. The index is calculated by summing the squared values of the legislative seat share of all political parties. Each value is then subtracted from 1. The maximum score of 1 indicates that each randomly selected MP belongs to a different party.

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0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 82 19 84 19 86 19 88 19 90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04 20 06 20 08 20 10 20 12

80

19

78

19

76

19

19

19

74

0

Directly Elected President

Mean Legislative Fractionalization

Figure 1.1. The rise of directly elected presidents and of party fragmentation of legislatures, 1974–2013. Note: Regimes are included here only if they are classified by Polity IV as ‘open anocracies’ (1 to 5 on the Polity scale) or ‘democracies’ (6 to 10). The total N of regimes meeting these criteria ranges from 37 in 1974 to 98 in 2013. The solid line refers to the proportion of these regimes featuring a directly elected president. The dotted line is Rae’s (1967) measure of fractionalization, representing the probability that two randomly selected members of the assembly will belong to different political parties. Source: authors’ updating of dataset supplied by José Antonio Cheibub and Sebastian Saiegh (see footnote 2 in text).

from minority coalition government to majority coalition government can expect a notable increase in their legislative ‘batting average’ (Saiegh 2011), i.e. the share of their proposals that are enacted into law. On average, a president turning a minority coalition into a majority one raises his or her batting average by four percentage points—a non-trivial gain when one considers that the batting averages of prime ministers, in all of their configurations, are consistently 10–15 points higher than they are for presidents (Saiegh 2011).6 Disadvantaged by the separation of powers, presidents need those extra hits, and a majority coalition provides them with a bigger bat. In this book, we aim to shed light on the strategies and mechanisms used by minority presidents to cultivate cross-party support in fragmented legislatures. ‘Coalitional presidentialism’, as it has come to be known, is an increasingly

6 Saiegh (2011) shows that under democracy, the overall batting average for executives of all types is 75 per cent. The highest batting average (88 per cent) is enjoyed by prime ministers with single-party majorities, i.e. what Lijphart (2012) refers to as the Westminster pattern of democracy.

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common form of governance in emerging democracies. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we first document the impressive growth of this institutional format, while also reviewing important operational differences in how to count coalitions around the world. We then move on to the incipient conceptualization of coalitional presidentialism in comparative political science, which requires us to revisit the ways in which the ‘presidentialism debate’ has evolved since the late Juan Linz initiated it in the 1980s. Briefly surveying a literature that originated in Latin America (and remains heavily biased toward that region), we then distill what has been learned so far about the inputs and outputs of coalitional presidentialism. This literature has identified several ‘tools’ that presidents can use to build and maintain interparty coalitions in the legislature, and we argue that these should be aggregated conceptually into a ‘toolbox’ that is available to directly elected executives. This ‘presidential toolbox’ underlies both the theoretical and empirical contributions of our cross-regional study. We conclude the chapter with an outline of the book ahead.

COALITIONAL GOVERNANCE I N TH E ‘T H I RD WA V E’ AND BEYOND Not only among democracies, but also among hybrid regimes—i.e. those political systems that operate in the grey zone between democracy and autocracy—heads of government have become accustomed to the challenge of governing without the backing of a party that can command a legislative majority. Since the start of the Third Wave, executive leaders drawn from parties controlling less than 50 per cent of the seats in legislative assemblies (or sometimes having no formal party affiliation at all) have become the norm. In this book, we are concerned with those political systems wherein the minority status of executives presents a significant challenge to governance. In our empirical analysis of those regimes, we include only those polities that permit meaningful levels of inter-branch competition. We consider political systems that are classified both as ‘partly free’ and ‘free’ by Freedom House7 and also score at least 1 on the Polity IV scale of democracy.8 For this subset of political regimes, the Third Wave has seen a steady rise in the proportion of executives whose political parties fail to win a majority of the seats in their

7 8

See https://freedomhouse.org/ (accessed 20 January 2017). See http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm (accessed 20 January 2017).

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0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2

19 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 2099 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 13

0

All

Presidential

Parliamentary

Figure 1.2. Proportion of minority presidents and prime ministers, 1974–2013. See notes to Figure 1.1. Minority executives are defined as those presidents or prime ministers who assume office with their nominal party controlling less than 50 per cent of the seats in the assembly.

respective legislatures. Figure 1.2 summarizes these global data across parliamentary and presidential executive formats.9 As is evident from the trend lines, the proportion of prime ministers and presidents whose parties lack majority support has increased from less than half in the 1970s to an average of almost two-thirds by the 2000s. The increasing frequency of leaders lacking a majority party in the legislature is closely linked to the democratization of political systems. The reason is simple: more robust political competition erodes the electoral advantages that executives enjoy in hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The shrinking coattails of these leaders tend to result in increasing pluralization within elected assemblies. As Figure 1.3 shows, the probability that the political parties of executives will command less than 50 per cent of legislative support is strongly and positively related to political competitiveness as measured by Polity IV.10 Consolidated democracies (scored 10 by Polity IV) are 40 per cent more likely to be governed by minority executives than those ‘open anocracies’ at the lowest point on the segment of the scale that we use here.11 Not surprisingly, 9 To make our results comparable with the analysis by Cheibub et al. (2004), we applied their criteria for classifying political systems as parliamentary, presidential, and mixed (pp. 582–3). The dataset contains a total of 2,984 observations for the period from 1974 to 2013. Of this figure, 50 per cent are parliamentary systems, 36 per cent are presidential systems, and 14 per cent are mixed. 10 For simplicity, the visual representations of these data use only Polity IV scores. Yet, all data presented met both the Polity IV and Freedom House thresholds described above. 11 Using a 21-point scale to distinguish among regime types, Polity IV draws distinctions among autocracies (−10 to −6), anocracies (−5 to 5), and democracies (6 to 10). Anocracies are ‘countries whose governments are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic but, rather,

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0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Polity score

Figure 1.3. Predicted probabilities of minority status for the parties of presidents and prime ministers at varying levels of political competition, 1974–2013. See notes to Figure 1.1.

the level of partisan support enjoyed by prime ministers and presidents is also strongly related to levels of party-system fractionalization. When fractionalization increases from 0.5 to 0.7, the probability that the parties of executive leaders will fail to command a majority of seats in the legislature increases from less than 10 to 90 per cent.12 There also is some evidence to suggest that fractionalization correlates positively and significantly with levels of democratization.13 All of this matters for the governing strategies of leaders. The need to build majority support in the legislature raises the likelihood that executives will share power with parties other than their own. This effect is visible across different executive formats. Even in pure presidential systems, where heads of government are thought to have weaker constitutional incentives to form

combine an often incoherent mix of democratic and autocratic traits and practices’ (Marshall and Cole 2014: 21). A further subdivision is made between ‘open’ (1 to 5) and ‘closed’ (−5 to 0) anocracies, depending on their relative weighting on the five components of the Polity Index. Here we include only ‘open anocracies’: cases that are closer to democracies in terms of their combined score on all five components. 12

Rae’s F can be converted to the Laakso-Taagepera (1979) effective number of parties (N) via the formula N = 1/(1−F). Thus, an increase in fractionalization from 0.5 to 0.7 corresponds to an increase in the effective number of parliamentary parties from 2.00 to 3.33. 13 Linear regression predicts a .013 increase in fractionalization for each one-unit increment between 1 and 10 on the Polity IV scale.

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1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1

76 19 78 19 80 19 82 19 84 19 86 19 88 19 90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04 20 06 20 08 20 10 20 12

19

19

74

0

All

Presidential

Parliamentary

Figure 1.4. Proportion of minority executives forming coalition governments, 1974–2013. Notes: See notes to Figure 1.1. Coalitions are defined here as portfolio (cabinet) coalitions. See text for explanation.

legislative majorities, coalitional government is ‘far from exceptional’ (Cheibub et al. 2004: 574). In fact, it has become the modal form of governance for minority presidents around the world. The frequency of interparty alliances is clear from the data summarized in Figure 1.4. In this and related figures, coalitions are defined simply by the awarding of cabinet portfolios to parties other than the nominal party of the executive (we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this operational definition in the section ‘Defining Coalitions in Comparative Research’, below). Across all constitutional systems, 73 per cent of minority heads of government invite other parties to join their cabinet. In parliamentary systems, 83 per cent of minority prime ministers govern through coalitions, as do 52 per cent of minority presidents in separation of powers systems.14 There is no evidence to suggest that this strategic choice by minority prime ministers and presidents is becoming less common over time. Thus, the need to understand the dynamics of coalition rule is as relevant for the analysis of presidential systems as it is for parliamentary systems. As Figure 1.5 shows, the predicted probability that presidents will experience minority status in the legislature increases sharply from an average of 45 per cent These averages are in line with the findings of Cheibub et al. (2004) for the period 1946 to 1999. Like Cheibub et al., we do not include the results for mixed systems. There are too few observations before the 1990s to permit a comprehensive time series. 14

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0.75 0.70 0.65 0.60 0.55 0.50 0.45 0.40

1 to 5

6

7

8

9

10

Polity score Probability of minority presidents Coalitional probability under minority presidents

Figure 1.5. Probability of minority status for elected presidents and probability of coalition formation by minority presidents, at varying levels of political competition, 1974–2013. Notes: See notes to Figure 1.1. Coalitions are defined here as portfolio (cabinet) coalitions. Polity scores of 1–5 (open anocracies) are collapsed into a single category here due to limited observations. The universe for the first (solid) line is all elected presidents; the universe for the second (dashed) line is restricted to minority presidents.

in open anocracies (Polity IV scores from 1–5) to 70 per cent in consolidated democracies (Polity score of 10). As democratization advances, it produces minority presidents with ever-increasing frequency. Democratization also impacts on the probability that minority presidents will form coalitions, although the magnitude of its effect is lower. This is indicated by the flatter slope of the prediction line for coalition governments under minority presidents in Figure 1.5. These data illustrate the fact that coalitions are frequently formed by minority presidents who operate in political regimes characterized by lower levels of competition. As is evident in Figure 1.5, the probability that minority presidents will form coalitions exceeds 45 per cent in the semi-competitive systems receiving Polity scores from 1 to 5. This fact justifies our inclusion of hybrid regimes in this comparative study: these regimes are partially democratic, and they display characteristics of coalitional politics that are known to become even more ingrained as countries democratize further. Successful coalitional governance is a central challenge facing many hybrid regimes. Overall, this exercise suggests two generalizations: (1) democratization fosters fragmentation, and (2) democratization also fosters solutions to fragmentation. As democratization increases, presidents are more likely to

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respond to their own minority status by reaching out to other political parties for support. We want to know how they do this, and to what degree of ongoing success. Therefore, in this book we seek to take research on presidentialism one stage further by analysing the internal dynamics of this phenomenon. As our review of the extant literature in the next section will argue, the scholarship on presidential democracy has reached the point where it is necessary to move beyond debates positing coalitional presidentialism as a source of regime survival to more fine-grained questions about the tools and strategies that presidents use to maintain coalitions. Given that institutional conditions in presidential systems are less conducive to coalition maintenance than is the case under parliamentarianism, we seek to understand how minority presidents are able to govern through coalitions. This requires the identification and analysis of the presidential toolbox of coalition management, which we introduce later in this chapter, and which we explore more fully in Chapter 4.

D E FINING C OA L ITIONS IN COMPARATIVE R ESEARCH The data we have presented on coalitions thus far follow established conventions of large-N analyses. These typically rely on a definition of coalitions that derives from the formal composition of ‘governments’: following decades of research on Western European parliamentary systems, coalitions are said to exist whenever the cabinet of a prime minister or president contains more than one party. This way of operationalizing coalitions—i.e. counting cabinet portfolios and matching them up with political parties—makes good sense for both methodological and substantive reasons. The number of ministerial portfolios is finite, the number of participant parties is usually modest, and both types of units can be counted easily. Cabinet-centred research not only yields data that are suitable for systematic quantitative analysis, but also addresses meaningful issues of real-life politics: the inter-party exchange of cabinet portfolios is usually a necessary condition for any coalition agreement to take place, especially in parliamentary systems. Crucially, the study of portfolio allocation has undergirded research that has transformed our understanding of the coalitional nature of presidential democracy (e.g. Cheibub et al. 2004; Amorim Neto 2006). However, as Strøm (1990a) observed in his classic work on parliamentary systems, the ‘portfolio’ definition of coalitions produces data that are not always perfectly coterminous with the actual blocs of legislative support that are cultivated by minority executives, i.e. with ‘floor’ coalitions. By floor

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coalitions, we are referring to durable cross-party alliances that presidents form to support their agenda for meaningful periods of time (we are not referring to the situational or ad hoc alliances that they might form for single votes).15 Ongoing voting blocs can differ from portfolio coalitions in a number of ways. For example, floor coalitions often include parties that are not awarded cabinet portfolios. The three Brazilian presidents between 1995 and 2015 sometimes enjoyed the support of 10–12 parties on the floor—that is, parties formally declaring their support for the executive and taking the government whip in Congress—while accommodating only 5–7 of these parties in the cabinet. Occasionally, some pro-presidential parties are simply too small to merit cabinet inclusion. However, it is often expedient for parties to steer clear of cabinet posts in order to avoid being too closely associated with presidential incumbents, a phenomenon known in Ecuador as coaliciones fantasmas (‘ghost coalitions,’ as analysed by Mejía-Acosta 2004, 2009). As Svåsand (2014: 280) notes, in Malawi presidents have cultivated informal backing from certain MPs to ‘provide the necessary support’ in the assembly even when these legislators were barred by their parties from accepting formal posts in the government. Furthermore, in Ukraine, the coalition of President Victor Yanukovych (2010–12) presented the unusual situation wherein one party, the Communist Party, joined the president’s floor coalition but not his cabinet, and another party, United Centre, refused to join the floor coalition because it contained the Communist Party—even while the United Centre’s leader, Victor Baloha, joined the Communist-free cabinet. In each of these cases, defining the effective presidential coalition requires close attention to context. Differentiating between portfolio coalitions and floor coalitions is not conceptual hairsplitting: it is a meaningful distinction in comparative research. Underreporting of the membership of floor coalitions can produce misleading coding decisions. Using the portfolio definition, for instance, the two most significant legislative coalitions formed by post-Soviet presidents—Vladimir Putin’s ‘coalition of four’ in Russia (2001–03) and Victor Yanukovych’s three-party ‘stability and reform’ coalition in Ukraine (2010–12)—would not be coded as interparty alliances, as in each case only one party formally held cabinet posts.16

15 Strøm’s focus on the incongruence between portfolio coalitions and legislative coalitions is different from ours: he highlighted the intermittent contributions of opposition parties to the legislative agenda of minority prime ministers (see also Strøm and McClean 2015). Our definition of floor coalitions does not include opposition parties but rather consistent supporters of the president who are nonetheless unrepresented in the cabinet. 16 From December 2010, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was the only party to have cabinet representation.

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Yet the dynamics of these governments can only be understood if we first appreciate that significant legislative support was provided from outside of the president’s own party. Moreover, the portfolio definition can overestimate the functional membership of legislative coalitions, which can be equally misleading. Based on the portfolio definition, the first term of US President Barack Obama—in which two Republicans held traditional portfolios alongside 13 Democrats—could erroneously be reported as a case of coalitional presidentialism.17 Consequently, in the remainder of this book we will use a definition of floor coalitions that seeks to provide a fine-grained way of capturing such details. In our definition, a coalition exists whenever more than one political party (or one party and independents) in the assembly opts to support the president on a reasonably stable basis for at least N units of time or legislative sessions. The concept of ‘support’ can be indicated by any of the following criteria: formal acceptance of cabinet posts or equivalent executive-branch positions; formal declarations of support for the president made by the party leadership; and/or de facto systematic support of the president as identified independently by experts and/or practitioners (i.e. peers in the assembly). Therefore, we acknowledge that cabinet portfolios remain an important component of any definition of floor coalitions, but we expand the definition to include other indicators. Does our decision to use floor rather than cabinet definitions of coalitions make any operational difference? The answer is a resounding yes. Using a definition of coalitions based on de facto support blocs within the legislative assembly, we are able to increase significantly the number of coalitional observations for the nine country cases that we cover in this book. Based on the month-by-month data that were available (see the appendix to Chapter 2 for a discussion of case selection and data issues) our floor definition yielded 1,224 monthly observations, while the portfolio definition for the same cases over the same time period identified 957 country-months of coalitional presidentialism. Moreover, our definition identifies a much larger number of parties comprising floor alliances than would be the case if we portrayed coalitions exclusively in terms of ministerial portfolios. In total, 139 different parties joined floor coalitions over the cases and time periods analysed

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The Republicans were Robert Gates (Defence) and Ray LaHood (Transportation). Even if we code Gates as a technocrat and ignore his self-declared party affiliation, LaHood was a Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1995–2009. The US cabinet has 15 traditional ministerial portfolios (departmental secretaries in the line of presidential succession) as well as eight other officials who hold cabinet status by convention.

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compared to only 91 parties that gained cabinet portfolios. Calculated as an unweighted monthly average, the floor definition yielded 5.4 raw parties per coalition, while the portfolio definition produced an unweighted average of 4.3 parties. Of course, these averages conceal a high degree of variability. While in Chile party membership of floor and cabinet coalitions was congruent for long periods (i.e. a ratio of 1:1), in Ecuador there was significant disparity: a ratio of 5:1 parties in floor and cabinet coalitions was observed in some years. We return to the empirical significance of the congruence between floor and portfolio definitions in Chapter 9. This improved precision is encouraging and significant, because it reveals that the level of coalitional activity is likely to be significantly higher than previous studies have estimated. At the same time, we recognize that our operational definition of coalitions is only possible because we engaged in a sustained, immersive study of nine countries: it would be very difficult to achieve this level of nuance if we were to engage qualitatively with the full 2,984 country-years of competitive politics that are depicted visually in Figures 1.1 through 1.4. We recognize that the portfolio-based definition is the only practicable solution for studying coalitions in large-N analyses, and many colleagues have wisely taken that path. Yet if a better definition is within our reach, we should use it. This is why we employ the minimalist portfolio definition only to analyse global trends in the present chapter; in the remainder of the book, we deploy our contextually sensitive definition of coalitions on the legislative floor. This definitional issue serves as an important reminder that there are still many unanswered theoretical and empirical questions in the study of coalitions in presidential systems. However, before introducing the framework of analysis that will be used in this book, we first review the current state of the scholarship on presidential systems and what we already know about coalitional presidentialism.

PE RSPECTIV ES O N P RESIDENTIALISM: FROM C O NF R O N T A T I ON TO CO A L IT I O N S The comparative study of presidentialism has undergone a major theoretical shift over the past 30 years. In 1984, the late Juan Linz began work on a seminal essay that would later be published as ‘The Perils of Presidentialism’ (Linz 1990; see also Linz 1994). This essay cast grave doubts on the viability of presidentialism, warning that minority presidents facing fragmented legislatures were in a largely untenable position: executive–legislative relationships

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in this scenario would be characterized by pervasive strife. The Linzian approach was grounded in an expectation of interbranch conflict. Fastforwarding to 2010, a review essay by two leading scholars would claim that the research frontier in the study of executive–legislative relations under presidentialism had now shifted to coordination—i.e. to the study of the mechanisms that allowed presidents and assemblies to cooperate, even under apparently unfavourable scenarios of partisan fragmentation and divided government (Cheibub and Limongi 2010). Among these mechanisms, the most important was remarkably simple and had been well known to scholars of parliamentarism for nearly a century: coalition building. If executives cannot govern with the support of just one party in the legislature, they try to win others to their cause. This principle applies both to parliamentarism and to minority presidentialism. In retrospect, it seems puzzling that early scholars of Third Wave democratization did not anticipate that directly elected presidents would engage in interparty coalition building. How was it, then, that scholars shifted their emphases from the ‘perils of presidentialism’ to a recognition of coalitional practices over the past quarter century? Robert Elgie (2005) has usefully retraced this debate. He notes that the 1980s and early 1990s were dominated by Linz’s classic argument for the superiority of parliamentarism over presidentialism, especially for young, untested democracies. Linz claimed that dual democratic legitimacies under presidentialism (based on separate electoral mandates for the legislature and president) would lead to recurrent conflicts. Conflicts would be exacerbated by the winner-take-all nature of presidential elections, by the two-dimensional nature of the presidential office (the president represents both the state and a partisan option) and by the overall inflexibility of the system, which is based on temporally rigid mandates. Later, in recasting the original Linzian arguments, Mainwaring (1993) and Stepan and Skach (1993) argued that the problem was not presidentialism per se, but rather the ‘difficult combination’ of presidentialism with fragmented multiparty systems. Linzian conflicts were much less likely to emerge in a two-party format; hence, bipartism was generally preferable to multipartism under the separation of powers. In a third phase of the debate that we have described elsewhere (Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power 2014), the ‘difficult combination’ argument was assailed by scholars claiming that presidentialism could work like parliamentarism: presidents were capable of building stable multiparty coalitions, even in weakly institutionalized party systems. This counter-argument emerged gradually between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s and was based heavily on the Latin American experience, especially that of Brazil. A new generation

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of neoinstitutionalist scholars marshalled both case-study and cross-national evidence suggesting that multiparty presidentialism was indeed viable.18 Many theoretical and empirical advances in recent years have come under the rubric of what is now called coalitional presidentialism, a concept that is relevant only in multiparty presidential regimes.19 In this book, we define coalitional presidentialism as a strategy of directly elected minority presidents to build stable majority support in fragmented legislatures, specifically via the coordination of two or more legislative parties by the president. As we demonstrated earlier when we reviewed global trends in the Third Wave, this strategy is pervasive under the separation of powers, and its empirical regularity undermines two arguments implicit in Linz: (1) the idea that executive power cannot be shared under presidentialism, and (2) the idea that interparty coalition formation is rare under presidentialism. These assumptions now have little support in comparative political science. Posited at a time when there was a paucity of comparative data about presidential democracies, both of these arguments were quickly challenged when systematic empirical research on presidentialism got under way in the 1990s, much of it inspired by Shugart and Carey’s pathbreaking Presidents and Assemblies (1992). Although Shugart and Carey were themselves not explicitly concerned with coalitions, data collection by Cheibub, Przeworski, and Saiegh (2004) demonstrated that coalition government occurs under presidentialism far more frequently than had been earlier assumed. The authors examined government formation and control of legislative seats in all democracies from 1946 to 1999, comparing parliamentary and presidential regimes. They find that coalitions occurred in 78.1 per cent of parliamentary minority situations but also in 53.6 per cent of presidential minority situations (p. 574). This largely disconfirmed the Linzian expectation that presidents and prime ministers would somehow behave differently when confronted with similar landscapes of legislative fragmentation. If data like these had been available to scholars in the late 1980s, it is likely that a good part of the literature on comparative presidentialism might never have been produced. But in reality we are fortunate that the 18 On Brazil, see for example Figueiredo and Limongi 2000. Important doctoral dissertations in this vein were completed by Deheza (1997), Amorim Neto (1998), Pereira (2000), Altman (2001), Zelaznik (2001), Mejía-Acosta (2004), Martínez-Gallardo (2005), Martorelli Hernández (2007), and Zucco Jr. (2007). 19 The coining of the phrase is usually attributed to a Brazilian scholar, Sérgio Abranches (1988), who introduced the term presidencialismo de coalizão. The term quickly gained traction in Brazil, where it is both a descriptor of political practice (used by journalists and politicians) and an analytical paradigm for the study of democratic governability (used by political scientists). For a review see Power 2010.

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debate unfolded as it did, for several reasons. First, the sustained study of presidentialism generated numerous by-products for the literature on democratization. A prominent example is Cheibub’s finding that presidentialism does in fact break down more frequently than parliamentarism (as correctly predicted by Linz) but not for the main reasons hypothesized by Linz (e.g. interbranch deadlock produced by the minority status of the executive). Cheibub concludes that if presidentialism is more vulnerable than parliamentarism, this is due to ‘extrinsic’ factors rather than to ‘intrinsic’ factors linked directly to the separation of powers (Cheibub 2007). Second, as noted above, the claim by Linz, Mainwaring, and Stepan and Skach that coalition formation was rare under presidentialism drove scholars to go out and collect the comparative data that showed this assertion to be unfounded. Third, knowing that presidents do form and maintain interparty coalitions helped launch the debate in which the present book is situated, which is about how presidents form and maintain coalitions. We return to this issue below.

W H A T D O W E K N O W A B O UT CO A L IT I O N A L PRESIDE NTIALISM ALREADY? Over the past 15 years, a number of scholars have made contributions that can now be construed as foundational propositions of the coalitional presidentialism literature. Here we review seven of these. As a disclaimer, we note that virtually all of these propositions have been derived from the voluminous work on Latin American (pure) presidentialism, and their portability to other regions of the world remains to be demonstrated. 1. Success in coalition formation and maintenance varies positively with the size of the president’s own party. This may sound painfully obvious, but a long line of research from Shugart and Carey (1992) through Cheibub (2007) demonstrates that the baseline political conditions of presidents can vary massively. Some presidents are elected with near-majority status (i.e. their party holds just under 50 per cent of the seats in the assembly), while others assume office as independents, who formally speaking have zero per cent support in Congress. The closer the president’s party is to majority status, the less political capital will have to be expended on coalition management, conditional of course on the discipline of the president’s party and his/her prestige within it. 2. Success in coalition formation and maintenance varies positively with the formal constitutional powers available to the president. Presidents vary in their

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ability to set the political agenda and to establish policy unilaterally; they also vary in their ability to resist efforts by other actors to change the status quo (Shugart and Carey 1992; Figueiredo and Limongi 1999). Constitutional powers such as the ability to issue decrees (Carey and Shugart 1998) or sustain vetoes (Tsebelis and Alemán 2005) give presidents significant bargaining power: these are formidable institutional mechanisms with which to overcome the disincentives to cooperation that can plague fragmented multiparty legislatures (Zelaznik 2001). 3. Coalition discipline varies positively with cabinet coalescence. Coalescence, a concept advanced by Amorim Neto (1998), refers to proportionality between the distribution of legislative seats and in the allocation of cabinet portfolios, and is similar to measures of seats–votes disproportionality used in the electoral studies literature (see Taagepera and Grofman 2003). Following ‘Gamson’s Law’ (Gamson 1961), if a party is contributing one-third of the floor seats to a given pro-presidential coalition, in a highly coalescent cabinet it would be rewarded with one-third of the cabinet portfolios. Although there is routinely a ‘formateur bonus’—some understandable overrepresentation of the president’s party, which normally finished first in the popular election— coalescence is a principle of fairness within the coalitional family. Presidents who compose their cabinets more proportionally can expect a higher degree of satisfaction from allied parties and therefore higher coalition discipline on the floor (Amorim Neto 2002, 2006). In contrast, presidents who adopt a more monopolistic approach can expect tensions, defections, and demands for alternative forms of political compensation (Pereira, Power, and Raile 2011). 4. The use of unilateral powers varies positively with the proportion of non-partisan ministers in the cabinet. When naming ministers, presidents generally have three choices: copartisans, politicians from allied parties, or non-partisans (sometimes referred to as ‘technocrats’).20 The allocation of a non-partisan or technocratic minister to a given policy domain suggests that the president either has compelling reasons to ring-fence that domain or is unwilling to delegate authority to a politician, or both. In a study of Latin American presidents, Amorim Neto (2006) has shown empirically that the greater the presence of non-partisan ministers, the more likely the president

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A fourth option would be to name a member of the opposition to a given cabinet portfolio. This can be done to secure specific expertise or policy continuity, or sometimes as an olive branch or symbolic gesture (as has become standard political practice in US presidential cabinets in recent decades). Since this option is not a mechanism for the formation of workable floor coalitions, we ignore it here.

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will attempt to rule by decree; conversely, a higher percentage of partisan ministers is associated with the use of ordinary statutes. 5. The coalitional strategy of presidents is influenced by the demands and preferences of political parties. Minority presidents seek legislative support, but at the same time they do not wish to compromise heavily on their policy preferences (Ames 2001). Therefore, presidents may actually benefit from the fact that some parties do not in fact seek policy but rather narrow, particularistic benefits (Shugart and Carey 1992 refer to this as the ‘inefficient secret’). These parties can be valuable in a mathematical sense (they supply votes to approve legislation) but also disposable as coalitional partners. Kellam (2015) has shown that the greater the presence of particularistic parties in the assembly, the less likely it is that the president will form majority governments, and the more likely it is that he/she will make frequent changes to the cabinet. Thus, pervasive particularism should be associated with coalitional flexibility. 6. Coalitions tend to erode toward the end of the presidential term. Students of US presidentialism have known for more than a century that there are strong temporal effects on presidential power, i.e. the so-called ‘honeymoon’ and ‘lame-duck’ effects. Other things equal, time affects the probability that the legislature will say ‘no’ to the president; this probability is expected to be low at the start of a term (when the executive has a fresh electoral mandate) and high at the end of a term, when the president is preparing to exit power. Because of fixed terms, these well-known effects are visible in virtually every presidential system. However, coalitional presidentialism exists in fragmented multiparty systems where the number of potential challengers to presidential authority is very high, complicating the president’s situation because some challengers may come from within the coalitional family. Amorim Neto (2002, 2006) has shown that coalition discipline varies negatively with the amount of time elapsed in the presidential term. 7. The very existence of a dominant pro-presidential faction in the legislature creates a new meta-cleavage in political life. This cleavage can be described very simply as ‘ins versus outs’ or government versus opposition. Opponents of the president attempt to emplace obstacles to the president in the assembly; supporters try to remove them. If the pro-presidential alliance gains a majority of seats, it will generally try to cartelize the legislature and make it friendly territory for the executive (Amorim Neto, Cox, and McCubbins 2003). When this cartelization works well, it is difficult to identify any other important cleavage in the assembly other than being for or against the president. Thus, conventional variables used in the study of legislative behaviour, such as party and ideology, may no longer have much explanatory power in the study of outcomes on the assembly floor—what matters is

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simply alignment or nonalignment with the executive (Zucco 2009; Zucco and Lauderdale 2011). * * * These seven propositions seem reasonably well established in what is still a modest comparative literature, and which is heavily skewed toward Latin America. As can readily be seen, the final four propositions are essentially descriptive: they capture what appear to be empirical regularities in coalitional presidentialism, such as non-partisan ministers, particularistic parties, erosion of coalitions over time, etc. Only a few of these propositions give us clues as to what presidents do in order to form and maintain coalitions. Two are based on the ‘constitutional powers’ and ‘partisan powers’ variables pioneered by Shugart and Carey (1992) and Mainwaring and Shugart (1997), while the third proposition (portfolio allocation) draws heavily on the experience of Western European parliamentary regimes. From this literature, we take the three variables that can be translated into presidential actions—legislative powers, partisan powers, and cabinet authority—and use them as building blocks in our notion of a presidential toolbox, as discussed in the following section. The literature has now moved beyond establishing that presidents govern with coalitions to ask how presidents govern with coalitions. How is the operative word here. We know that coalitional presidentialism is quite common around the world. We know that it is capable of producing presumably desired results, whether in creating stable majorities (Cheibub et al. 2004) or in generating legislative throughput (Figueiredo and Limongi 1999, 2000). However, we also know that these successes of multiparty presidentialism cannot easily be attributed to intrinsic features of the regime type, as they plausibly could be under multiparty parliamentarism. Because presidentialism operates under the principle of ‘separate origin and survival’ of the executive and legislative branches (Shugart and Carey 1992), legislative support is not necessary for the government to take office or to remain in office, and there are few built-in incentives for parties to cooperate with the head of government. Generalizing broadly, parliamentarism has some obvious explanations for the success of coalition formation and survival—investiture, confidence votes, and dissolution powers—that presidentialism lacks. This is overstated, of course: presidentialism does offer some explanations for coalitional practices, but they are not always visible to the naked eye, and they are not intrinsic to the separation of powers. Thus, the emerging literature on coalitional presidentialism asks how executives generate multiparty support from fragmented legislatures despite the relative paucity of hard-wired incentives for such support. That minority presidents seek support from other parties is, in itself, unsurprising. That they

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frequently secure and maintain this support over long periods of time requires more of an explanation.

IN S T R UM E N T S O F CO A L I T I O N M A N A G E M E N T : T H E P R E S I D E N T I A L T OO L B O X In the comparative study of presidentialism to date, studies of the executive’s ability to construct and discipline coalitions have tended towards single-factor explanations. Building on the previous discussion, we can identify at least five such strands in the literature, each of which poses contending claims about coalition management by minority presidents. Some authors claim that minority presidents engineer coalitions through their control over agenda-setting powers: the direct legislative powers of presidents allow them to dominate the agenda of the assembly, leading to the emergence of what Amorim Neto and Santos (2001) call a ‘presidentially defined faction’. Given agenda control by the president, such a faction (coalition) will be largely reactive but reasonably disciplined in support of the executive’s preferences (Figueiredo and Limongi 2000). A second group of scholars, inspired by the Western European parliamentary experience, claim that minority presidents secure support via their cabinet powers (e.g. Amorim Neto 2002, 2006). Parties trade support on the legislative floor for a seat at the cabinet table, thereby winning some partial control over ministries, resources, and state employment. This second perspective emphasizes power-sharing, and is altogether different to the first perspective that stresses the legislative power of executives. A third approach to coalition management builds on the concept of partisan powers first proposed by Mainwaring and Shugart (1997). Our understanding of partisan powers centres on the authority that presidents gain from the domination of their parties. Such authority is particularly valuable to minority presidents, because the coalitional bargain usually assumes that the formateur will be able to deliver and discipline at least one constituent party (his or her own). Samuels and Shugart (2010) have reinforced this idea by documenting presidentialism’s tendency to produce ‘presidentialized parties’, i.e. the severe dependency of parties on their presidential candidates and/or incumbent executives. A president who does not conform to this pattern—either because s/he lacks a political party, or is unable to exercise stable authority over the one s/he may have—presumably comes to the game of coalition formation at a distinct disadvantage. A fourth group of analysts, influenced by distributivist perspectives on the US Congress, hold that minority presidents use their control over budgetary

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authority to get the desired results from their interparty alliances (Pereira and Mueller 2004). Legislators engage in pork-barrel politics because they want deliverables, thus allowing them to credit-claim within their districts; presidents engage in coalitional politics because they want to enact policy, thus allowing them to credit-claim to the nation as a whole. Given the opportunity, and with coalitional survival at stake, minority executives will trade ‘pork for policy’ (Alston and Mueller 2006). If the secret of coalitional survival is distributivist politics, then logically legislative prerogatives, cabinet inclusion, or partisan authority cannot be critical to the outcome. Finally, a fifth group of scholars downplays the four constitutional and organizational factors mentioned above (legislative power, portfolio allocation, budgetary authority, and political parties) in favour of an emphasis on the role of informal institutions (Helmke and Levitsky 2006) in coalition management. Unwritten mechanisms of executive–legislative exchange are central to the political realities of presidentialism in many regions of the world: examples include clientelistic networks in Latin America, state regulation of new market economies in the post-Communist world, and cultivation of ethnic and regional loyalties in sub-Saharan Africa. Minority presidents can exploit the exchange of favours in order to form and maintain interparty alliances. Doing so allows them not only to circumvent constitutional or institutional rigidities, but also to obscure or conceal patterns of coalitional bargaining that (if made excessively visible) could be harmful to either the executive or the constituent parties (Mejía-Acosta 2006; Siavelis 2006). Each one of these five approaches, while undoubtedly valuable and insightful, makes a claim for the importance of a single presidential tool in forming and maintaining coalitions. We believe that each of these claims is individually plausible, but the main problem is that each approach is essentially univariate. We prefer to think in multivariate terms. Following Raile, Pereira, and Power (2011), we conceive of a presidential toolbox in which all five of these instruments are available to the executive, simultaneously and with some degree of (imperfect) substitutability. Such an approach not only draws on the rich insights of the new literature on coalitional presidentialism to date, but also allows us to explore how these factors interact in combination. More specifically, a multivariate toolbox perspective allows us to ask how and why presidents opt for one instrument of coalition management over another, or why they may activate two or more tools in combination, in a multipronged effort to form and cultivate their coalitions. As we discuss more fully in Chapter 4, the long-term theoretical goal of such a perspective should be not only to understand under what conditions minority presidents are likely to choose a specific tool, but also under what conditions such a choice is likely to pay off in the game of coalition management. This is an ambitious standard

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for what is likely to be an extended research programme, but one that is essential given the rising prominence of minority presidentialism around the world. A sustained cross-regional exploration, examining the record of coalitional presidentialism in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union, can potentially make some empirical and theoretical headway.

OVE RVIE W OF THE BOOK AHEAD This chapter has asserted both the empirical and theoretical importance of coalitional presidentialism. Empirically, global democratization has been accompanied by rising political fragmentation—i.e. increasing multipartism— whether in parliamentary, presidential, or semipresidential regimes. Minority executives are already the modal outcome of competitive elections, and they are likely to become even more widespread if and when today’s hybrid regimes democratize further. Theoretically, there are strong reasons to believe that coalition formation is one of the main reasons why multiparty presidentialism has survived, contrary to some early, negative predictions about its viability. Although we know that coalitions are common, we still know very little about the precise tools and strategies that presidents use to manage these interparty alliances—and what we do know is largely based on one world region (Latin America). Moreover, extant hypotheses about coalition management tend to be univariate, leading to an unnecessary compartmentalization of the incipient literature. There is ample space for a comprehensive approach that is both integrative and interactive, one that assumes that minority presidents can draw upon a multiplicity of tools as they seek to build stable support within fragmented legislative assemblies. The remainder of this book puts these ideas to the test. In Chapter 2, we make the case for a cross-regional approach to coalitional presidentialism. We justify our case selection—which includes analysis of three world regions, nine countries, and 51 episodes of coalitional presidentialism in the Third Wave of democratization—and we introduce our varied sources of empirical data for the study of interparty coordination by presidents. However, before we can analyse coalition management, we need to understand a phenomenon that is temporally precedent: coalition formation. We do so in Chapter 3, which revisits classic theories of coalition formation, nearly all of which derive from the study of parliamentarism. We argue that the distinctive political structures of presidential systems require us to rethink the nature of coalition formation under the separation of powers and to impose regime-specific scope conditions. For example, the unipersonal nature of the presidential office, the

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individual-level electoral mandate of the president, the ability of the executive to invite non-partisans into the cabinet, and the de-emphasis on collective responsibility all imply that presidents have far greater latitude in assembling their coalitions than do prime ministers. In Chapter 3, we also derive a set of expectations about the operational challenges imposed by the characteristics of baseline coalitions on Day One of their term in office. In stressing the contours of the ‘Day One coalition’—in terms of the size, fairness, and heterogeneity of the interparty alliance—we set the parameters for expected legislative payoffs and for subsequent intracoalitional bargaining.21 Chapter 4 develops the idea of the presidential toolbox as an overarching framework for the analysis of coalitional presidentialism. As discussed above in the section ‘Instruments of Coalition Management: the Presidential Toolbox’, we claim that the formateur—the incumbent president—can draw upon a wide range of tools to manage coalitions, and he/she exercises substantial discretion when doing so. In juxtaposing legislative powers, partisan powers, cabinet management, budgetary power, and the informal exchange of favours as presidential choices, we hypothesize that formateurs select tools and different admixtures of tools in the most (subjectively) cost-effective way: they choose the tool (or tools) that seems least costly to them at a given moment in time. Costs can be political, administrative or economic in nature, and we analyse the factors that shape the costs of each instrument of coalition management. We classify these factors as system-level (e.g. deriving from the constitution and from the electoral and party systems), coalition-level (i.e. associated with the compositional characteristics of a given interparty alliance), and conjunctural (i.e. exogenous influences such as economic performance, presidential popularity, conflict, crisis, or other shocks). In addition to the critical role of the Day One coalition, we stress temporal factors such as the electoral timetable, and we draw attention to the particular interactions between tools—i.e. how the cost of each tool is in part affected by the commission or omission of other tools in the toolbox. Chapters 5 through 9 form the empirical heart of the book. These tool chapters cover each one of the five alternative instruments of coalition 21 By ‘Day One,’ we refer to the first moment that a given president interacts with a given parliament. By ‘Day One coalition’ we refer generally, but not always, to the coalition established as a formateur begins a term of office. These interactions take different forms depending on the electoral calendar. Where presidential and legislative elections are non-concurrent, a newly elected president may need to work with a legislature elected several years earlier; by the same token, mid-term elections may change the composition of the assembly and force the president to negotiate a new coalition. In these cases, a single president may have more than one Day One coalition. The 42 presidential terms examined in this book produced 51 ‘episodes’ of coalitional presidentialism (see Chapter 3).

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discipline, respectively. As a result, each chapter draws on a different subliterature within the comparative study of presidentialism: legislative powers, cabinet formation, party politics, budget management, and emerging research on corruption and informal institutions. The five chapters also introduce our cross-regional research in Armenia, Brazil, Benin, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine. We use an original survey of national legislators conducted in each country (357 in total) to interpret the perceived cost of tools and to analyse the factors that shaped these perceptions. We triangulate these survey data with an original legislative database of ‘episodes’22 of coalitional presidentialism for which data were available on a month-by-month basis (see appendix to Chapter 2), and case studies of successful and unsuccessful efforts at major legislation, which illustrate how presidents adopt their coalition management strategies to minimize costs. In Chapters 5–9, we identify the interplay of system-level, coalition-level, and conjunctural factors that shapes the deployment of tools. Chapter 10 concludes the book by reflecting on the conceptual developments and empirical findings from our cross-regional analysis. We first clarify the main parameters of coalitional presidentialism that we derive from this analysis. These include, inter alia, the importance of the composition of floor coalitions, which moves analysis beyond the extant focus on portfolio coalitions, and the need to distinguish the process of coalition management from that of coalition formation. We also consider the characteristics, deployment patterns, and costs of the five tools that presidents utilize. This analysis identifies a complex web of mechanisms that shape coalition management. These findings engage directly with the theoretical evolution in presidential studies that we introduced earlier in this chapter: the shift in focus from conflict to coordination. We cannot conclude that coalitions always provide a neatly coordinated solution to the challenges that minority presidents face in systems of separated powers. Although minority presidents govern with a predictable set of tools, and their costs are recognizable cross-regionally, they continually improvise in response to systemic, coalitional, and conjunctural factors. Given these many moving parts, we contend that perseverance rather than coordination is sometimes a more accurate representation of the management strategies that minority presidents deploy.

22

An episode of coalitional presidentialism is defined as the coexistence of a given incumbent minority president with a given parliamentary convocation. As explained in the previous footnote, presidents can experience more than one episode during a presidential term.

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Coalitional Presidentialism in Cross-Regional Perspective As noted in Chapter 1, coalitional presidentialism is a global phenomenon. It is now present in all the main regions of the world: from East Asia to Latin America, and from Eastern Europe to Africa. While coalitional presidentialism has a reasonably long history in Latin America,1 it is a relatively new phenomenon in Africa and the former Soviet Union. It also comes in several constitutional flavours: post-Soviet cases of coalitional presidentialism function under dual executives, whereas the African and Latin American cases are largely the products of ‘pure’ presidential systems.2 Given very different historical paths of political and institutional development, it is essential that we situate each of our nine country cases in the appropriate regional and comparative context. This chapter begins by setting out how we chose our country cases, and then proceeds to outline some essential features of the political landscape in our three regions. In Africa, coalitional presidentialism is the product of fragmented party systems, which typically result from the combination of high ethnic diversity and the historic politicization of communal identities. In the former Soviet Union, the tumultuous events of the late 1980s, and the emergence of new and often fluid party systems, meant that it took over a decade for presidents to transform their broad constitutional powers into commanding political parties and outright legislative majorities. In Latin America, the experience has been somewhat different. Apart from Venezuela in the Chávez years, there has been no obvious regional trend towards the centralization of authority under the party of the president. Instead, party systems and legislatures in countries such as Chile remain highly fragmented and coalitional presidentialism has become a way of life. These differences are important,

1 In Latin America, coalitional presidentialism existed in the Second Wave of democratization (roughly the two decades after World War II), notably in Brazil and in Chile. On the breakdown of these regimes, see Stepan (1978) and Valenzuela (1978) respectively. 2 With the exception of Benin between 9 April 1996 and 14 May 1998.

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because they shape the challenges facing incumbent presidents and the strategies of coalition management that they adopt.

C A S E SE L E CT I O N Our central goal is to enable broad comparative analysis while at the same time highlight the historical and institutional factors that area specialists view as important to presidentialism and to coalitional politics (Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power 2014). Given wide variation in democratic development across our three regions, we establish a baseline threshold of political competitiveness in order to ensure that we are comparing ‘like with like’. Countries in which presidents do not have to engage with the legislature because they can simply coerce MPs are unlikely to exhibit meaningful coalition-building practices. Thus, we focus on coalitional politics under political democracy and/or under hybrid regimes that are reasonably pluralistic. We thus employ the two most commonly used regime classification datasets, Polity and Freedom House, in order to establish a ‘double threshold’ for this standard of political competition. Consistent with the threshold deployed in the introductory chapter, we include cases that are classified by Polity IV either as ‘open anocracies’ (1 to 5 on the Polity scale) or ‘democracies’ (6 to 10), but they must also satisfy the Freedom House threshold specified as ‘partly free’ (less than 5 on a seven-point scale in which lower numbers indicate higher levels of freedom, averaging political rights and civil liberties). These two democracy measures have the advantage of covering a large number of countries over a long period of time. We choose continuous indices of democracy because they provide more fine-grained categories for classifying political systems where the alternation of incumbents (or the absence of alternation) can be difficult to interpret at the country level. This makes our case selection sensitive to incremental changes in regime type. For example, we cease to include Russia from 2004, when Freedom House reclassified Russia as ‘not free,’ even though the country continued to be rated above +1 by Polity. Although the cases covered in this book are not equally polyarchic, they meet a standard of competitive politics in which parties and legislators have operated in relatively open political environments. In addition to the democracy threshold, we also consider only those regimes in which presidents act as the de facto formateurs of legislative coalitions. This means that we do consider cases that are sometimes categorized by other scholars as semi-presidential, but only where a careful reading of the practice

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of executive politics suggests that they are effectively ‘presidential’ when it comes to coalition formation. Referring to the typology of semi-presidential regimes drawn by Shugart and Carey (1992), this condition holds in ‘president-parliamentary’ systems, where the prime minister and cabinet are accountable to both the president and the parliamentary majority, because presidents are usually the principal formateur of the executive-supporting coalition irrespective of the size of their parliamentary support base. It may also hold in ‘premier-presidential’ systems, because the president becomes the de facto formateur when he or she can determine the choice of prime minister.3 However, because president-parliamentary systems come closest to the pure presidential model in terms of the president’s formal powers to dismiss the prime minister and/or cabinet, we select only the presidentparliamentary variant of semi-presidentialism in order to minimize constitutional differences between our cases. Hence, we do not include data for Armenia after 2007, nor from Ukraine in two periods (2006–10 and 2014– present), when constitutional changes moved both political systems in a premier-presidential direction. Taken together, these criteria lead to the following case selection. In Latin America, Brazil (democratic since 1985) is a paradigmatic case of coalitional presidentialism with a strong executive, especially after the adoption of a new constitution in 1988. Ecuador (1979–) provides a useful contrast to Brazil, insofar as it has had a similar multiparty system but weaker executive agenda-setting powers for most of the period analysed. Ecuador also held two constitutional conventions after democratization, offering us variation on presidential power. Chile (1990–) further expands variance of context: the peculiar post-Pinochet electoral system (in place until 2013) forced coalitions to be assembled prior to elections, rather than afterward as is typical in Brazil and Ecuador. Among the post-Soviet regimes meeting our dual democracy threshold, Armenia (1995–2007), Russia (1994–2003), and Ukraine (1996–2006; 2010–14) are the three systems that come closest to pure presidentialism, with the arguable exception of Georgia prior to 2004. All three countries have experienced coalitional presidentialism, albeit in varying degrees. The failure of Ukrainian presidents to achieve single-party legislative majorities since independence has rendered coalitions a constant feature of national politics, whereas the emergence of dominant presidential parties in both Armenia

3 When a minority president is obliged to appoint the prime minister from the parliamentary opposition he is not, by definition, the formateur (e.g., periods of ‘cohabitation’ in France).

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and Russia from the mid-2000s means that coalitional presidentialism is confined to the first 15 or so years of post-Soviet rule. In sub-Saharan Africa, coalitional presidentialism has marked the democratic experiences of Benin (1991–), Malawi (1994–) and Kenya (2002–). However, our African cases vary considerably with respect to the distribution of institutional power. Benin has developed a vibrant democracy based on coalition formation and mutual accommodation despite being one of the most fragmented legislatures on the continent. In contrast, Malawian presidents enjoy considerable extra-legislative powers but have often been forced to resort to informal measures to assemble viable legislative coalitions. Finally, the powerful Kenyan presidency has relied on both formal and informal mechanisms to build working majorities in one of Africa’s most robust parliaments. In all cases, coalitions have played an important role in democratic governance, albeit to varying degrees across and within individual countries. One indicator of the variable significance of coalitions is the Index of Coalitional Necessity (ICN), which is summarized in Table 2.1 for selected episodes of coalitional presidentialism analysed in this book. The ICN takes into consideration two of the biggest structural constraints on presidents within legislatures: (1) the effective number of parties, and (2) the share of lower house seats Table 2.1. Index of coalitional necessity: selected episodes Country (date of presidential election)

Effective number of parliamentary parties

Seat share of presidential party (%)

Index of coalitional necessity

Brazil (2010)

10.64

16.99

88.32

Rousseff (Worker’s Party)

Russia (2000)

7.85

18.48

63.99

Putin (Unity)

President (party)

Armenia (2003)

5.85

0.00

58.50

Kocharyan (no party)

Chile (2010)

5.25

15.00

44.62

Piñera (National Renewal)

Kenya (2002)

4.78

17.40

39.48

Kibaki (Democratic Party)

Ecuador (2009)

4.17

45.16

22.86

Correa (PAIS Alliance)

Benin (2006)

3.89

42.17

22.50

Boni Yayi (Cauri Forces for an Emerging Benin)

Ukraine (2010)

3.39

38.00

21.01

Yanukovych (Party of Regions)

Malawi (1999)

2.55

48.00

13.26

Muluzi (United Democratic Front)

Note: Data calculated from legislative party membership at the start of each presidential term. Data for Benin are calculated from party membership after the 2007 parliamentary elections. Seat shares refer to lower chambers or unicameral legislatures (see Table 2.2). Source: CPP Coalition and Legislation Data.

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not held by the nominal party of the president.4 As can be seen in Table 2.1, there is a wide range of coalitional necessity across these different episodes: from very high under Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff to relatively low under Malawian president Bakili Muluzi. The remainder of this chapter introduces our cases and places them in the appropriate regional context.

SUB-SAHA RA N AFRICA: BENIN, KENYA, AND M ALAWI The reintroduction of multiparty elections in the 1990s transformed the African political landscape. In just ten years, a continent that had previously been dominated by one-party states and military rule witnessed the widespread introduction of more open forms of political competition and, in countries such as Benin, transfers of power (Lindberg 2006). As of 2017, Eritrea stands out as the only major state not to hold elections of some kind. However, the reintroduction of multiparty politics did not go hand in hand with constitutional reform to democratize the wider political system. Especially in Anglophone Africa, transitions from authoritarian rule typically occurred quickly and with minimal constitutional reform (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). By contrast, some Francophone countries established National Conferences to debate the new political dispensation, and at times this paved the way for broader institutional change to create a more level political playing field, as in Benin (Heilbrunn 1993). But even in these cases, presidents remained dominant relative to other branches of government. African executives also have another source of strength, namely the informal authority they are able to wield as a result of their position at the apex of neopatrimonial political systems. Neopatrimonialism is a term that is often used and rarely defined. In the African context it refers to the political systems that emerged from the imprecise collision between ‘traditional’ African forms of government, in which authority was often vested in unaccountable individuals whose claim to power rested on claims of lineage and divine right rather than competence, and the ‘modern state’ imposed by colonial rule (Medard 1982). In its most sophisticated interpretation, the presence of neopatrimonialism implies that both traditional forms of authority and the modern state have

4

The ICN is calculated by multiplying the Laakso–Taagepera effective number of (parliamentary) parties by the complement of the percentage of seats held by the president’s own party, then dividing by ten for ease of interpretation.

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been transformed (Erdmann and Engel 2007). On the one hand, the power of traditional leaders is institutionalized and reinforced, increasing the capacity of ethnic ‘Big Men’ to dominate their communities. On the other, the personal networks enjoyed by presidents enable them to exert control over political institutions that were formally independent, subverting them so that they do not function as intended. Although recent scholarship has demonstrated that not all African states are neopatrimonial, it is nonetheless clear that in most of Africa the formal rules of the game are more malleable than in, say, western Europe.5 Largely as a result of this powerful combination of informal and formal authority, incumbent African presidents won 88 per cent of the elections they contested between 1991 and 2010.6 Following the early defeat of incumbents in Benin and Zambia in 1991, old authoritarian leaders— almost all of whom were allowed to contest multiparty polls—perceived the threat posed by open election contests, and began to exert greater control over the process in order to sustain themselves in power. Thereafter, opposition parties found it much harder to gain a foothold in the political system. But despite the resilience of African leaders in the face of multiparty competition, many failed to secure the kind of legislative dominance that their broader political powers would seem to suggest. For every dominantparty state in which the ruling party consistently secures an absolute majority of seats in the legislature—e.g. Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa—there is a country in which the president’s party is in a clear minority. Indeed, many casual observers of the continent will be surprised to learn that over the last 20 years this second category has included Benin, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Within the universe of African presidentialism, Benin, Kenya, and Malawi are useful cases for comparison. First, they are all cases in which executives have consistently struggled to secure a majority in the legislature. This was the case for the first three presidents in multiparty Benin and Malawi, and two of the first three presidents in Kenya.7 They are also countries in which presidents have sought to form enduring coalitions, in contrast to a case

5

Bratton and van de Walle classify South Africa and Zimbabwe—to 2000—as nonneopatrimonial systems, and argue that this played a significant role in their comparatively successful transitions from authoritarian rule (1994). 6 Sample includes all direct presidential elections held between 1989 and 2009. See Cheeseman (2010: 142). 7 We exclude Kenya between 2007 and 2013, when the president was forced into a grand coalition as a result of an internationally brokered deal to end a period of post-election violence, and was thus unable to act as a formateur.

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such as Liberia, where President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has advanced her legislative agenda by forming shifting ad hoc alliances depending on the issue at stake. Second, these are countries with a reasonably similar institutional past: all three avoided civil war and possessed relatively stable dominant party systems under authoritarian rule in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, they have considerable experience with political parties and legislatures. Minority presidents in our African cases face pronounced ethnic, regional, and religious political cleavages (Mozaffar et al. 2003). These cleavages have a number of complex roots, including struggles over land, episodes of winnertakes-all politics, and past instances of inter-ethnic violence (Cheeseman 2015). The combination of politically salient communal identities, and high levels of ethnic diversity—Benin and Kenya are more diverse than New York or central London—creates significant barriers to the formation of majoritarian presidential parties under conditions of democracy. It is easy to understand how these divisions are reflected in parliamentary politics in a case like Benin, where the use of a proportional representation system in 24 multi-member constituencies facilitates the election of smaller parties.8 But it might be expected that first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral systems in Anglophone Africa would prevent some of these cleavages from being translated into the legislature, given that FPTP produces disproportional outcomes and impedes the growth of minority parties. However, the presence of regional cleavages in countries such as Malawi, and the tendency for ethnic communities to cluster together geographically in countries such as Kenya, means that even relatively small communities are capable of electing a significant number of MPs. This combination of political and demographic factors ensures that in all three African cases, identity politics plays more of a role in mobilizing political support than do ideological debate or retrospective voting—although there is evidence that the significance of the latter is on the increase (Bratton and Kimenyi 2008). This does not mean, however, that presidents can form legislative coalitions without constraint. In the same way that a Conservative Party leader in the United Kingdom will find an alliance with the Liberal Democrats easier to sell to his or her supporters than one with the Labour Party, African leaders must take into account the opinions of their supporters with regard to which groups make for the most acceptable coalition partners. For instance, a community may see some other ethnic groups as ‘kissing cousins’, but others as historical rivals (Dunning and Harrison 2010).

8 This helps to explain the election of 12 parties in 1991, despite the fact that at that time the country had one of the world’s smallest lower chambers (63 seats).

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Partly as a result of this kind of challenge, coalition politics in ethnically polarized states such as Kenya has been turbulent. Alliances have often been fleeting and grounded more in political necessity than ideological proximity. In the three elections held between 2002 and 2013, the president’s party never won more than one-third of the seats in the National Assembly. In this book we analyse the outcome in 2002, when Mwai Kibaki won the presidential election as the head of the National Rainbow Alliance (NaRC), a multi-ethnic movement whose main aim was to remove President Daniel arap Moi and his Kenya African National Union (KANU) party from power. As Kibaki needed to form a pre-electoral alliance in order to secure victory at the polls, he had already made promises of cabinet positions to his coalition partners (discussed in Chapter 6). However, disagreements over how to share power rapidly led to the collapse of the coalition, forcing Kibaki to approach other parties with offers of ministerial positions in order to shore up his administration. Coalitions in Benin also tend to be formed in the run-up to presidential elections, but these alliances do not always easily translate into legislative coalitions because, in contrast to Kenya, elections are rarely concurrent. Presidential elections are held every five years and parliamentary elections are held every four years, meaning that the two only coincide once every 20 years—hence an incoming president may face a legislature that was elected under their predecessor and hence does not reflect the current balance of power. However, even concurrent elections are no guarantee of stable presidential party majorities. In one concurrent campaign, the ‘founding’ election of 1991, the Union for the Triumph of Democratic Renewal (UTRD), which had been set up to support the campaign of President Nicephore Soglo—who officially ran as an independent—won just 12 seats (18.5 per cent). However, even this paltry number gave the UTRD a plurality in parliament, which demonstrates the extent of legislative fragmentation: the smallest number of parties required for Soglo to build a minimum winning coalition was four. This set the scene for the next 20 years, in which presidents with a small legislative presence have had to piece together complex coalitions. It was not until the second term of President Boni Yayi in 2011 that the president’s party came close to securing an absolute legislative majority. Partly as a result, coalition formation and management have been guided more by mathematics and ethno-regional considerations than a sense of a shared policy space. Coalitions in Malawi have followed a different path, largely because the party of the president has tended to win more seats than in Benin and Kenya. In 1994, President Bakili Muluzi’s United Democratic Front (UDF) won 85 of 177 legislative seats, while in 2009, President Bingu wa Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party won 113 seats in an Assembly that had been enlarged to

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193 members. The success of presidential parties can partly be explained by the fact that Malawian voters have tended to cluster into three regional voting blocs in the north, centre, and south of the country, giving rise to a three (or twoand-a-half) party system. However, this has not meant that Malawian presidents have found the politics of coalition formation and management easier than their counterparts in Benin and Kenya. Mistrust between the UDF and the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), which ruled the country for 33 years, mostly as a one-party state, meant that a grand alliance between the two largest legislative parties appeared unlikely at the moment of the transition to democracy.9 But relations between the UDF and the country’s third party, the Alliance for Democracy (AFORD) have also been strained. Following the 1994 elections, AFORD surprised many commentators by forming an opposition alliance with the MCP, turning down the opportunity to join the UDF government. It was only one year later that President Muluzi was able to draw AFORD into a coalition with the UDF, although this collapsed in 1996. The next ten years were characterized by a similar pattern, with periods in which presidents have tried to make minority governments work punctuated by the formation of fractious, short-lived alliances.

T HE FO R M E R S O V I E T U N I ON : AR ME N I A , RUSSIA, AND UKRA I NE The breakup of the Soviet Union left incumbent elites in the 15 newly independent states with the task of finding alternative institutional arrangements to the Leninist model of government. The new constitutions that were adopted were predominantly presidential. This preference for presidentialism had indirect historical precedents. The choice of political systems that were structurally semi-presidential—with separate posts for president and prime minister—reproduced the Soviet-era division between the political leadership of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers’ responsibility for administration. However, the semi-presidential variant was not applied uniformly. Although dual executives were created in most cases, there was notable variation in the constitutional powers of presidents.

9 The two parties supported a common presidential candidate in 2009 in a bid to defeat a common rival, Bingu Mutharika.

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The precise distribution of power within the executive branch varied according to the institutional and political authority enjoyed by incumbents at the time of constitutional choice. As Frye shows (1997), when the bargaining power of incumbents was high and their reelection prospects favourable, post-Soviet rule-makers opted for constitutions that concentrated power in the hands of the president. This outcome was typical of many post-Soviet constitutional settlements. While the Baltic states and Moldova adopted either parliamentary (Estonia, Latvia) or more balanced semi-presidential systems (Lithuania, Moldova), presidential power in other cases greatly exceeded that of post-communist states elsewhere in Eastern Europe (Fish 2006). As a result, the region produced many cases of presidents with subordinate executives, which have operated de facto in ways more typically associated with pure presidential regimes. The dominance of presidents in many states of the region has also been reinforced by informal patterns of political authority. As in Africa, the presidential office serves as the main hub for the personal networks of power that manage both the state and the economy. In post-communist societies where the rule of law is weakly developed, the power to determine the distribution of economic rents and to control the agencies of law enforcement has made the presidency the focal point for clientelism. This gives presidents additional resources beyond their extensive formal powers. It has led scholars of Russian politics in particular to describe post-Soviet political systems as ‘super-presidential’ (Fish 2000), with the ‘dominance of personal rule over impersonal institutionalized administration’ (Robinson 2003: 150); whereas in other cases, notably Ukraine, presidents have been described as ‘central mediators’ between rival networks of business and regional interests (Pleines 2012: 127). However, research on post-Soviet presidents also finds that the nature of the ‘patronal’ networks of power can be shaped by the way in which power is distributed by the formal rules of the presidential system. As Hale shows (2011: 611), constitutions that have empowered the president to dominate the executive have been more effective in re-establishing ‘single-pyramid politics’ than those that divide power within the executive branch. Therefore, we attach special importance to the study of regimes where the president is the supreme centre of authority within the executive. From the universe of post-Soviet presidencies, the cases of Armenia (1995–2007), Russia (1994–2003), and Ukraine (1996–2005, 2010–14) provide the best fit of our case selection criteria. First, they meet the baseline democratic criteria provided by both Polity IV and Freedom House for at least one legislative term. This democracy threshold excludes over one-third of the post-Soviet presidential systems from our analysis: Azerbaijan, Belarus,

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Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,10 Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. These states have functioned as authoritarian regimes for all or most of the postcommunist period. Second, Armenia, Russia, and Ukraine adopted president-parliamentary constitutions during the early transition from communism. These constitutions empowered presidents in each state to be the principal formateur of legislative coalitions, irrespective of their support base in parliament. As we noted earlier, this variant of semi-presidentialism differs from premierpresidential systems where the prime minister can be the main architect of coalitions when legislative support resides with parties opposed to the president. Therefore, we exclude premier-presidential cases from our analysis: Lithuania, Moldova (1991–2001) and Georgia (2013–), as well as periods of premier-presidentialism in Armenia (2007–17)11 and Ukraine (2006–10 and 2014–present). The episodes of premier-presidentialism in Ukraine highlight the formateur powers that this regime type can confer on prime ministers. The Anti-Crisis Alliance, which formed during Victor Yanukovych’s tenure as prime minister (2006–07), became the focal point for opposition to the rule of President Yushchenko, and caused a political crisis that led to the parliament’s premature dissolution in 2007.12 Finally, the three cases provide clear examples of presidents who sought to overcome minority presidential party support in the assembly (or no party support) by constructing inter-party alliances. This was less obvious in the case of Georgia, which met our other criteria until constitutional change in 2013 took the country in a premier-presidential direction. In Georgia, presidential parties or blocs enjoyed far greater success in winning parliamentary majorities through the ballot box during the first decade of post-communist rule, even though they had mixed fortunes in sustaining this support for the legislative duration. Coalitional presidentialism occurred in Armenia, Russia, and Ukraine either because presidents were non-partisan or because their nominal parties While Freedom House ranks Kyrgyzstan as ‘partly free’ from 1991 to 1999, Polity IV ranks Kyrgyzstan as a ‘partial democracy’ only from 2005. Therefore, the country does not meet our double threshold until 2005. The relatively recent democratization in Kyrgyzstan is outside the time frame of our analysis, but it is a case that merits further investigation. 11 The Armenian constitution was amended by popular referendum in December 2015 to create a parliamentary republic, with the amendments taking effect in 2017. 12 Initially, the Anti-Crisis Alliance included the president’s party, but relations soon deteriorated. Renamed the Alliance of National Unity in March 2007, President Yushchenko feared that the alliance would acquire a constitutional majority and dissolved the assembly. For the terms of this coalition agreement, see http://zakon1.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/n0005001-06 (accessed 29 July 2014). 10

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did not have the same electoral success in securing outright legislative majorities during the 1990s. It was not until the mid-2000s that presidential parties emerged in Armenia and Russia that could command legislative majorities; and in Ukraine, President Yanukovych’s attempt to install the Party of the Regions as the ruling party failed in dramatic circumstances in February 2014.13 Notwithstanding the significant constitutional powers enjoyed by presidents in each case, this lack of legislative support ultimately compelled leaders to form coalitions. Although all post-Soviet Armenian presidents have governed with interparty alliances, the presidential coalition that dominated the Armenian National Assembly from 2003 to 2007 was the first attempt to formalize an agreement between the president and two or more parties. It was based on alliances that had emerged in the previous parliament (1999–2003). Without a party of his own, President Kocharyan acquired a majority from several parties in the spring of 2000. This consisted of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the Rule of Law Party, and the Unity Alliance of the Republican Party and People’s Party, which disintegrated after the assassination of its leaders—Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan (Republican Party) and Assembly Speaker Karen Demirchyan (People’s Party)—in the failed coup attempt of 27 October 1999. In the subsequent presidential elections of February 2003, the Republican Party backed Kocharyan’s candidacy, and was joined by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the Rule of Law Party. This electoral alliance formed a coalition in the National Assembly with the signing of a memorandum in June 2003, which became known as the ‘three plus one’ agreement. This combined support enabled the president to maintain firm control over the activities of the parliament. Even when the coalition’s majority was placed under strain by the defection of the Rule of Law party in the spring of 2006, President Kocharyan was able to maintain a pro-presidential majority with the support of the United Labour Party and People’s Deputy—a group of independent MPs and Republican Party members. This disciplined support is typical of Armenian presidentialism. Russian presidents had less success in constructing majority coalitions in the years following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Like Kocharyan, President Boris Yeltsin did not officially have the backing of a presidential party, although he was supported by several parties that had close ties with the

13 Yanukovych left office and Ukraine on 21 February 2014 after he lost the support of his party and the parliament in the face of popular protest.

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executive branch: Russia’s Choice and the Party of Unity and Accord (First Duma), and Our Home is Russia (Second Russia). These parties allied with groupings of independent MPs to support executive initiatives in the Duma, but this support was insufficient to deliver parliamentary majorities (Chaisty 2005). This governance problem was addressed by Vladimir Putin shortly after he came to power in March 2000. With his Unity party winning less than a quarter of the seats in Duma elections held the previous December, Putin used the political authority gained from his electoral victory to construct Russia’s first post-Soviet majority presidential coalition, which emerged in April 2001 (Ivanov 2008: 78). This ‘coalition of four’ was formed from two parties (Fatherland-All Russia and Unity) and two groupings of independent MPs (Russia’s Regions and People’s Deputy). The coalition united the interests of Russia’s ruling elite—which had divided over the succession to Boris Yeltsin—at both the national and regional levels. This unification set the stage for a new political party, United Russia, which went on to dominate subsequent parliaments. However, the original ‘coalition of four’ was not as amenable to presidential control as United Russia would prove later. The large number of independent MPs in Putin’s first coalition opened up space for dissenters who opposed the Kremlin’s party-building project, and who continued to enjoy a relatively high degree of autonomy on substantive legislative issues. For Ukrainian presidents, such problems of coalition discipline have been the most difficult. They were particularly acute during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma. As with Kocharyan and Yeltsin, Kuchma did not have the backing of a presidential party in the legislature, and drew support from broad alliances of many parties. Such coalitions were insufficient to sustain majorities during Kuchma’s first presidential term (1994–9), and it was not until the start of his second term in 2000 that a majority coalition was created (Whitmore 2004: 44–6; D’Anieri 2007: 88). This coalition enabled Kuchma to break the stranglehold that left-wing parties had held over the parliament’s leadership since the early 1990s (Kuzio 2003: 29), but it suffered from defections that arose from his reorganization of the government in 2001. This action, which led to the dismissal of two prominent reformist leaders from the cabinet—first Yulia Tymoshenko, and then Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko—resulted in the loss of support of several parties, and effectively wiped out Kuchma’s majority for the remainder of the parliament. This pattern was followed in subsequent parliaments until Victor Yanukovych came to power in 2010. Backed by a presidential party with a large number of seats (the Party of the Regions), the ‘stability and reform’ coalition provided the most reliable coalition support enjoyed by any post-Soviet Ukrainian president up to that point.

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LATIN AMERICA: ECUADOR, BRAZIL, AND CHILE Latin America, as the world region with the longest historical experience with pure presidentialism, contains the largest number of cases meeting our case selection criteria. Moreover, the region’s impact on academic debates has been enormous. Latin America is responsible for the lion’s share of political science research on what has come to be known as comparative presidentialism—i.e. the study of presidentialism outside the United States—and for nearly all of the main hypotheses about the subtype in which we are interested here, coalitional presidentialism. The predominance of Latin America in the literature proved both a boon and a challenge to our research. While the Latin American experience has been extraordinary in terms of hypothesis generation, at the same time one of the main objectives of this book was to take the debate on coalitional presidentialism outside of the western hemisphere. Democratic institutional design in Latin America draws heavily on both US precedents (the Madisonian separation of powers) and on European innovations (proportional representation for the assembly), but these two sets of influences were separated by roughly a century. The adoption of US-inspired presidential constitutions in most newly independent republics of Latin America, largely in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, is one of the best-documented cases of institutional diffusion in modern history. Most Latin American countries retained majoritarian electoral systems for the legislature until well into the twentieth century, yet a spate of electoral reforms between the 1920s and 1950s changed the political landscape in favour of increasing multipartism, the second necessary ingredient for coalitional presidentialism. Whereas in 1930 only one-third of Latin American republics used any form of proportional representation (PR), by 1960 PR was in place in 75 per cent of the regional political systems (Wills-Otero 2009). In several cases, including all three countries we examine here, the adoption of PR preceded the initiation of competitive politics, such that the effects of electoral reform on executive–legislative relations were not immediately visible.14 Yet the global Second Wave of democratization (roughly the first two decades after World War Two) transformed Latin America into an early laboratory for coalitional presidentialism. In 1950, for example, Eurico Gaspar Dutra of Brazil, Gabriel González Videla of Chile, and Galo Plaza Lasso of

14

For example, in Chile, PR was adopted in 1925 but was not used under reasonably democratic conditions until 1932; for Brazil, the equivalent dates were 1932 and 1945, and for Ecuador, 1946 and 1948.

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Ecuador were all directly elected presidents governing with the support of two or more political parties that supported them on the legislative floor and enjoyed direct representation in the cabinet. However, persistent internal conflicts, aggravated by the unfavourable Cold War context, caused the eventual breakdowns of these democracies and led to long and brutally repressive military regimes (Stepan 1978; Valenzuela 1978). By 1975, it was striking that all three surviving democracies in Latin America approximated classical two-party systems: Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela (Mainwaring 1993). Yet when the Third Wave of democratization came to Latin America circa 1978, the combination of presidentialism and multipartism was ratified by almost all of the other nascent polyarchies in the region (Shugart and Carey 1992; Foweraker 1998). A general trend toward party fragmentation was visible almost everywhere, even in countries with a two-party tradition in the relatively recent past (e.g. Dominican Republic, Uruguay). By the late 1980s, coalitional presidentialism had become the modal form of governance among the transitional democracies of Latin America, especially so in the South American subregion. Of our three South American cases selected here, Ecuador was the first to democratize, in 1978. Between the founding presidential election of 1979 and the inauguration of Rafael Correa in 2007, the Ecuadorean political system was characterized by high party fragmentation and executive instability. In the first 35 years of democratic experience there were no fewer than 13 presidents, eight of whom were directly elected (the rest were acceding vice-presidents or interim appointments). Notably, these eight directly elected executives belonged to seven different political parties: in the pre-Correa years, only the Social Christian Party managed to win the presidential office twice (with León Febres Cordero in 1984 and Sixto Durán-Ballén in 1992). In the 1990s, rising party fragmentation combined with serious internal conflicts over structural adjustment—exacerbated by historically low prices for oil, Ecuador’s principal source of foreign exchange—created major challenges to governability. Falling state revenues and economic stagnation changed the behaviour of both executives and legislators: need for unpopular austerity measures led politicians to switch or create parties with increasing frequency, and presidents found it difficult to create stable majorities in Congress. Executives responded by forming clandestine or ‘ghost’ coalitions (MejíaAcosta 2004, 2009) on an issue-by-issue basis, wherein legislators were able to obfuscate their support for presidential initiatives. The period of greatest instability was between 1996 and 2006, a decade that saw seven consecutive minority presidents, a new constitution (1998), and the virtual disappearance of the traditional parties that had founded the regime in 1978–79. The political vacuum was filled by Correa, a fiercely independent populist who first won

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election in 2006. Within a space of two years, Correa had largely unified the country’s fractured left and indigenous movements, created a dominant party (Alianza PAIS), and implemented the country’s twentieth constitution, revolutionizing Ecuadorean politics. He was reelected in 2009 and in 2013. Thus, post-2006 Ecuador has moved away from the system of unstable minority presidentialism that characterized the first two decades of democracy; a scenario of declining coalitional necessity, punctuated by two constitutional conventions, affords us interesting variation on both institutional variables and political context. Brazil underwent a negotiated transition to democratic rule in 1985. Notably, the first civilian administration led by José Sarney15 was already a coalition government, incorporating the Party of the Democratic Movement (PMDB) and the Party of the Liberal Front (PFL) into the cabinet but also enjoying the support of several smaller parties in Congress. The legislative elections of 1986, conducted during an economic boom and the euphoria of the transition, saw the PMDB win what is still, to date, the only single-party legislative majority since the end of military rule (53 per cent of lower house seats). However, the party fractured the following year during the tensions of a National Constituent Assembly and the beginning of a hyperinflationary spiral that lasted through 1993. The unpopular Sarney finished his term and was succeeded by the populist Fernando Collor (PRN, 1990–2). Collor studiously ignored Congress and made no serious efforts to build a stable party coalition; as a result, when confronted with serious corruption allegations in 1992, he was quickly impeached and removed from office (Weyland 1993). Like their Ecuadorean counterparts, Brazilian politicians reacted to poor government performance by creating new political parties, causing fragmentation to spike sharply between 1986 and 1994 (Mainwaring 1999). Since 1990, no party has managed to win even 25 per cent of lower house seats; the largest party in 2017, the PMDB, held less than 14 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. A turning point came in 1994 with the presidential victory of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, PSDB). In that year, a constitutional reform initiated a system of concurrent elections, making it easier for Cardoso to form a pre-electoral alliance with the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB) and the PFL. Improved economic results after 1994 were more 15

The founding coalition (known formally as the Democratic Alliance) was assembled by president-elect Tancredo Neves (PMDB) in 1984–85, who died before he was able to take the oath of office. The broad contours of the Neves cabinet were preserved by his vice-presidential running mate, José Sarney (formally PMDB, though representing the PFL in the coalition bargain), who served a full five-year term from March 1985 to March 1990.

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conducive to party system institutionalization (Mainwaring, Power, and Bizzarro 2017). Moreover, Cardoso’s pragmatic approach to power sharing inaugurated a set of first principles that have shaped coalitional presidentialism in Brazil for the past 20 years. These include the toleration of ‘disconnected’ coalitions (i.e., the constituent parties do not need to be ideologically contiguous), the encouragement of oversized or ‘surplus’ coalitions (an insurance policy for the president to protect against defections), and the predictable allocation of government resources (jobs, nominations, and pork) to loyal parties in the pro-presidential alliance. Cardoso’s two successors from the leftist Worker’s Party (PT), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–10) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–16) followed the basic lines of this coalitional model, in fact incorporating some of the same parties that supported Cardoso’s earlier centre-right alliance. Brazil’s economic and social performance in this period has also been far superior to its record in the 1980s and early 1990s (Neri 2012; Montero 2014), leading many observers to note that the combination of presidentialism and extreme party fractionalization16 has prevented neither governability nor innovative policy making. Whereas in Ecuador the last remnants of a fragile party system reshaped themselves around a newly dominant president (Correa), Brazil illustrates a different path: successive executives have adapted their governing strategies to the realities of party fragmentation and permanent minority presidentialism. Like Ecuador and Brazil, Chile since 1990 has also been a consistent practitioner of coalitional presidentialism, albeit in a very different institutional and historical context. Chile differs from our other South American cases in three key ways: first, political parties are arguably the most programmatic and disciplined in the region; second, governing coalitions are always pre-electoral in nature; and third, the two main coalitions have changed very little in their composition over the past 25 years. Both coalitions trace their origins to the October 1988 plebiscite on the tenure in office of dictator Augusto Pinochet. A continuista alliance formed around the ‘Yes’ campaign in 1988, and was dominated by the conservative National Renewal (RN) and Independent Democratic Union (UDI) parties. A centre-left alliance backed the successful ‘No’ campaign, and was centred around the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), the Socialist Party (PS), and the newly founded Party for Democracy (PPD), plus several minor parties. In the founding presidential election of December 1989, the former coalition

16 The 2014 elections produced a raw number of 28 legislative parties and an effective number of 13.2, the highest ENP among democracies.

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continued under the name Democracy and Progress (later known as the Alianza),17 while the latter became known as the Concertación por la Democracia and went on to elect the first four democratic presidents (Patricio Aylwin of the PDC in 1989, Eduardo Frei of the PDC in 1993, Ricardo Lagos of the PPD in 2000, and Michelle Bachelet of the PS in 2006).18 The first alternation in power did not occur until 2010, when conservative businessman Sebastián Piñera was elected for the rightist alliance. Piñera’s victory failed to produce a lasting realignment, however, as former president Bachelet returned to office in 2013 with a resounding 62 per cent of the vote.19 The Pinochet-era constitution of 1980 gave a helping hand to the political right during the early years of Chilean democracy. The unusual ‘binomial’ electoral system, with a district magnitude of two and where the second-placed coalition nearly always wins one of the two seats at stake, overrepresented the Alianza in the lower house (Siavelis 2000). Also, prior to a 2005 reform, the presence of nine unelected senators artificially boosted the voting power of the Alianza in the upper chamber. Yet the Concertación’s generally strong electoral performance provided legislative mandates for the first four presidents, and the alternation in power of 2010 gave the right a plurality of lower house seats for the first time. Chile has a tradition of robust multipartism dating back over a century, and over the past decade it has consistently had the second highest ENP in Latin America, after Brazil. Although in the first six electoral cycles after military rule, the nominal party of the president won, on average, only about 24 per cent of lower house seats (with a range of 8 per cent to 42 per cent) in no case was this a major obstacle to governability. The reason for this is the astoundingly consistent nature of coalitional politics in Chile, wherein stable alliances nominate presidential candidates and then supply their portfolio coalitions in office. As our field director in Chile put it succinctly: ‘In Chile, presidents do not make coalitions: coalitions make presidents.’20 This key difference from other cases, 17 The right-wing alliance has used various names over the years, including Union for the Progress of Chile, Union for Chile, and Coalition for Change. In 2013 it reverted to its most frequent name, Alianza. Also in 2013, the Concertación renamed itself Nueva Mayoría (New Majority), adding the Communist Party which had previously remained outside the Concertación but opted to endorse Bachelet in her second bid for the presidency. For consistency, we will refer to the two historic coalitions as the Alianza and Concertación throughout. 18 The first postauthoritarian president, Patricio Aylwin, served only a four-year term due to transitional provisions in the Pinochet-era constitution. The term then reverted to the traditional six years, but was later reduced to four years by a 2005 reform. 19 Unlike post-1997 Brazil and post-2008 Ecuador, Chile does not permit consecutive reelection of presidents. 20 We are grateful to Germán Bidegain Ponte for insisting on this point.

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combined with the presence of highly disciplined and programmatic parties, affords us interesting contextual variation. We chose this case with a view to discovering whether prefabricated coalitions affect the way in which Chilean executives deploy coalition management strategies.

THE S TRENGTHS AND L IMITATIONS OF CR O SS - R EG I ON AL A NA LY SI S With regard to our case selection, we do not claim that Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine are somehow perfectly representative of the universe of coalitional presidential regimes across the world. Given the many moving parts to this strategy of presidential governance, we doubt that a wholly satisfactory sample could ever be drawn. Instead, our objective in this book is to clarify the parameters of coalitional presidentialism and to investigate its dynamics while varying (a) the size of the challenge facing presidents seeking to build a legislative coalition, (b) levels of democratic experience and practice, and (c) important and enduring regional contexts. We do not endeavour to make consistent comparisons on the same variables at every point in the narrative. Rather, we intend to make use of different combinations of our nine cases depending on the independent and dependent variables that we wish to vary, and the quality of the data available for each case. As the reader will soon note, our N could be perceived as three (regions), nine (countries), 33 (presidents), 42 (presidential terms), or 51 episodes of coalitional presidentialism, depending on the value-added of the comparisons we wish to make (for the full range of cases, see Table 3.2 in Chapter 3). While our small-N comparative approach permits the consideration of such rich region-specific factors, it is sensitive to the availability of data that are comparable. There is a significant asymmetry of data supply across the three regions. Much of the legislative data available (often electronically) to scholars of Latin America is not accessible for many of our African or post-Soviet legislatures. To address these challenges in this book we use a combination of data sources: quantitative information on coalition membership and cabinet composition; surveys of MPs, and case-study analysis. These data and their availability are explained in the appendix to the present chapter. The problems of data availability may partly explain why there is no comprehensive cross-regional study of coalitional presidentialism. The extant research is region- and country-specific: it has focused heavily on Latin America and Brazil in particular. By putting Latin American cases into an

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active dialogue with comparable cases from Africa and the former Soviet Union we are able to explore whether the propositional inventory developed in Latin America is truly portable. Therefore cross-regional analysis is crucial for concept development. In this book, we engage with a number of assumptions that underpin much of the extant literature on coalitional presidentialism in Latin America. The first is the definition of coalitions, which tends to focus on the composition of cabinets: so-called portfolio coalitions. We explore whether this definition of coalitions may be too restrictive for comparative analysis. As discussed in Chapter 1, the nature of minority presidentialism in Africa and the former Soviet Union suggests that coalitions are broader than just party alliances in executive cabinets. Rather, coalitions take the form of broader pro-presidential alliances on the floor of assemblies. Second, although institutional variation matters for the nature of coalition management in Africa and the former Soviet Union, legislative context and contingency are also likely to play a key role. Based on our knowledge of legislative politics in these regions, we expect to find as much variation between different presidential coalitions operating within the same country as we do between different countries in our small-N sample. Third, the extant literature makes assumptions about the degree of party system institutionalization, and the extent to which the programmatic motivation of political parties influences executive–legislative relations. We expect the importance of programmatic party politics to be more apparent when we test coalitional theories in countries where multiparty politics was reintroduced relatively

Table 2.2. Survey sample for MP interviews, 2012–15 Country

Chamber

Size

Category

N interviews

N as %

Armenia

Unicameral

131

Benin

Unicameral

83

Small

36

27

Small

30

Brazil

Lower

36

513

Large

50

Chile

10

Lower

120

Small

30

25

Ecuador

Unicameral

124

Small

31

25

Kenya

Unicameral

210

Intermediate

40

19

Malawi

Unicameral

193

Intermediate

40

21

Russia

Lower

450

Large

50

11

Ukraine

Unicameral

450

Large

50

11

Source: CPP Pooled Survey Data (N = 357). The size of the Kenyan National Assembly excludes appointed MPs, which were not included in the survey.

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recently and in which parties remain weak and particularistic, as in several of our African and post-Soviet cases. By exploring these assumptions through cross-regional analysis, we intend to clarify the conceptual parameters of coalitional presidentialism. In Chapters 3 and 4 we present the key concepts that we explore in the remainder of the book.

APPE NDIX: D ATA USED I N T HIS S TUDY Most of the data used in this book are available from data sets that we deposited with the UK Data Archive: reference number 10.5255/UKDA-SN852003.21 These data from the Coalitional Presidentialism Project (CPP) consist of two main types. First, coalition and cabinet membership data, which are organized on a month-by-month basis. These data cover episodes of coalitional presidentialism and cabinet composition for which complete monthly data were available. Throughout the following chapters all coalitional and cabinet data available from the UK Data Archive are referenced as ‘CPP Coalition and Legislation Data’. Second, we draw heavily on survey data gathered from interviews with 357 MPs across all of our country cases. Our sample was weighted according to the size of each country’s legislature (see Table 2.2); within-country samples were split 60–40 between coalition members and opposition members, with the selection of MPs reflecting the proportional share of parties within both the coalition and opposition blocs. In some cases, MPs were interviewed about historical cases of coalitional presidentialism. For example, our Russian sample only included MPs who had served in the Third Duma (2000–03) during Vladimir Putin’s first term, the final period in which Russia meets our democracy criteria; in Ecuador, given the large number of freshmen legislators in the Correa era, we had to modify our sample in order to leverage the insights of ex-deputies who had served under the pre-2006 minority presidents. Our interview questionnaire is reproduced in Appendix A. Our survey data are referenced throughout the book in two ways. First, quantitative data from structured questions are referenced according to the survey item being reported (e.g. ‘CPP survey item B7’). These data are deposited in the file entitled ‘CPP Pooled Survey Data’ in the UK Data Archive. Second, quotations from interviewees taken from their verbatim 21

http://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/852003/ (accessed 10 January 2017).

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responses to semi-structured interview questions are cited with a reference code, which refers to interview transcripts that are also deposited with the UK Data Archive. The code for each interviewee lists their country case and number within the interview sequence: e.g. BRA32 corresponds to interview 32 for Brazil. The country codes are incorporated from the schema used by the United Nations (ISO 3166 standard): ARM (Armenia), BEN (Benin), BRA (Brazil), CHL (Chile), ECU (Ecuador), KEN (Kenya), MWI (Malawi), RUS (Russia), and UKR (Ukraine).

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3

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The Embedded Costs of Power Sharing Coalition Formation in Multiparty Presidentialism

I NT R O D UC T IO N When presidential parties fail to gain a legislative majority, presidents can respond in one of two main ways: they may attempt to govern through durable coalitions with other parties, or they may try to form shifting legislative alliances on each sequential policy issue. This book focuses on the first of these strategies. This is what we mean by coalitional presidentialism, and in later chapters we analyse the tools that presidents use to maintain their coalitions. In the present chapter, we identify the determinants of coalition formation in presidential systems, and we explain how particular features of presidential coalitions on Day One of a new legislative term (e.g. their size, fairness, and heterogeneity) represent embedded costs that pose ongoing operational challenges to formateurs. Legislative or floor coalitions, as we defined them in Chapter 1, have three important advantages that make them very attractive to presidents. First, they generally make legislative support more consistent and predictable. Even if floor coalitions cannot be counted upon to return perfect discipline, their very existence, shape, and size convey important baseline information to formateurs, thus rendering it easier for presidents to plan and implement a legislative agenda across time. Second, coalitions typically require constituent parties to support agreed government policy—even in cases where it runs counter to their preferred policy position—thus generating support for executive proposals that might otherwise have floundered in the legislature. Third, forming a coalition with parties that can be relied upon to deliver bloc votes saves the president from investing the considerable time, resources, and energy that would be required to rally an ad hoc majority around each particular issue. This might seem a trivial observation, but when legislatures are dealing with hundreds or thousands of proposals per year, the existence of a definable bloc of interparty support has a significant impact on the capacity of presidents to manage their legislative agendas.

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Apart from legislation, a durable pro-presidential coalition may also bring a variety of other benefits, both offensive and defensive. An effective coalition may confer the image of strength and legitimacy on a president, boosting his position both inside and outside of the assembly (Opalo 2011). Workable alliances can take on deterrent or protective functions as well. Pro-presidential coalitions may be called upon to block policy initiatives that the president perceives as undesirable. Coalitions may also neutralize efforts by opposition parties to strengthen parliamentary oversight, or, in extreme cases, serve as a ‘legislative shield’ to defend the president from censure or impeachment (PérezLiñán 2007). Given this range of benefits, it is unsurprising that minority presidents try to make friends. Yet however advantageous it may seem to minority presidents, coalition formation does not come without costs. Coalitions require formateurs to give away executive power, because other parties typically demand cabinet representation or other state offices in return for their participation in government. Forming a coalition requires presidents to make at least some compromise on policy priorities and the legislative agenda, because few parties are willing to remain in coalitions in which they enjoy no policy influence at all. Herein lies a perplexing trade-off with no easy solution. Presidents engaging in coalition formation aim to secure the maximum possible legislative control in return for giving away as little executive power and policy influence as possible. For their part, rival parties seek to maximize the pound of flesh that they can extract in return for joining the president’s coalition. When forming their first coalition, which we refer to here as the Day One coalition, presidents are empowered by their status as the gatekeeper of executive power and influence, but their choices are almost always constrained. Some parties may be historically close to the president’s party, have campaigned for his or her election, and have been promised a seat at the table of government, while others may be rivals for executive office. Presidents also have to think hard about the kind of coalition they wish to build. Is it better to foster a coalition that is extremely large and thus able to both effect constitutional changes and cope with defections, even though such an alliance is likely to prove unwieldy? Or is it preferable to build a coalition that is sleek and manageable, even though it is more susceptible to being outvoted on the assembly floor? These foundational choices depend not only on the legislative context and the president’s relationship to the formateur party, but also on their vision of what can realistically be achieved in a fixed term of office. This chapter seeks to illuminate the factors that shape formation decisions and their later consequences for coalition management. In the first section, we necessarily engage with a vast literature on coalition formation under parliamentary systems, but we show that fundamental differences between

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parliamentary and presidential regimes require us to rethink some of the classic propositions of coalitional theory. The separate origin and survival of the executive and legislative branches under presidentialism, in combination with the availability of ministers who do not have to be drawn from the assembly, confers greater flexibility on presidents than on prime ministers. Simply put, presidential discretion matters. The greater latitude enjoyed by formateurs under presidentialism makes theory building difficult, but not impossible. In the second section of this chapter, we argue that the choices facing presidents are conditioned by two types of causal variables, which we describe as distal (background) factors and proximal (conjunctural) factors, respectively. Our distal factors include the varying roles played by the party system, constitutional rules, and the electoral cycle. Our proximal factors focus on concrete electoral outcomes, i.e. the actual results of presidential and legislative elections. We conclude the chapter by reviewing actual coalitional outcomes. The effects of distal and proximate factors are considered along three dimensions: the size, fairness, and heterogeneity of Day One presidential coalitions. These coalitional characteristics are the embedded costs of the formation process, and we discuss their impact on the operational challenges that face presidents on Day One. These sunk costs figure prominently in the framework that we will use to analyse coalitional management strategies in subsequent chapters.

TH E O R IE S O F C O A L I TI O N F O RM A T I O N The literature on coalition formation has focused overwhelmingly on parliamentary regimes. The unit of analysis is almost always cabinet coalitions—i.e. ‘governments’ in parliamentary parlance. The objectives of this literature have typically been twofold: first, to describe and classify the types of coalitions we see in the real world, and second, to explain the birth, life, and death of these same coalitions. Here we attempt a brief summary of what is undoubtedly one of the largest specialized literatures in comparative politics. Arguments Originating in Parliamentary Systems. With regard to classification of coalitions, it is commonplace to use a tripartite typology of minimal winning coalitions (the smallest set of actors that can secure control of a parliament, e.g. with 51 per cent of the seats), oversized coalitions (coalitions containing one or more surplus parties), and minority coalitions. Lijphart’s analysis of 31 parliamentary regimes between 1945 and 2010 showed that of the total time that coalition governments were in place, the configuration was a

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minimal winning cabinet about 47 per cent of the time, an oversized cabinet about 39 per cent of the time, and a minority coalition cabinet about 14 per cent of the time (Lijphart 2012: 87).1 As can readily be seen, this conventional typology assumes that coalitions differ mainly in their size and shape, rather than in their ideological breadth or cohesion. Yet size-driven typologies have frequently been modified to incorporate ideology or policy preferences. Axelrod (1970), for example, classified coalitions according to whether the member parties are ideologically adjacent (‘connected’) or whether they are noncontiguous within the policy space of their party system.2 The range of the coalition from its leftmost to its rightmost member (or an analogous distance on some other salient dimension) is assumed to be a meaningful measure of coalitional homogeneity and therefore viability. With regard to coalitional behaviour, students of parliamentarism are generally interested in three different dependent variables: formation, duration, and termination of governments. To simplify our later comparisons to presidential regimes, here we focus on formation. As Laver (1998) observes, there is a clear bifurcation in the literature between scholars who attempt to predict coalition formation on logical grounds alone—that is, by relying on stylized a priori assumptions, as in game theory—and those who engage in direct empirical observation of actors and their choices. A key example of the former (a priori) approach is the classic contribution by Riker (1962), who assumes that parties are utility maximizers that will resist the inclusion of any party beyond those needed for a minimal winning coalition. An example of the latter (empirical) approach is the observational study by Budge and Keman (1990), which first documents that parties often hold attachments to specific portfolios (e.g. the Agrarian Party prefers to hold the Agriculture Ministry above all others), then goes on to show that these enduring attachments can lead to bargaining behaviour that violates the size or threshold assumptions of rational choice theory. 1

There were of course minimal winning one-party cabinets and minority one-party cabinets in Lijphart’s parliamentary sample (Lijphart 2012; see table 6.1, p. 87), but these are excluded from our calculations here, which show only coalition governments. 2 In the coalition literature, policy preferences have often been used interchangeably with party location in a one-dimensional ideological (left-right) space. This is because until recently, even in the advanced western European literature, it was difficult to obtain estimates of party positions, other than by assigning them to intuitively traditional European party families (see Laver 1998 for a discussion). European research has improved with the Comparative Manifestos Project and expert party placement surveys such as the one by Benoit and Laver (2006). However, the lack of reliable ideological estimates for parties remains a severe obstacle to research in most of the countries included in this book.

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The empirical methodological tradition gained ground with the ‘new institutionalism’ of the 1980s and 1990s, which sought to explain why the older predictions of minimal winning coalition theory were so poorly supported. These more recent models have looked for answers in the interior design of parliamentary democracy—which can vary greatly from system to system— emphasizing variables such as formateur powers, decision-making sequences, agenda control, negotiation timing, reversionary outcomes, procedures for votes of investiture and of no confidence, and the allocation of policy jurisdictions to cabinet portfolios (see reviews in Laver 1998; Martin and Stevenson 2001). Taking institutions seriously revised some early propositions. For example, Riker (1962: 88) had explained oversized coalitions (which were at odds with his minimal winning assumptions) on purely logical grounds, claiming that surplus parties were functionally necessary in some cases to protect against likely defections. In contrast, a later neo-institutionalist hypothesis advanced by Lijphart is much more concrete: oversized coalitions can be explained by the presence of supermajoritarian requirements for constitutional amendments. ‘If the policy agenda of a new cabinet includes one or more important amendments to the constitution, any special majorities required for this purpose are likely to broaden the composition of the cabinet’ (Lijphart 2012: 91–2).3 Of course, whether surplus parties exist as an insurance policy against defections or as building blocks of a supermajority is an empirical question, the answer to which will likely vary across cases (for additional hypotheses, see Volden and Carrubba 2004). As the literature on government formation developed, it became better informed by the parallel literature on comparative political parties. Scholars made wildly divergent assumptions about the motivations of the main actors in coalition formation, i.e. parties. What do parties want? Strøm’s (1990b) classic article highlighted three different approaches to this basic question (see also Mueller and Strøm 1999). The early contribution of Downs (1957) gave us the ‘vote-seeking’ party, in which the main objective of parties is not simply to win elections but also to maximize their votes. The coalition behaviour of vote-seeking parties should therefore be predicted by electoral concerns. The subsequent work of Riker (1962) depicted an alternative model, that of the ‘office-seeking party,’ in which the main objective of parties is to participate in Martin and Vanberg (2011: 58) claim that ‘constitutional amendments are generally subject to super-majority requirements that require support beyond the parties included in the coalition’ (italics in original). While this is probably accurate in most cases, our research on Brazil shows that recent presidents have formed coalitions exceeding the three-fifths supermajority necessary for constitutional amendments; if their support parties were fully disciplined, they would not need to reach outside the coalition at all. 3

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government. The coalition behaviour of office-seeking parties is to maximize their cabinet portfolios and to share the cabinet with as few partners as possible—hence the oft-quoted prediction of minimal winning coalitions. Finally, De Swaan (1973) developed the model of the ‘policy-seeking’ party, which aims to maximize its influence over public policy. As Strøm notes, the image of a policy-seeking party was something of an antidote to Downs and Riker, emerging ‘in response to the “policy-blind” axioms of the first generation of game theoretic studies of government formation’ (Strøm 1990b: 567). The contribution of Strøm’s article was its synthetic perspective: rather than claiming that any one of these models held the ‘correct’ solution to party motivations, he showed that parties in competitive political systems often pursue all three objectives—votes, offices, and policy—simultaneously, and that the main challenge to political parties is how to manage the tradeoffs among these goals. For example, vote-seeking Party A may quit an unpopular government if it believes that remaining in coalition will harm its chances at the next election; conversely, office-seeking Party B may remain loyal to an unpopular government through thick and thin. But making small modifications to these assumptions will quickly highlight difficult tradeoffs. Party A, although generally vote-seeking, could decide to remain in coalition longer if it believes that the government will enact that one signature policy it has long advocated; Party B, although deeply invested in its cabinet portfolios, might conclude from opinion polls that disaster lurks at the next general election, and thus abandon ship. Meanwhile, policy-seeking Party C has a solidly programmatic reputation: it should be expected to participate only in coalitions that are ideologically connected and that feature like-minded parties. Yet if given a credible offer to logroll and thus approve some key policy objectives, Party C might choose to enter a heterogeneous coalition under the right conditions. The contingency inherent in these assumptions explains why we frequently observe outcomes— such as minority governments or oversized coalitions—that were not well predicted by early game-theoretic models. The insight that actors have competing and sometimes unresolvable preferences is meaningful: parties cannot always be neatly assigned to the categories of vote-seeking, office-seeking, or policy-seeking. When we combine the attributes of coalitions (the characteristics of the participating parties) together with institutional context and external shocks (disruptive events), we can see that there is considerable room for noise in coalitional politics, even in the supposedly tidy world of parliamentary systems. Taking the Arguments to Presidential Systems. As noted above, all of the classic theories of coalition formation were developed in the context of parliamentary

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systems. Coalitional politics in presidential regimes has received far less attention in the literature. This lesser attention is not surprising given that the most frequently studied presidential system (that of the United States) features single-party cabinets, and given that until the Third Wave of democratization relatively few examples of multiparty presidential democracies existed as sources for building theory. However, even though scholars have become more cognizant of the significance of coalitional presidentialism in recent years (see Chapter 1), several theoretical factors militate against a direct translation of the coalitional politics literature to the context of presidentialism. With regard to the origins and purposes of coalitions, the first and most obvious difference between presidentialism and parliamentarism is that in presidentialism, the survival of the government in office is not contingent on assembly confidence. Lijphart (2012) has developed this point in a compelling way, arguing that the purposes of coalitions differ fundamentally across the two systems. In parliamentary systems, coalitions have two purposes: (1) they permit the government to stay in office, and (2) they approve legislation. In separation of powers systems, the first function is unnecessary, so coalitions are reduced to one purpose: to control legislation so that it is enacted in the interest of the executive (Lijphart 2012: 93–4). We argued earlier that this onepurpose assumption is not borne out 100 per cent of the time, given that coalitions can also serve defensive or deterrent purposes in executive– legislative relations, or may also assume legitimation functions in new or threatened democracies. Yet Lijphart’s verdict is nonetheless persuasive for the great majority of cases, and we are interested here in simplifying reality. A second key difference between presidentialism and parliamentarism concerns the nature of the executive itself. As Lijphart argues, parliamentary governments are based on the notion of a collegial executive in which the parties are participants with approximately equal standing. Although prime ministerial office in some systems (notably the United Kingdom) has assumed some presidential attributes in recent decades (Poguntke and Webb 2005), it is nonetheless the case that parties remain highly salient actors. Moreover, the notion of collective responsibility under parliamentarism generates incentives for more horizontal patterns of authority relations within parties; these incentives reduce, if not eliminate, the risk of personalistic party capture (Samuels and Shugart 2010). In contrast, presidentialism features a unipersonal executive: ‘executive power is concentrated in the president, and his or her cabinet consists of advisers to the president instead of more or less coequal participants’ (Lijphart 2012: 94). This seemingly innocuous observation has several important implications. First, except in those rare cases where the president is an independent, the

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party of the president is by definition the formateur party and can be expected to dominate the process of government formation. Second, other things being equal, the personal authority of the president over his own party is typically greater than the equivalent autonomy of a prime minister vis-à-vis his or her own party (Samuels and Shugart 2010). The president generally enjoys impressive personal discretion in composing a cabinet: although he or she must take into account the preferences of coalition parties, the bargaining power of party leaders is much lower than in parliamentarism—they cannot simply exchange the elected president for a more pliant negotiator, and the government can begin operations without their consent. The president’s personal vision of the size and shape of the coalition is therefore critical: while it may not prevail in every case, it is always a strong opening bid in coalitional negotiations. Third, presidents are at liberty to reach outside of the legislature and even outside of the party system in order to select their ministers. The ability to invite technocrats and non-partisans to assume ministerial portfolios is one of the most important discretionary powers of presidents, and it is largely at odds with the party-centric world of traditional (i.e. western European parliamentary) coalitional theory. We should expect this power to introduce significant noise into theory building about coalitional presidentialism (Amorim Neto 2006). A final relevant difference between presidentialism and parliamentarism concerns the time horizons of the main actors. One of the definitional characteristics of presidentialism is a fixed term in office. Executives always know exactly when the next election will be, and so do legislators. This is not always true under parliamentarism, where confidence votes and dissolution powers introduce an element of temporal uncertainty. Given the well-known temporal effects of presidential government, i.e. ‘honeymoon’ and ‘lame-duck’ effects affecting the incumbent executive, we should expect the preferences and behaviour of coalitional partners to vary over time. Altman (2000) has connected this (presidential) temporal insight to Strøm’s (parliamentary) observations about the competing goals of parties as being votes, offices, and policy. According to Altman, under presidentialism ‘party leaders shift their immediate goals over the course of each presidential term. At the outset, they are preoccupied with spoils and policy rewards . . . [but] near the end of the term, the closer the election, then vote-maximization becomes more important’ (Altman 2000: 264). Parties, therefore, are moving targets in the eyes of the president. With these important differences in mind, we now consider the factors that shape presidential choices of coalition partners on Day One of a new legislative term.

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Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective D E T E R M IN A N T S O F C OA L I T I ON F O R MA TI O N : DISTAL AND P ROXIMAL F ACTORS

While almost all minority presidents will make attempts to broaden their base of legislative support in advance of Day One, they do not do so in a vacuum. Presidents are subject to the influence of constitutional and institutional constraints that are embedded in their respective political systems: we refer to these as the distal, or background, factors that shape coalition formation. Formateurs also act at a specific moment of interbranch relations, i.e. they are constrained by the prevailing configuration of mandates, parties, and seats. Electoral outcomes and legislative seat distributions shape the ‘market’ of coalition formation. These short-term forces of supply and demand are the proximal or conjunctural factors that act upon presidential choice. Before considering these proximal determinants, we first emphasize three types of distal factors. First, factors that are associated with the diverse nature and size of legislative parties; second, factors that derive from the specific constitutional and institutional arrangements that are practised under different presidential formats; and, third, factors that are a consequence of electoral dynamics peculiar to presidentialism. Legislative Parties. Although the extant literature leads us to expect that presidents will exercise greater freedom from political parties when forming coalitions than their prime ministerial counterparts—by virtue of their independent institutional power as formateurs of government coalitions (Altman 2000: 260), and their distinctive electoral relationships with voters (Samuels and Shugart 2010)—parties still provide the main means of constructing presidential coalitions. Even in those presidential systems where large numbers of legislators take office as non-partisans, MPs often band together into legislative party caucuses, becoming the de facto interlocutors in dealings with the executive. As discussed, the parliamentary literature in part analyses coalition formation in terms of bargaining between chief executives and legislative party leaders over policy concessions. This assumption about the motivation for coalition formation is equally appropriate for presidents. In this book we contend that presidents form coalitions in order to achieve their policy goals through the legislature. However, the extent to which the policy rationale motivates their coalitional interlocutors—legislative party leaders—appears to vary widely within and across party systems in presidential polities. The degree to which parties pursue ideologically consistent policy programmes is less ingrained in presidential systems (Kellam 2015). This is for institutional reasons. As Samuels and Shugart (2010) argue, the need for

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presidential candidates to appeal to a majority of the voting public strengthens their independence from narrow party programmes. It is also reinforced by structural conditions, in particular the level of party system institutionalization, which tends to be lower in Third Wave presidential systems (Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Mainwaring and Torcal 2006). Although party system institutionalization is not conceptually the same thing as programmatic politics (party systems can become more stable without necessarily making more policy-based appeals to voters), most comparative work has concluded that party system consolidation is an important driver of programmatic linkages (International IDEA 2014). Consequently, the bargaining relationship between presidents and their coalition partners is likely to be affected by differences in the magnitude of party system institutionalization. Within the presidential systems that we cover, party system institutionalization is relatively more developed in the three Latin American cases (with the notable exception of pre-Correa Ecuador) than in the post-Soviet or sub-Saharan African cases. Our Latin American cases provide frequent examples of presidents who form coalitions from parties that are ideologically proximate.4 Successive Chilean presidents, for instance, have consistently formed programmatic, connected coalitions since the transition to democracy. This was clearly explained by one MP interviewed for this book when describing the moment when the rightist Coalition for Change (Coalición por el Cambio, 2009–12) was formed: [The Coalition for Change] has its origins in the Yes or No referendum of October 1988.5 It is the Yes coalition. Efforts to extend the coalition [since then] are not that significant. These are the same parties; the same heritage . . . It is the RN–UDI6 alliance with a different name. (CHL 03)

When such long-standing party alliances exist, the identifiability of potential coalitions is very high. In Chile, as we noted in the previous chapter, coalitions make presidents, not the other way around. This dynamic greatly simplifies the president’s role as formateur. The main post-electoral task facing Chilean presidents is the attraction of sufficient numbers of smaller parties and independent legislators to pass controversial bills or to form supermajorities for constitutional reform. Coalitional continuity across

Other research on coalitional presidentialism in Latin America also finds evidence of the significance of ideological factors. For instance, Altman finds ideological affinity to be a significant determinant of the inclusion of parties in electoral coalitions in Uruguay (2000: 271). 5 On the question of extending General Augusto Pinochet’s presidency until 1997. 6 The National Renewal (Renovación Nacional) and Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente) parties formed an alliance in support of Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite. 4

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presidents is also not unknown in other Latin American systems, such as Colombia, El Salvador, and Uruguay. In the Brazilian case, for instance, Dilma Rousseff largely inherited party alliances from her predecessor and former party leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. As a member of Dilma’s first coalition remarked: The coalition was actually a continuation of what already existed in the previous term . . . the core of this coalition originates from the formation of Lula’s previous administration, before even Dilma became a candidate. (BRA06)

However, political systems that have lower levels of party system institutionalization are more likely to produce outsider presidents—presidents who are independent of parties, or who represent new parties (Doyle 2011; Carreras 2012). In these presidential systems, coalitions are less likely to centre on ideological or long-standing party alliances. Instead, presidents form coalitions that are particularistic in profile: they offer a wider variety of extra-policy benefits to their coalition partners, such as the spoils of office and electoral support. An example of this was the coalition formed in 2003 by Armenia’s President Robert Kocharyan. Kocharyan, who was not a member of any party, created a coalition between the allied Republican Party and two parties that lacked clear ideological common ground: the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the Rule of Law Party. As one MP remarked: The coalition in 2003 was formed by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation [and the] Rule of Law Party . . . I do not think there was any political motivation. They were simply interested in grabbing cabinet positions. . . . Ideationally they did not have any common ground. Ideologically the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the Rule of Law Party were worlds apart like the swan, crab and shark,7 but they were after ministerial portfolios, [legislative] committee chairmanship, deputy minister or governor posts, etc. They wanted that and they went for it . . . They just needed the positions and appointments to make sure they got re-elected in the next elections. And life showed that they were right. (ARM10)

At the other extreme are presidents who have the backing of parties that dominate their coalitions. With such support, presidents are less likely to be constrained by the need to trade programmatic benefits. Although established formateur parties can have a programmatic base to their authority, they typically draw on other sources of legitimacy: clientelist networks and, in some cases, the charismatic appeal of their leaders. However, when presidents is enhanced whenever the formateur party tends toward greater discipline. When presidents cannot rely upon the disciplined support of their party or 7 The MP makes reference to a Russian fairy tale by Ivan Krylov entitled ‘The Swan, The Pike and The Crab’, in which the three creatures cannot agree and pull in different directions.

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face internal party rivals, they may seek to widen their coalitional base as an insurance policy, regardless of the baseline size of the formateur party. Institutional Rules. Institutional rules also shape the discretion of presidents over coalition formation. The most significant rules fall into two categories. First, rules that define the legislative powers of the president. These have a bearing on the willingness of presidents to share power in the first place. Second, rules concerning the constitutional powers of the president over the assembly’s survival, as well as rules affecting coalition construction—in particular rules that shape party organization within the assembly. These factors have a bearing not only on the resources that presidents use to form coalitions, but also on the timing of their formation. Regarding the legislative powers of presidents, scholars of Latin American politics have identified an important connection between the magnitude of presidential legislative power and the initial willingness of presidents to form coalitions (Amorim Neto 2002, 2006). As the power of presidents to legislate independently of the assembly increases (e.g. through presidential decrees) presidents may opt, it is argued, to legislate unilaterally through decrees rather than base their legislative strategies on coalition bargaining—especially if their own policy preferences (and those of the assembly median) are distant from the policy status quo (Cheibub et al. 2004). In such cases, presidents may prefer to work with a loyal minority in the assembly. Such minorities serve as a block on any attempts by assemblies to override presidential vetoes of legislative enactments that challenge the legislative preferences of presidents. Thus, presidential veto powers work in combination with decrees to maintain executive dominance. This explanation for the existence of minority coalitions travels well to the former Soviet Union, where presidents enjoy the proactive and reactive legislative powers of their counterparts in Latin America. For example, the half-hearted efforts by Russian President Boris Yeltsin to form a majority cross-party coalition during his second term (1996–9) can largely be explained by his ability to manage the Duma via constitutional powers. In a number of cases, presidents also enjoy powers normally associated with chief executives in parliamentary systems. The most important of these is the power to dissolve assemblies when MPs cannot form governments or sustain confidence in them. Like the heads of state in parliamentary systems, this power gives presidents significant in-built institutional leverage over coalition formation. As explained in Chapter 2, we focus on such ‘semi’ presidential systems when the president is the principal formateur, as in the president-parliamentary

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systems of the former Soviet Union. Like the British monarch, the Kyrgyz president, for instance, has the power to select the party that would lead the negotiations over formation of a government in the event that no party secures an overall majority.8 Given the highly fractionalized nature of the Kyrgyz political system, this means that in practice the president typically plays the decisive role in coalition formation. Dissolution powers have also been used by post-Soviet presidents to expedite coalition formation. In Armenia, for example, President Kocharyan used this power to force the creation of the first parliamentary coalition of his presidency, which was formed midway through his first term in 2000. Lower-level rules regulating the organization and discipline of political parties also affect coalition formation. For instance, permissive rules concerning the ability of MPs to switch parties—or even join more than one party organization within the assembly—can be exploited by presidents who seek to entice MPs from opposition parties to join their coalitions. The selective inducement of party defections can be expedient for presidents who have slender and ill-disciplined majorities. The presidency of Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14) provides one example of the use of such rules. Yanukovych’s ability to form a majority in 2010 was greatly enhanced by a legislative amendment that removed the power of parties to prohibit party switching by MPs. As a result, Yanukovych was able to lure MPs from opposition parties to join his coalition by a variety of means. It was alleged, for instance, that Yanukoyich used informal methods of persuasion—either monetary or in-kind—to attract particularistic deputies (so-called tushky9) who had previously backed Yanukovych’s main presidential opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko. As one MP explained: The amended rules opened up the possibility for deputies to switch from one faction to another . . . Thereafter, coalitions began to be formed through the system of tushky. (UKR18)

Similarly, rules intended to deter party switching in Malawi have been undermined by presidents for coalitional purposes (Patel and Tostensen 2006: 10). Electoral Dynamics. Our third and final distal factor is the electoral process, which almost invariably plays a key role in the formation of coalitions. Elections affect when coalitions form. The timing of formation is complicated 8

This power is set out in Article 84 of the 2010 Kyrgyz Constitution. The authors thank Eugene Huskey for drawing their attention to this provision. 9 This Ukrainian word is variously translated as ‘roadkill’ or ‘carcass’, or in this context ‘political prostitutes’. It refers to opportunistic MPs prepared to sell their support to the highest bidder.

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100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Malawi

Benin

Ecuador Russia Ukraine

Brazil

Armenia

Chile

Kenya

Figure 3.1. Percentage of MPs who agree with the statement ‘The president assembles his coalition during election campaigns’. Source: CPP survey item B7.

by separate presidential and assembly elections, which may operate according to different electoral timetables. Furthermore, the fixed-term nature of presidentialism means that the dynamics of coalition formation can take different forms depending on whether presidents are in their first or second terms. In parliamentary systems, coalitions typically form after elections. There is an institutional rationale for this dynamic. As parties compete for a multitude of electoral contests (N legislative seats), they aim to maximize their later bargaining power, and thus the incentive to coordinate electoral strategy with party competitors is reduced. In presidential systems, only one party can win the main contest—the presidential election—and hence the incentive for cross-party alliances ahead of elections is greater.10 Yet, while pre-electoral coalitions occur frequently in Latin American presidential democracies (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997: 399–401) there is significant variation both intra- and cross-regionally. According to the majority of MPs interviewed for this book, most coalitions form after election day (see Figure 3.1). Only 44 per cent of the legislators who gave valid responses (326 MPs) believed that presidents created their coalitions during the election campaign (CPP survey item B7). Over 80 per cent of Chilean legislators linked 10 In systems with vice-presidencies and in which the vice-presidential candidate does not need to belong to the same party as the president (e.g. Brazil), two parties can claim to be victors in an executive election. However, this does not change the fact that the presidency is the main prize of the political system.

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coalition formation to pre-electoral alliances, but even in Latin America within-region patterns were far from uniform.11 As Figure 3.1 shows, Ecuador had one of the smallest percentages of MPs who identified the importance of pre-election coalitions. The Ecuadorean finding, and those for other regions, may be explained by the frequent use of ballotage, under which coalitions can be formed or modified between the two rounds of the presidential election. In contrast to parliamentary systems, coalitions in presidential systems are not binding, and so governing coalitions can differ significantly from those formed to contest elections (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997: 397). Yet this outcome may also reflect the lower levels of party system institutionalization in many Third Wave presidential systems. The effectiveness of pre-election coalitions hinges on the ability of parties to coordinate their election strategies. This coordination is much more difficult to achieve under conditions of high party volatility. It is also less likely, as Hicken and Stoll (2013) contend, in conditions where presidential power is highly concentrated, as is the case for many of the presidents in our sample. Given that the risks of backing the wrong candidate are potentially so great, it is argued, parties that are trailing behind the two frontrunners are likely to avoid supporting a candidate before election day. However, even in cases of low party system institutionalization, preelectoral coalition formation is not unknown. In Kenya, coalition agreements are not only drawn up prior to polling day, but must be formally deposited with the Registrar of Political Parties, and according to almost all Kenyan MPs (97 per cent)—the largest in our survey—coalitions are indeed formed during the election campaign. In the Kenyan context, the personalized nature of presidential election campaigns also gives frontrunners greater latitude to build cross-party support, and they can benefit from having weak party ties. Contrary to Hicken and Stoll, the high concentration of presidential power creates strong incentives for parties to form pre-electoral coalitions if there is a clear favourite in the election race. Given the many political benefits to be gained from coalition membership when presidential power is highly concentrated, parties appear to play the odds game and align with the likely winner. This situation was also well illustrated by the pre-electoral coalition that was formed by Armenian President Kocharyan in 2003: he was both a non-partisan candidate and the clear favourite to win. Hence in our sample Armenian MPs were the second most likely to identify the importance of pre-electoral Using data from Brazil and Chile, Borges and Turgeon (2017) provide the first evidence that presidential ‘coattails’ in direct elections extend not only to the formateur party but to other parties in the identifiable pre-electoral coalition. 11

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coalitions, despite Armenia’s low level of party institutionalization and high concentration of presidential power.12 The impact of separate electoral contests for presidents and assemblies is further complicated when they are not simultaneous. Nonconcurrent elections increase the probability that presidents will face hostile assemblies, thereby reducing the ability of formateurs to construct coalitions that are disciplined and stable (Shugart 1995; Samuels and Shugart 2010: 146). Moreover, mid-term elections can sometimes entice coalition parties to distance themselves from the executive, forcing presidents to invest significant energy and resources into the formation of new coalitions mid-way through their presidencies. An example of the problems posed by nonconcurrent elections was Brazil’s first directly elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello. Inaugurated in 1990, Collor spent his popular early months dealing with a lame-duck legislature in its fourth year, only to see a very different—and much more fragmented— Congress take office during the hyperinflation of 1991, by which time his honeymoon had long since been forgotten. A similar scenario faced Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma during his second term in office. As a result of midterm parliamentary elections that significantly changed the configuration of the assembly, Kuchma was required to form two very different coalitions in the same presidential term. Presidential systems are distinguished not only by the fixed nature of the electoral cycle, but also by the separate survival of the two branches (Shugart and Carey 1992). With the exception of those president-parliamentary systems referred to above, assemblies that are unable to form governments cannot be dissolved, and legislators cannot remove governments that fail to gain the confidence of the legislative majority. As a consequence there is not the same constitutional urgency to form presidential coalitions immediately after a presidential contest. Thus, presidents have greater discretion over the timing of coalition formation than do their prime ministerial counterparts. Presidents may decide, for instance, to ride on the back of the honeymoon effects of a successful election campaign before conceding power to coalition partners in the assembly (the pattern followed by Brazil’s Collor). In doing so, they do not risk their survival in office. Yet, the fact that many presidents are term-limited—i.e., they cannot seek consecutive reelection, or if they can, they are prevented from serving more than two consecutive terms in office—can create vulnerability as their tenure

12 The Armenian sample was constructed from MPs who had served in the 2003–07 parliament.

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in office wanes. This so-called lame-duck syndrome may compel presidents to search for new coalition partners (as their existing partners peel away in search of the next president) or create new alliances altogether. In the Malawian case, this problem was largely responsible for the creation of a new presidential coalition towards the end of the second term of President Bakili Muluzi. The coalition was formed to give Muluzi the majority that he needed to introduce constitutional changes enabling him to run again.13 As a member of the Malawian coalition at that time explained: We needed two thirds [of the assembly]. With two thirds, we would be in a position to change the constitution in order to allow a third term for the incumbent . . . it was important to have a coalition. (MWI 39)

Proximal Factors: Formateur Party Size and Legislative Fragmentation. While presidential calculations about coalition formation are clearly dependent on the broad party system, and the constitutional and electoral constraints faced by executives, these decisions are also contingent on the immediate mathematics of inter-branch relations—i.e. on the most recent roll of the electoral dice, or the newest realignment of seats on the legislative floor. In contrast to the cross-case variation exhibited by distal factors, which tend to operate at the system-level, proximal factors are conjunctural, and account for within-case variation in coalition formation. Factors like the size of the president’s party and the levels of party fragmentation, which we explore in this section, can vary within single cases over time, and produce important contrasts between the coalitions formed by different presidents within the same political system. These factors, combined with the high decisional autonomy enjoyed by presidents when composing their coalitions, limit the extent to which we can accurately predict patterns of coalition formation at the country level. When forming the Day One coalition, the options available to formateurs are largely shaped by the size of their own party. The more seats the president’s party wins, the better the terms on which he or she will be able to form a coalition. Of course, some minority presidents are elected as independents, and so officially have no party label and no direct connection with any legislative parties. However, in reality such leaders are typically backed by a coalition of parties willing to offer legislative support, and in some cases boast a strong legislative majority. The fact that a president is an independent is therefore a unreliable guide to their legislative strength.

13 However, he still failed to get the backing of the National Assembly in the face of protest (see Chapter 7).

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The terms of the coalition bargain normally includes preferential treatment of the president’s party. This is known as the ‘formateur bonus’, which stems from the additional electoral authority that presidents enjoy. As a result, presidential parties tend to get more than their fair share of the spoils of office. The magnitude of this overcompensation is closely related to the size of the president’s party, although other contextual factors and the idiosyncrasies of presidential leadership can attenuate or exaggerate the size of the bonus. This is well illustrated by the case of Ukraine. When Viktor Yushchenko began his term in office in January 2005, his Our Ukraine party held 22 per cent of the seats in the legislature. Just over five years later, when Yushchenko’s successor, Viktor Yanukovych, began his first term (February 2010), his Party of Regions held almost 40 per cent of the seats in the assembly. Yushchenko’s weak starting point meant that even with five coalition partners he failed to secure an absolute majority, controlling only 45 per cent of the floor. At the same time, despite the relatively small size of Our Ukraine, the party commanded almost half of the seats in the coalition. This share of seats was used by President Yushchenko to justify conferring 70 per cent of cabinet seats on his own party. Under Yanukovych, in contrast, the formateur bonus was less exaggerated, but still apparent. With only two additional parties required to construct a coalition that delivered 52 per cent of the legislature, the dominance of the presidential Party of Regions (73 per cent of the coalition’s seats) translated into around 80 per cent of the cabinet’s portfolios. This was the highest share of cabinet seats taken by any party in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history, but it was more proportional in terms of the party’s share of seats in the coalition. A second conjunctural factor that shapes the balance of power between the president and potential coalition partners is the degree of party fragmentation in the assembly. The extent to which legislative seats are concentrated in the hands of a small number of parties or divided between a great many parties affects the complexity of the bargaining arrangements. Fragmentation is often measured in terms of the effective number of parties (Laakso and Taagepera 1979), a calculation that takes into account the number of political parties but weights them according to their relative size. As the effective number of parties increases so does the likelihood that presidents will need to form more diverse multiparty coalitions. Thus, party fragmentation significantly complicates the bargaining process. It requires pay-offs to each coalition partner, which increases the costs faced by presidents, and leads to oversized coalitions when party discipline is weak. The impact of fragmentation is brought out clearly if we compare the legislative situation facing Mwai Kibaki in Kenya in 2003 and that facing Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in 2010. In each case, the formateur party held around 17 per cent

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of lower house seats. But the distribution of the rest of the legislature was radically different. Although ten parties were elected in Kenya, the vast majority of seats were concentrated in the hands of four parties, which is reflected in an effective number of parties score for the Kenyan assembly of 4.78. By contrast, 23 parties were elected in Brazil and the seats were relatively evenly distributed, with eight parties each taking more than five per cent of the Chamber. Thus, while President Kibaki could rely on the four main parties that had formed his pre-electoral coalition to deliver a clear legislative majority, President Rousseff ’s Day One coalition had to be far broader, and included seven different parties. Although this may seem like an overly unwieldy alliance, it was nothing exceptional by Brazilian standards, where coalitions frequently include more parties than is necessary for a majority in the lower house (Power 2010). In fact, Rousseff ’s coalition was three parties fewer than the coalition put together by her predecessor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for his first term in office in 2007. These two considerations—size of the president’s party and legislative fragmentation—are captured in the Index of Coalitional Necessity introduced in Chapter 2. The impact of electoral mathematics on the formation of the Day One coalition is well illustrated by the tendency for presidents operating under higher levels of coalitional necessity to form broader and more fragmented Day One coalitions. For example, three of the cases with the lowest levels of coalitional necessity—Benin under Boni Yayi Malawi under Muluzi, and Ukraine under Yanukovych—all featured Day One coalitions with an effective number of parties of less than two. By contrast, the highest effective number of parties in a Day One coalition occurred in Brazil, and went hand-in-hand with the highest level of coalitional necessity. So far, we have reviewed both the distal and proximal factors affecting coalition formation. Our distal factors include party systems, constitutional arrangements, and the electoral cycle, while our proximal factors focus on the concrete outcomes of electoral processes—that is, the actual distributions of seats. In the final section of the chapter, we describe 51 episodes of coalitional presidentialism that were shaped by the interaction of both sets of factors. We also consider how the process of coalition formation produced embedded costs that created challenges in terms of coalition maintenance.

C O A L I T I O N F OR M A T I ON O B SER V E D : DAY ONE COALITIONS IN PRACTICE Our main concern in this book is with the substantive composition of coalitions, and how their internal dynamics impact on the strategies that presidents

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use to manage and maintain them. In Chapter 4, we will introduce the ideas that frame this focus. Our framework assumes that the nature of the Day One coalition shapes the coalition management strategies available to presidents. In the remainder of this chapter we examine the characteristics of Day One coalitions that are considered to be the most significant in terms of generating embedded costs to formateurs. Size, Fairness, and Heterogeneity. As already discussed, the literature on coalitions under both parliamentarism and presidentialism has paid special attention to the significance of the size, fairness, and heterogeneity of coalitions. The importance of these factors has been considered mainly in relation to the formation, duration, and termination of government or portfolio coalitions. Nonetheless, the assumptions that underpin this research are equally meaningful in the study of legislative or floor coalitions, and provide a sound basis for deriving a set of expectations about the challenges facing presidents on Day One. The a priori assumption that the size of coalitions is integral to the coalition strategy of the formateur is one of the most debated in legislative studies. As noted earlier in this chapter, the literature has presented competing accounts of the optimal size of coalitions. Much of this empirical work has challenged the Rikerian assumption that utility-maximizing formateurs will always opt for minimal-winning coalitions. However, the baseline assumption that smaller majority coalitions are easier to maintain continues to have a compelling logic. This is centred on the simple theoretical claim that as coalitions grow, so do the bargaining and transaction costs faced by formateurs. It is a claim that has empirical support in emerging research on coalitional presidentialism. Studies of legislative velocity in both Brazil and Russia, for instance, find that decisional delays are positively correlated with coalition size (Hiroi and Rennó 2014; Chaisty 2014). The effects of minimal winning coalitions are also likely to be enhanced by the size of the presidential parties that form them. As the proportion of seats held by presidential parties increases, presidential influence over coalition affairs is also likely to increase. In a narrow winning majority coalition with one dominant presidential party, the president’s control of the legislative agenda gives nonpresidential parties strong incentives to seek the president’s patronage rather than vice versa. Thus, presidents who are supported by minimal winning coalitions and large party support on Day One are likely to face lower costs of coalition management than their counterparts with oversized coalitions and low levels of party support. Our 51 examples of Day One coalitions across the nine country cases provide variance along the size dimension (see Table 3.1). Examples of presidents with minimal Day One coalitions and large party support include Ecuadorean

Table 3.1. Coalition characteristics on Day One: size, fairness, and heterogeneity

Country

Formateur (year of Day One coalition)*

Coalition size (% seats)

Fairness

President’s party (% coalition seats)

Coalescence

Heterogeneity

Balance of pay-offs: non-presidential parties

ENP coalition

Cleavages

Armenia

Ter-Petrossyan II (1996)

61

56

0.27

0.05

3.10

Ideology, business (high)

Armenia

Kocharyan I (2000)*

69

0

0.49

0.02

1.67

Business, region (low-moderate)

Armenia

Kocharyan II (2003)

54

0

0.80

0.32

2.38

Benin

Soglo (1991)

62

0

0.23

0.25

8.83

Business, region (low-moderate) Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Soglo (1995)*

36

70

0.23

0.35

1.19

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Kérékou I (1996)

51

0

0.43

0.05

3.27

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Kérékou I (1999)*

42

0

0.47

0.02

5.08

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Kérékou II (2001)

42

0

0.48

0.07

5.12

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Kérékou II (2003)*

63

60

0.66

0.26

2.50

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Boni Yayi I (2006)

50

0

0.18

0.31

3.88

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Boni Yayi I (2007)*

63

67

0.26

0.16

1.97

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

Benin

Boni Yayi II (2011)

59

84

0.25

0.32

1.41

Ethno-regional (mediumhigh), religious (medium)

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Size

Cardoso I (1995)

76

16

0.45

0.13

3.47

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Brazil

Cardoso II (1999)

80

22

0.70

0.01

4.52

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Brazil

Lula I (2003)

47

22

0.56

0.01

5.00

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Brazil

Lula II (2007)

67

23

0.49

0.04

5.81

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Brazil

Dilma I (2011)

69

21

0.56

0.004

5.19

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Chile

Aylwin (1990)

59

54

0.74

0.99

2.70

Ideology (low)

Chile

Frei (1994)

58

53

0.85

0.60

2.60

Ideology (low)

Chile

Frei (1998)*

58

54

0.89

0.72

2.60

Ideology (low)

Chile

Lagos (2000)

58

23

0.88

0.76

2.70

Ideology (low)

Chile

Lagos (2002)*

52

33

0.87

0.74

3.50

Ideology (low)

Chile

Bachelet (2006)

54

23

0.80

0.42

3.50

Ideology (low)

Chile

Piñera (2010)

48

31

0.42

0.06

1.80

Ideology (low)

Ecuador

Roldós (1979)

67

63

0

0.18

2.20

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Hurtado (1981)

26

67

0.21

0.08

1.80

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Febres-Cordero (1984)

29

43

0.08

0.28

3.22

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high) (continued )

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Brazil

Table 3.1. Continued

Country

Formateur (year of Day One coalition)*

Ecuador

Borja (1988)

Ecuador

Coalition size (% seats)

Fairness

Heterogeneity

President’s party (% coalition seats)

Coalescence

Balance of pay-offs: non-presidential parties

ENP coalition

55

77

0.25

0.24

1.60

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Durán-Ballén (1992)

51

46

0.21

0.27

2.40

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Durán-Ballén (1994)*

57

19

0.25

0.31

2.40

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Bucaram (1996)

61

42

0.13

0.06

2.39

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Mahuad (1998)

57

54

0

0.23

2.31

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Noboa (2000)

56

0

0.06

0.43

2.24

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Gutiérrez (2003)

20

45

0.13

0.27

2.82

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Palacio (2005)

29

0

0

0.50

2.44

Ideology, region, programmatic versus clientelist (high)

Ecuador

Correa I (2007)*

68

91

0.57

0.83

1.22

Ideology (low)

Ecuador

Correa II (2009)

54

84

0.53

0.08

1.41

Ideology (low)

Cleavages

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Size

Kibaki (2002)

59

29

0.85

0.45

3.15

Ethnic (high)

Kenya

Kenyatta (2013)

59

43

0.01

0.19

3.09

Ethnic (high)

Malawi

Muluzi I (1994)*

69

69

0.47

0.58

1.77

Ethno-regional (medium-high)

Malawi

Muluzi II (2003)*

64

76

0.85

0.30

1.59

Ethno-regional (medium-high)

Malawi

Bingu wa Mutharika (2004)

50

51

0.57

2.17

2.33

Ethno-regional (medium)

Russia

Yeltsin I (1994)*

38

0

0.25

0.24

2.70

Regional/business (moderate)

Russia

Yeltsin II (1996)

30

0

0.09

0.40

1.99

Regional/business (moderate)

Russia

Putin I (2001)*

51

36

0.10

0.21

3.75

Regional/business (moderate)

Ukraine

Kuchma I (1994)

50

0

0.36

0.05

8.20

Regional/business (moderate)

Ukraine

Kuchma I (1998)*

41

0

0.17

0.33

3.03

Regional/business (moderate)

Ukraine

Kuchma II (1999)

50

0

0.17

0.19

7.98

Ideological/business (high)

Ukraine

Kuchma II (2002)*

48

0

0.25

0.25

7.90

Business (moderate)

Ukraine

Yushchenko (2005)

45

49

0.44

0.14

3.40

Ideological/business (moderate)

Ukraine

Yanukovych (2010)

52

73

0.84

0.27

1.78

Ideological/business (moderate)

Notes: the balance of pay-offs measure developed by Altman (2000) assumes that 50 per cent of the cabinet seats are taken automatically by the president’s party, and that the remaining 50 per cent of cabinet seats are then distributed to the president’s party and coalition parties in proportion to their share of seats in the coalition. Values reported here are the difference between the prediction of Altman’s theoretical model for pay-offs to non-presidential parties and what those parties actually received. An asterisk (*) denotes Day One coalitions formed after mid-term elections (Kérékou I, Kérékou II, Boni Yayi I, Boni Yayi II, Lagos, Frei, Durán-Ballén, Kuchma I, Kuchma II, Soglo, Yeltsin I) or during a presidential term (Correa I, Putin I, Kocharyan I, Muluzi I, Muluzi II). The terms of those presidents who served more than once are distinguished by Roman numerals. Consecutive appearances in the table by the same president in the same term refers to Day One coalitions formed after mid-term legislative elections: e.g. Soglo (1995), Kérékou I (1999). In qualitative analysis, we occasionally refer to presidential terms that fall outside of these time periods, e.g. Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello (1990–2). Sources: CPP Coalition and Legislation Data, with cleavages in final column estimated by the authors.

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Kenya

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presidents Borja and Correa (second term), Beninois president Boni Yayi (second term), and Ukrainian president Yanukovych. We would expect these formateurs to face fewer problems of coalition management than those who ruled with surplus coalitions and low party support. Examples of the latter include Brazilian presidents Cardoso (second term), Lula da Silva (second term), and Armenian president Kocharyan (first term). In the case of Kocharyan, we also have a formateur who was not formally allied to any one party within his coalition. This was not unusual for post-Soviet presidents during the early years of the transition from communist rule, as also illustrated by the examples of Kuchma and Yeltsin. The coalitions formed by these presidents were clearly ‘high maintenance’. Another feature of Day One coalitions that is considered to have a bearing on the maintenance strategies of the formateur is the fairness of the coalition agreement. Coalition agreements that are deemed to give a fair deal to their participants—i.e., agreements that maximize the pay-offs to coalition members on Day One—are expected to boost the satisfaction levels of coalition partners, and thus are less problematic than agreements that make hardly any concessions to their partners, or skew benefits in favour of certain parties. Scholars writing on Latin America, for instance, have found that presidents who compose their cabinets proportionally can expect higher levels of discipline on the floor and fewer defections (Altman 2000; Amorim Neto 2002, 2006; Raile, Pereira, and Power 2011). To assess the level of fairness on Day One, we use two measures of cabinet pay-offs. The first is ‘cabinet coalescence’ (Amorim Neto 2002, 2006). Built on Gamsonian assumptions,14 this is a measure of proportionality between the size of a coalition party’s legislative seat share and its share of cabinet portfolios. This measure has the advantage of distinguishing between overall levels of proportionality, but it cannot capture the institutional advantages that presidential parties gain from their leader being more than just ‘first among equals’. To address this shortcoming, the second indicator, the ‘balance of payoffs’ measure proposed by David Altman (2000), seeks to account for the fact that presidential parties are typically overrepresented in presidential systems. This measure reserves a share of cabinet posts for the president’s party, and then divides the rest proportionally between all parties (presidential and nonpresidential) according to legislative seat share—thus the Altman indicator blends Gamsonian assumptions with sober expectations of an exaggerated formateur bonus under presidentialism. Of particular importance for fairness 14

Gamson (1961) argued that where one party fails to secure an absolute majority in parliament, cabinet portfolios tend to be allocated in proportion to the share of seats held by each coalition member. See also Carroll and Cox (2007).

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is the level of satisfaction gained by nonpresidential parties; hence in Table 3.1 the balance of pay-offs for non-presidential parties is reported. These values represent the difference between the theoretical measure of proportionality and what non-presidential parties get in practice: positive values indicate a ‘good deal’ for non-presidential parties, and negative values suggest a ‘bad deal’. The two measures of fairness display interesting variation across our cases. Within the Latin American region, Chile’s stable system of ideologically connected alliances has consistently produced the fairest Day One coalitions both in terms of coalescence and the balance of pay-offs. We would expect this to have beneficial effects in terms of coalition management, with the notable exception of President Sebastián Piñera (2010–14). In contrast, Ecuadorean presidents have tended to create Day One coalitions that are unfair in terms of portfolio distribution. With the exception of the first term of President Correa, Ecuadorean presidents have been reluctant to concede executive power on Day One, even when they have lacked significant party support. A further contrast can be seen in the Brazilian case, where presidents have tended to fall somewhere in between. The surplus nature of Brazilian coalitions has required presidents to concede portfolios to their coalition partners, but they do not always result in a fair deal, even when the so-called formateur bonus is taken into consideration. Hence, the maintenance of Brazilian coalitions is expected to produce high operational costs (Raile, Pereira, and Power 2011). Country-level patterns are also evident for other regions. African presidents in Kenya and Malawi have opted for fair coalition agreements on Day One; whereas in the former Soviet Union, Russian and Ukrainian presidents have been less likely to distribute portfolios evenly between their coalition partners. Fewer episodes of coalitional presidentialism in these two regions make the identification of patterns over time more difficult, however, and in a number of cases, notably in Benin, Armenia, and Ukraine, there does appear to have been change over time, with presidents becoming less fair in Benin and more even-handed in Armenia and Ukraine, at least in terms of portfolio distribution (Chaisty and Chernykh 2015). Finally, the internal cohesion of coalitions on Day One—the level of affinity between the parties that comprise the founding agreement—has a bearing on coalition maintenance. This factor is not immediately obvious from coalition data on size and fairness. Minimal winning coalitions, for instance, can conceal operational problems for presidents if they are composed of parties with conflicting demands; likewise fair coalition agreements are not conflictproof if they produce governments made up of ministers with competing policy proposals. Thus, the level of heterogeneity within the Day One coalition also presents important challenges to formateurs. Much of the research on Latin America has analysed the effects of party fragmentation and ideological

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affinity or disunity (Altman 2000) on coalition dynamics. In Africa and the former Soviet Union, which have received less attention in the presidential literature, other cleavages appear to be at least as important. Emerging research suggests that ethnic divisions influence the formation of government coalitions in Africa (Arriola 2009), and business and regional interests are identified as being an important component of presidential coalitions in the former Soviet Union (Zimmer 2006). Table 3.1 summarizes heterogeneity data for each coalition. This consists of a quantitative measure of fragmentation (the effective number of parties) and qualitative assessments of the most salient cleavages within each coalition. In a number of cases, levels of heterogeneity correlate with size. As already noted above, the surplus coalitions formed by Brazilian presidents contain a large effective number of coalition parties, which has created further management problems for formateurs. In other cases heterogeneity is not correlated with the raw size of coalitions. The minimal winning coalition formed by President Kuchma on Day One of his second term, for instance, contained large numbers of MPs representing competing particularistic business and regional interests. Moreover, levels of intracoalitional fragmentation can miss the nature and intensity of conflict within each alliance. For instance, the moderate level of party fragmentation within President Kibaki’s coalition masked considerable ethnic divisions that required special consideration by the Kenyan president. Therefore, the combination of size, fairness, and heterogeneity provides an empirical basis for triangulating expectations about the management challenges that presidents are likely to encounter from the composition of their Day One coalitions. Based on these factors, we can distinguish between presidents who govern with coalitions that were likely to require high, moderate, or low levels of maintenance. This is summarized in Table 3.2. At both extremes were presidents who formed Day One coalitions where the values for size, fairness, and heterogeneity consistently combined to raise or lower the difficulties of coalition management. For example, the coalition formed during Ecuadorean President Correa’s first term comprised high levels of both presidential party support and coalition fairness, and low levels of fragmentation; whereas Ukrainian President Kuchma’s coalitions during his second term contained no presidential party support, were marked by low levels of fairness and high levels of party fragmentation. In the remainder of the book we explore the extent to which coalitional conditions on Day One matter in terms of subsequent coalition management. In Chapter 4 we outline a broad framework that will integrate the importance of Day One conditions into our understanding of the multi-varied strategies that presidents deploy to manage their coalitions. We refer to these strategies

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Table 3.2 The challenges of coalition maintenance on Day One High maintenance

Moderate maintenance

Low maintenance

Boni Yayi I (2006)

Bachelet (2006)

Aylwin (1990)

Bucaram (1996)

Bingu wa Mutharika (2004)

Boni Yayi I (2007)

Cardoso I (1995)

Boni Yayi II (2011)

Correa I (2007)

Cardoso II (1999)

Borja (1988)

Correa II (2009)

Cordero (1984)

Kérékou II (2003)

Frei (1994)

Durán-Ballén (1992)

Kocharyan I (2000)

Frei (1998)

Durán-Ballén (1994)

Kocharyan II (2003)

Lagos (2000)

Dilma I (2011)

Mahuad (1998)

Lagos (2002)

Gutiérrez (2003)

Piñera (2010)

Muluzi I (1994)

Hurtado (1981)

Soglo (1995)

Muluzi II (2003)

Kenyatta (2013)

Yushchenko (2005)

Yanukovych (2010)

Kérékou I (1996) Kérékou I (1999) Kérékou II (2001) Kibaki (2002) Kuchma I (1994) Kuchma I (1998) Kuchma II (1999) Kuchma II (2002) Lula I (2003) Lula II (2007) Noboa (2000) Palacio (2005) Putin (2001) Roldós (1979) Soglo (1991) Ter-Petrossyan II (1996) Yeltsin I (1994) Yeltsin II (1996) Notes: coalitions were classified according to whether they scored at least three times in either the high, middle, or low third of the possible range of values for the six variables capturing size, fairness, and heterogeneity in Table 3.1. If a coalition scored high, moderate, or low values in equal measure they were classified as ‘moderate maintenance’. This stratification does not constitute a precise measurement but rather a general indication of the degree of user-friendliness of each coalition on Day One.

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as the presidential toolbox, and we explore the variables that shape presidents’ choices of deploying different tools. In the remaining chapters (Chapters 5 to 9) we then explore each tool in turn, and provide a detailed assessment of the ways in which coalitional conditions on Day One—along with other systemic and conjunctural factors—have a direct bearing on their efficacy in coalition management.

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....................

4

....................

Towards a Framework for Analysis The Presidential Toolbox

In the extant research on coalitional presidentialism, scholars have generally failed to distinguish adequately between two phases of the phenomenon: coalition formation and coalition management. Chapter 3 concerned the former process; the current chapter and the remainder of this book focus on the latter. In the real world of multiparty presidential democracy, most of the day-today action in political life derives not from the formation of coalitions, but from their ongoing political coordination. Our aim is to make some sense of this process. Therefore, in this chapter, we outline a framework for the comparative analysis of coalition management under multiparty presidentialism.

L I MI T S TO T HE O R Y B U I L D I N G : C ON T I NGE NC Y A N D UN I P E R S O NA L AU TH O R IT Y In making a first attempt to explain patterns of coalitional presidentialism around the world, we prefer to advance a ‘framework for analysis’ rather than a more formal ‘theory’. There are several reasons for this choice. The first is that coalition management is inherently a noisier, more indeterminate process than coalition formation. As suggested in Chapter 3, theories of government formation (e.g. Laver 1998; Martin and Stevenson 2001; Martin and Vanberg 2011) can rely on conventional models of party size and ideological proximity to derive elegant predictions about which combinations of political parties will choose to enter electoral and/or cabinet alliances. Management of an interparty alliance by an incumbent, however, is highly contingent and somewhat unpredictable, responding on a continuous basis to changing environmental conditions and exogenous shocks. Under the separation of powers, these factors may lead to the addition, subtraction, or reweighting of coalition members without the parliamentary neatness of government initiation or

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termination—in other words, the political punctuation of presidential governments is far less clear than it is for parliamentary governments. Second, variation in the president’s cultivation of coalitional support cannot necessarily be explained by the same blunt variables that explain one-off coalition formation. The tools used to build a complex machine are not necessarily the ones that are used most frequently to maintain it. Moreover, the unavailability of preferred tools of coalition management can lead to forms of clearly improvisational behaviour (fire extinguishing, jerry-rigging, ‘battlefield repairs’, and the like) that are unlikely to lend themselves to neat theorization. Third, the composition of governing coalitions in newly competitive multiparty regimes often features several actors rarely present in established parliamentary democracies, notably non-partisan cabinet ministers (technocrats) and non-partisan legislators (independents on the assembly floor). In several of the cases of coalitional presidentialism discussed in this book, even the president is a political independent. This partial de-linking of key actors from the key unit of analysis in coalition formation theory—the political party, typically portrayed as inhabiting a one-dimensional ideological space— renders a formal theory of coalition management more difficult, especially so in the fluid party systems of nascent democracies. Fourth and finally, we reiterate a point made in Chapter 3. Presidentialism is characterized by (a) electoral delegation of all formateur authority to a single named individual and no other, and (b) the subsequent dominance of the directly elected president over the political process. In other words, presidents enjoy an immense amount of personal discretion in coalitional politics, and the nature of coalitional management is shaped by the personal vision and preferences of the chief executive. This is not to say that presidents are wholly unrestrained: they are subject to a range of recurring formal and informal constraints that we outline in this and the following chapters. Yet given the wider decisional autonomy of a unipersonal executive whose mandate is separate from that of the legislature, the process of cultivating political support from the assembly is likely to be far more contingent than under parliamentarism. For these reasons and more, our ability to develop elegant, parsimonious theories of coalition management—as opposed to coalition formation—is likely to be limited under conditions of presidentialism. However, this does not prevent us from developing an analytical framework that is capable of capturing certain empirical patterns of coalitional presidentialism while at the same time remaining sufficiently flexible to accommodate contingent action. In the remainder of this chapter, we outline such a framework. Our framework depicts presidents as possessing and deploying a set of discrete political tools for the purposes of coalition management, and makes a first attempt to set out the conditions under which presidents might opt to draw on various elements of this toolbox.

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C O NC E P T S AN D D E F I N I T I O N S We conceive of coalition management as a process of continuous political cultivation of an interparty alliance in the legislature, directed by an incumbent minority president. This process normally consists of (a) enactment of a shared policy agenda, of which the formateur president is normally the principal driver; (b) strategic manipulation of coalition characteristics (inclusion/exclusion of members, access to executive posts, and fairness of the coalition agreement); and/or (c) engagement in exchange politics between the president and alliance partners. Although we acknowledge that the first of these three facets of coalition management—coordination of a collective agenda—is also relevant to processes of coalition formation, this feature assumes far greater salience once the government has taken office. After Day One, the shared agenda is no longer abstract: coalition partners are continually called upon to enact and take responsibility for specific public policies advocated by the president. The second and third aspects of coalition management—changes to the size and shape of the coalition, and distribution of power and resources within it—are exclusively postelectoral and are at the discretion of the president. This definition of coalition management is restricted to incumbents (the formateur must hold presidential office)1 and to the management of interparty coalitions for legislative purposes (the domain of action is executive–legislative relations). This distinguishes coalition management from preelectoral aspects of interparty political coordination, which in our view belong to the ‘formation’ phase of coalitional presidentialism. Moreover, as explained in Chapter 1, we restrict our analysis to minority presidents, i.e., executives whose nominal political parties control less than half of the seats in the lower house or unicameral chamber of parliament.2 This decision rule excludes some hypothetical situations of coalitional politics. For example, a president whose nominal party wins 51 per cent of the seats in the assembly, but who 1

We include all incumbents who have arrived to the office by constitutional means, whether via direct election to the presidency (86 per cent of our sample of 42 presidential terms) or accession from the vice presidency or another office in the line of succession (14 per cent). The cases of acting presidents included Osvaldo Hurtado, Fabián Alarcón, Gustavo Noboa, Alfredo Palacio (all Ecuador), Robert Kocharyan (Armenia), and Vladimir Putin (Russia). 2 All ‘independent’ or non-partisan presidents are by definition minority executives since they lack nominal parties. These make up 29 per cent of our sample. They include Armenian president Robert Kocharyan (both terms); Russian president Boris Yeltsin (both terms); Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma (both terms); Beninois presidents Nicéphore Soglo (at time of election), Mathieu Kérékou (both terms), and Thomas Boni Yayi (first term at time of election); and the single terms of Ecuadorean presidents Gustavo Noboa and Alfredo Palacio.

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nonetheless allies with two additional small parties bringing his or her support to 58 per cent, would clearly have a coalition that would still need to be managed. Yet this scenario—a surplus majority coalition in which the defection of the two small parties would still leave the president with a single-party majority in parliament—would not fall under our working definition here. We are interested in minority presidents who must coordinate two or more parties (or one party and a set of independents) into a governing alliance with a view to purposive action in the legislative domain. We recognize that such a scenario may exist under either pure presidentialism or semipresidentialism, but we restrict our analysis to cases in which the president is the de facto formateur. By this we mean that the directly elected president—and not a prime minister where one exists—is the principal coordinator of coalition formation. This stipulation allows us to navigate some of the sticky definitional questions surrounding dual executives (e.g. Duverger 1980; Elgie 1997; Schleiter and Morgan-Jones 2009). To us, the constitutional format is less salient than the identity of the formateur: if a directly elected president is the operational architect of the ruling interparty alliance, we define this as coalitional presidentialism regardless of the constitutional fine print on investiture and ministerial responsibility.3 Our working definition of a coalition is as follows. A coalition exists whenever more than one political party (or one party and independents) in the assembly opts to support the president on a reasonably stable basis for at least N units of time or legislative sessions. By ‘reasonably stable’ we mean to exclude one-off logrolling or ad hoc coalitions, especially temporary policy coalitions that are assembled to pass a specific package or reform but then dissipate soon thereafter.4 The concept of ‘support’ can be indicated by any of the following criteria: formal acceptance of cabinet posts or equivalent executive-branch positions, institutional declarations of support for the 3

For example, all French governments since 1958 have been coalitional in nature, but the formateur has varied. In the three periods of cohabitation (1986–8, 1993–5, 1997–2002), the prime minister has been the architect of government coalitions, while in periods of unified government the de facto formateur (and the object of support of the coalition parties) is clearly the directly elected president. 4 Being temporary and with limited goals, such policy coalitions are distinguishable from electoral or portfolio coalitions. For example, several of Ronald Reagan’s key legislative victories during his 1981 honeymoon were the result of cooperation between his Republican Party and a conservative regional faction of the opposition (‘Boll Weevil Democrats’), uniting against the liberal mainstream of the Democratic Party then in control of the House of Representatives. More recently, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto negotiated the Pacto por México in 2012 with the two leading opposition parties (PAN and PRD) for the purpose of passing five key reforms within his first year. Neither of these coalitions would meet our operational definition.

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president made publicly by the party leadership, and/or de facto systematic support of the president as identified independently by experts and/or practitioners (i.e. peers in the assembly). The first of these criteria, formal acceptance of cabinet positions, corresponds to the conventional usage of portfolio coalition used in many cross-national quantitative studies, including our own such analysis presented in Chapter 1. However, as we noted in that chapter, a minimalist portfolio-based definition of coalitions fails to capture the political realities of many of the new multiparty democracies or hybrid regimes of Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America, where parties and factions in the legislature frequently back presidents without formally entering the cabinet. This is why our preferred definition of coalition begins on the legislative floor. Our temporal frame is the presidential term. Some approaches to multiparty presidentialism have taken portfolio coalitions as the unit of analysis, with any substantial change in cabinet composition—entry or exit of a party or minister—implying that a new coalition has been formed. This is a conventional approach in research on parliamentary systems, which focuses heavily on government formation and termination (e.g. Mueller and Strøm 1999). Yet we observe that if the typical exit/entry criteria used in the parliamentary literature are applied to presidentialism, then a single presidential term in office would feature a number of discrete ‘governments’. This might be useful for periodizing presidential behaviour (and would aid quantitative analysis by inflating the observations of coalitions) but we believe that punctuating presidential experiences in this way can be misleading, and does unnecessary violence to the concept of government. Under presidentialism, a government is generally taken to mean a fixed term in office. Coalition management is a way to navigate this term from beginning to end. Thus, if we were to use cabinet reshuffles to demarcate the formation and termination of multiple coalitions, we would obscure the analysis of portfolio allocation as a mechanism of ongoing coalition management as a president proceeds through his/her fixed term. Therefore, in order to show how presidents coordinate interparty alliances during their time in office, we adopt presidential terms as our unit of analysis, and we treat portfolio allocation as endogenous to the presidential toolbox.

MOTIVATIONS O F ACTORS: PRESIDENTIAL GOALS Any analytical framework needs to state assumptions about the motivations of actors. This book attempts mainly to explain presidential behaviour, not legislative or partisan behaviour. Moreover, the scope of our project,

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unlike much comparative research on presidentialism, does not encompass executive–legislative relations writ large: rather, it concerns president– coalition relations. We see this relationship as purposive: we assume that presidents build coalitions because they want to control the legislative agenda. This involves not only ensuring the success of the president’s own legislative priorities, but also preventing unwelcome proposals from becoming law. Executives intend to enact their policies and proposals, and they believe they cannot do so without building a coalition first. In other words, coalitions are a means to an end, similar to an investment strategy that seeks material returns. We acknowledge that simplifying assumptions like this one sacrifice some reality in return for greater analytical power. In assuming that coalitional politics has legislative ends, we do not deny that coalitions can be formed and maintained for other purposes. As noted in Chapter 3, presidents may form or augment coalitions in order to enhance legitimacy and/or project an image of strength (Opalo 2011); they may also occasionally use coalitions as an insurance policy against presidential ‘falls’ (Hochstetler 2006) or ‘interruptions’ (Llanos and Marsteintredet 2010), such as impeachment (Pérez-Liñán 2007). Coalitions may be the preferred format of caretaker governments after the presidential office is vacated, or they may also be a response to crisis, as in national unity governments during wars or emergency. Yet these types of coalition governments are the exceptions that prove the rule. Even if it is true that not all coalition governments are intended to generate legislative support, the fact that most of them evince this purpose means that our assumption captures a great deal of reality.5 The assumption that presidents aim to build support in the legislature has been a dominant claim of the presidentialism literature since the publication of Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies in 1992: as such, the claim is uncontroversial. Moreover, the assumption is consistent with what we know about cross-national patterns of coalition government under the separation of powers. The cross-national analysis in Chapter 1 suggests that the vast majority of coalition governments are utterly ordinary. Minority presidents form coalitions with such impressive regularity that it would be difficult to imagine

5 In our nine countries, there are only a handful of examples of caretaker governments or ‘artificial’ governments of national unity, and even in these cases it was clear that coalitions frequently had legislative objectives as well. For example, after the impeachment of Fernando Collor in Brazil in 1992, vice-president Itamar Franco established an inclusive cabinet (including politicians from the far left and far right) that is sometimes referred to as a caretaker government. Yet Franco governed for 27 months (almost as long as Collor), innovated his own legislative agenda, and practised patterns of coalitional politics very similar to those of his successors.

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that they are all in need of legal defence, national reconciliation or a boost to their already considerable egos. Most likely, they want to overcome their minority status and enact their policies.

T E MPO R A L O R DER I N G A ND CA US A L P R O C E SS E S As discussed earlier, we assume that for any term in executive office, coalitional presidentialism has two distinct phases. The first is coalition formation, while the second is coalition management. Depending on the circumstances, the origins of the interparty alliance may be preelectoral, although perfect conversions of electoral alliances to governing coalitions are relatively rare. The coalition may often be broadened during a run-off election and/or adjusted again prior to the president’s inauguration day.6 The presidentelect selects obvious coalition partners, beginning with his/her own party and any other parties that may have backed him/her in the election, and moving on to other potential partners. Negotiations are undertaken, deals are hammered out, and offers of power sharing are made—in some cases, even to defeated rivals. The president then takes office with a baseline configuration of political support, which we refer to as the ‘Day One Coalition’. The temporal ordering of the Day One Coalition is depicted in Figure 4.1. We assume that the Day One Coalition is meaningful, for two reasons. First, the Day One Coalition is likely to be an imperfect, yet still very revealing, approximation of the president’s sincere preferences in coalitional politics. The coalition agreement conveys important information about whom he or she wishes to govern with, and how much power he or she is willing to share

Presidential Election

Phase 1 (coalition formation)

Phase 2 (coalition management)

The ‘Day One Coalition’

Figure 4.1. Stylized temporal ordering.

6

The Chilean case is a clear outlier in our sample outlined in Chapter 2, given that governing coalitions originate as electoral coalitions, and given that the composition of these coalitions has been highly stable since the transition to democracy.

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with them. It is true that the Day One Coalition may not be the perfect ‘dream team’ in the eyes of the president, but it is likely the best coalition agreement that he or she could get under the prevailing circumstances at the time of his or her inauguration. In making this best team available assumption, we gain some non-trivial leverage in our observational research. This is because coalition negotiations can be opaque and ‘dealbreakers’ may not be easily identified by outsiders—but the composition of the Day One Coalition is likely to incorporate such invisible information already, because it represents the president’s ‘starting line-up’. The second reason that we stress the Day One Coalition is far more germane to our analytical framework. Simply put, the characteristics of the Day One Coalition matter for subsequent coalitional choices by the president. Compositional choices made at time t (the moment of Day One coalition formation) can raise or lower the costs of adjustments at time t+1 (an instance of coalition management). Formateurs make choices about the size, fairness, and heterogeneity of their intended interparty alliance (see Chapter 3). These foundational decisions affect the later relations between presidents and their potential bases of legislative support (parties and individual politicians). Most obviously, once a president has selected a team of ministers, these positions cannot be given out again—they can be redistributed, but likely at the expense of disappointing the existing post-holder and their party. Thus, the Day One coalition shapes the options available for coalition management. One might ask whether it is legitimate to explain the management of a coalition by using characteristics of the coalition itself as a set of independent variables. This is a thorny question, but we believe the answer is yes. Our rationale can be explained by returning to the financial market analogy referenced earlier. Coalition formation resembles an initial investment allocation. In establishing a new portfolio from scratch, investors must allocate their available resources across various financial instruments. Their decisions are essentially wagers, but these wagers are informed by (a) present rates of return on these instruments, (b) assumptions about their rates of return in the future, and (c) assumptions about the potential convertibility of these assets in the future (i.e. the ease of divesting from them or replacing them with alternatives, should that become necessary). All investors make initial allocations, and most (but not all) make adjustments to their portfolio thereafter, in response to changing market conditions. The ease with which they can respond to market conditions depends in part on their prior choices, for example, ongoing constraints imposed by sunk costs. Therefore, explaining the behaviour of an investor requires not only analysis of current market conditions, but also analysis of the investment

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profile that he or she is carrying forward. This simultaneity of causal effects has long been familiar to market analysts: contemporary social scientists prefer the term ‘endogeneity’ to describe the same phenomenon. Endogeneity confounds causal inference, and is therefore the main villain of the current ‘identification revolution’ in political science (Huber 2013; see also Imai 2015). Yet the fact remains that choices in coalition management are endogenous to choices in coalition formation. These entanglements are called politics, and we are attempting to explain the politics of coalitional presidentialism as best we can. The alternative, from a strict ‘identificationist’ perspective, would be to condemn to academic obscurity a form of governance that is rising in importance in every corner of the globe on the basis that it is too inscrutable to be studied.7 While we cannot eliminate the endogeneity of present presidential choices to earlier presidential choices, we can anticipate and minimize its effects. Therefore, our analytical framework (a) distinguishes coalition formation from coalition management, (b) attempts to identify the ‘sunk costs’ embedded in Day One coalitions, and (c) attempts to estimate the independent effects of those costs as distinct from the separate costs imposed by changing conjunctural factors and exogenous shocks throughout (‘market conditions’). Admittedly, none of these analytical distinctions is perfectly clean, and our estimation of costs will naturally incorporate some measurement error. Yet we must navigate these problems as best we can if we want to gain some insight into how minority presidents govern with multiparty alliances around the world. This involves recognizing that the political cultivation of an interparty coalition is, in fact, affected by the characteristics of that same coalition. We assume that in coalitional presidentialism, minority presidents observe returns on their initial investment allocation (i.e. their foundational coalition) and make adjustments accordingly. This is coalition management and it is undertaken with the use of the tools described in the following section.

Huber’s recent (2013) comments are pertinent. ‘Some “identificationists” take the strong position that social science research that cannot solve the identification problem is not worth doing, or at least is not worth publishing in leading journals . . . [I]f we move towards this position, we excessively narrow the range of questions we ask, and thus unnecessarily limit our understanding of the social processes we study . . . Many substantively important variables are embedded in dynamics of reciprocal causation with each other that will often frustrate the ambitions of even the most determined and talented “identificationists” . . . Thus, good causal identification is not always possible on questions of central importance.’ 7

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Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective FIVE TOOLS AVAILABLE TO PRESIDENTS

As discussed in Chapter 1, the incipient literature on coalitional presidentialism has tended towards monocausal, mutually exclusive hypotheses about how minority presidents coordinate cross-party support blocs. Some scholars emphasize the legislative prerogatives of presidents; others, cabinet powers; and still others, partisan influence, budgetary authority, or informal mechanisms of exchange. Each one of these approaches makes a claim for the importance of a single presidential tool in forming and maintaining coalitions. We believe that each of these claims is individually plausible, but the main problem is that each approach is essentially univariate. Following Raile, Pereira, and Power (2011), we conceive of a presidential toolbox in which all five of these instruments are available to the executive, simultaneously and with some degree of fungibility. Here, we expand on the utility of these instruments to presidents (Figure 4.2). Legislative powers. Even in so-called separation of powers systems, the legislative branch shares law-making authority with directly elected executives. The legislative powers afforded to presidents are clearly important, because they enable the president to set the agenda and, through this, to promote or restrain the policy ambitions of coalition partners (Huber 1996; Figueiredo and Limongi 2000). Shugart and Carey (1992) were the first scholars to draw attention to the ‘constitutional powers’ of presidents. Constitutional powers can be both legislative and non-legislative; the latter could incorporate, for example, authority over the armed forces, the power to issue pardons, or the right to name cabinet ministers (also treated separately in our toolbox, and see

Instruments of Coalition Management (The Presidential Toolbox) Legislative Powers

Partisan Powers

(constitutional and agenda-setting authority)

(authority over the formateur party)

Cabinet Powers

Budgetary Authority

Exchange of Favours

(portfolio allocation)

(control over public spending)

(particularistic transactions)

Figure 4.2. The tools of coalition management.

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‘Cabinet Authority’ discussed below). In practice, what Shugart and Carey spent the most time analysing was the ‘legislative powers’ of presidents, a term that some other authors came to emphasize instead (e.g. Amorim Neto 2006; UNDP 2004; Negretto 2009; Singh and Carlin 2015). Shugart and Carey drew attention to six legislative powers of presidents: package veto, partial veto, constitutional decree authority (CDA), exclusive initiative, budgetary power, and the right to convoke referenda. Some of these powers, like CDA or exclusive initiative, are proactive: the president benefits from a first-mover advantage. Others, such as veto power, may appear as reactive—although even veto power is also an agenda-setting tool because it presents the assembly with a new choice. But what these powers all have in common is that they make the president a central legislative actor. Far from what is implied in a textbook separation of powers model, most directly elected presidents around the world have substantial lawmaking authority. The more they have, the easier it is for them to influence the agenda of the legislature. And the more they dominate the legislative agenda, the easier it becomes to manage the pro-presidential coalition within the assembly. Because the literature on comparative presidentialism has displayed some inconsistency in its treatment of constitutional powers, legislative powers, and agenda-setting powers of presidents, we need to be very precise by what we mean by our first tool. Of the ‘constitutional powers’ of presidents, our framework includes only the legislative powers (the non-legislative power of cabinet appointment is treated separately). Moving from general to specific, from the package of legislative powers first suggested by Shugart and Carey, we remove budgetary authority and treat that also as a separate tool in our framework—not only to be more consistent with more recent literature (e.g. Pereira and Mueller 2004; Hallerberg, Scartascini, and Stein 2009), but also because we see presidential control over public spending as being an alternative way of disciplining a coalition, qualitatively different from the broad exertion of influence over the law-making process (see section ‘Budgetary Authority’ below). We are left then with a more traditional set of tools that empower the president either as an independent ‘legislator’ or as a colegislator with the elected assembly. The most common of these are decree authority (CDA), the right to introduce legislation directly in the assembly, urgency and fast-track provisions, priority of executive bills over assemblyinitiated bills, amendment rights, package and partial vetoes, partial promulgation, exclusive initiative of legislation in certain policy areas, the power to summon the legislature into special session, and the power to convoke plebiscites or referenda. The exact repertoire varies across our nine country cases, so this is almost a mini-toolbox that we have chosen to portray as a single tool.

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Henceforth we will refer to ‘legislative powers of the president’ as being any formal legislative prerogative of the executive branch that enhances the influence of the president over the agenda of the elected assembly (noting again that we treat budgetary authority separately). Cabinet authority. One of the most common arguments in the literature is that coalitions are managed via the allocation of cabinet portfolios (Amorim Neto 2002, 2006). On this logic, parties join the coalition mainly in return for ministries, and a seat at the cabinet table is the most effective tool that presidents have to achieve unity. By distributing ministries to loyal partners, and removing them from troublesome parties, presidents can maintain internal discipline. We expect that presidents will have broad powers of appointment and that they will use these appointments to secure political support. Yet we note that cabinet allocation is but one form of appointment power, and taking this logic further, appointment power is but one form of power-sharing. Ideally, studies of coalitional presidentialism would look not only to cabinet appointments but to a much broader set of appointment powers to senior posts in the civil service, judiciary, and other agencies and parastatals. However, the practicalities of data collection have forced most analysts to remain focused on the inner circle of the executive. It is challenging to collect data on all relevant posts, which would in any case be complicated by the fact that the importance of some positions varies across political systems. For operational reasons we follow other scholars in restricting our analysis to appointments to the national cabinet, that is, to the set of senior executive-branch positions that enjoy cabinet status in a given country.8 There are three justifications for using cabinet authority as a one-size-fits-all measure of appointment powers. First, this method ensures comparability of cases: all countries have executive cabinets. Second, focusing on cabinet appointments is consistent with previous studies in this field. Finally, parties generally want cabinet posts, and therefore awarding cabinet posts is an obvious way to recruit political support (Chapter 6 will show that cabinet allocation is regarded by most elites as the first or second most important tool of coalition management). We recognize that not all parties want representation in the cabinet everywhere, all the time; but because most political parties do, using cabinet portfolios as a proxy for executive power-sharing is a reasonable operational decision.

8 Some individuals may enjoy cabinet rank without the formal title of minister, e.g. a central bank president or a presidential chief of staff.

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Partisan powers. Reviving a hypothesis of Mainwaring and Shugart (1997), Samuels and Shugart (2010) have emphasized that presidents are equipped with significant partisan powers—that is, political power that results from their domination of their own party. The logic here is fairly simple: presidents with large parties that they are able to control effectively are less reliant on support from coalition partners, whatever the size and shape of the coalition. This is highly relevant because the degree of party unity shown across the cases in our studies varies significantly. Some presidents experience almost no rebellions from within their own parties, while others suffer almost constant dissent. The greater the control that a president is able to exert over their own party the better able he/she will be to ensure coalition discipline. When it comes to coalition management, presidents with strong control over a very small number of MPs and presidents with weak control over a very large party are likely to find themselves in a similar position; in both cases, the president will be forced to make greater use of alternative tools in order to coordinate the coalition. Budgetary authority. Another prominent claim in the literature is that presidents seek to manage coalitions by manipulating their budgetary authority— sometimes referred to loosely as ‘pork’—to coax the desired results from their interparty alliances (Ames 2001; Pereira and Mueller 2004). On this argument, it is primarily presidential power over the purse that attracts other parties into the coalition, and it is the ability of presidents to reward/punish allies by turning on/off the flow of state resources that enables them to maintain control. As one would expect, the comparative literature on pork has tended to focus on those cases where it is easiest to track earmarks. In the case of Brazil, for example, Raile, Pereira, and Power (2011) have shown that while ‘coalition goods’ (such as ministries) may form the baseline of coalition agreements, pork functions as a ‘a fine-tuning instrument’ that enables coalition management over time. In Chapter 8, we will show that budgetary authority clearly merits a place in the presidential toolbox: control of pork typically is ranked by legislators as the second most important tool of coalition management across all three of our regions. We define this tool in terms of the president’s ability to direct the formulation and execution of public spending priorities with a view to obtaining targeted political support. This has various sub-dimensions, including influence in the drafting of the national budget, normally done by the executive branch alone; authority to accept or reject legislative amendments to the national budget (which formally is a ‘legislative power of the president’); ability to accelerate, delay, or suspend the execution of discrete line items in the budget; and ability to deploy non-earmarked discretionary funds under the control of the executive branch.

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The exchange of favours. Finally, other scholars have shown that presidents resort to various informal institutions to manage their coalitions and extract support from the assembly (Mejía-Acosta 2006; Siavelis 2006). This may take the form of established informal norms that govern legislative behaviour, or established patron–client networks that operate outside of formal and transparent political mechanisms. This tool has perhaps received the greatest attention in our African cases, where coalition management has owed much to behind-the-scenes networks through which the president promises future political economic support to increase the election chances of loyal coalition members. In order to make it feasible to operationalize the broad range of informal institutions that operate across our cases, we focus on just this kind of backroom deal, which we term the exchange of favours. In the analysis that follows, we use the term exchange of favours to refer specifically to deals between the president and coalition legislators in which political support is informally traded for economic support, private benefits, or other forms of personal assistance. Although these kinds of practices are sometimes associated with corruption, it is important to note that they are not always illegal, and may not always have normatively bad connotations in the context in which they play out. In some cases, the exchange of favours may take the form of unique one-off deals, while in others, the exchanges may be so frequent and predictable—and the expectations surrounding them so ingrained within the political elite—that they could accurately be described as informal institutions (O’Donnell 1994; Helmke and Levitsky 2004).

C H O O S IN G T H E T OO L S: E M B E D DE D C OS T S AND EXOGENOUS FACTORS How do presidents select the tool or tools of coalition management, and how do they use them, either alone or in combination? These issues are central to our analytical framework. To investigate these questions, we assume that presidents are cost minimizers: they will choose the tool (or tools) which seem least costly to them at a given moment in time. We highlight the word ‘seem’ because we assume that elite decision making is governed by bounded rationality (e.g. Simon 1957; March 1994). We cannot say with certainty whether presidents always have good information about the actual costs and benefits of all of their tools: moreover, the quality of this information is difficult for researchers to observe directly. Yet if we are correct and presidents choose the tool or tools that seem least costly to them at the moment of

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decision, we can still obtain significant analytical leverage by conducting independent estimation of these costs. What do we mean by ‘costs’? Costs can be either political or economic in nature, although of course political costs may have economic implications and vice versa. In terms of political costs, we reiterate that presidents want to enact their policies via the legislature and to complete their term of office. We further assume that presidents seek either reelection or the election of an approved successor, so they will avoid any actions that would compromise that overriding goal; this is an assumption drawn from the theory of static ambition (Schlesinger 1966). We are interested in how the costs of coalition management may harm these multiple and sometimes incompatible goals of the executive. Political costs are attached to strategic interactions within the coalition which are expected by the president to (a) reduce the president’s capacity to control the political and policy agenda; (b) stimulate opposition within the president’s own party, reducing his or her influence within it; (c) create significant opposition within one or more allied parties, potentially fracturing the coalition and/or rendering the president less attractive as a coalition partner; or (d) are expected to be widely unpopular with the mass public. Examples of each of these four scenarios could be, respectively, the transfer of a high-powered ministry such as Finance from the president’s own party to a coalition partner, thereby risking agency loss; the naming of a crony to a position of leadership within the ruling party; the transfer of a ministry from an allied coalition party to a non-partisan technocrat; or, the repeated use of presidential decrees to achieve policy objectives via unilateral action. Costs can also be economic in nature, in the sense of the suboptimal usage of scarce resources. The process of governing can cost more or it can cost less, depending on how much budgetary largesse or state employment has to be deployed to satisfy coalition partners (Pereira and Mueller 2004). Coalitional misappropriation of resources can lead to financial distortions, reduced state capacity, or both. When the economic costs of exchange politics begin to exceed the benefits of keeping coalition partners satisfied, presidents will question the expenditures. Presidents may also seek to manage coalitions by utilizing informal transfers (through the exchange of favours) rather than the formal distribution of resources (through pork) whenever the former is significantly cheaper than the latter, and whenever this can be done without serious risk of sanctions. In general, we expect that presidents will seek the greatest amount of political support at the lowest possible cost, and that they will tailor their governing strategies accordingly. Our analyses of these strategies in Chapters 5–9 are based directly on the subjective costs of tool deployment by presidents.

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We see these perceived costs as being shaped by several factors that we now discuss in turn. First, returning to our discussion of temporal ordering, the costs of coalition management in general are determined in part by the preexisting characteristics of the coalition already in place. To express with visual reference to Figure 4.1, the operating costs of Phase Two (coalition management) are shaped by the sunk costs incurred in Phase One (coalition formation). A poor choice in Phase One, for example the overrepresentation of the president’s party in the Day One cabinet, can lead disadvantaged coalition partners to make demands that the president will later be hard pressed to meet (Pereira, Power, and Raile 2011). Second, some tools are likely to be seen as more costly than others to deploy because they involve high levels of both political and economic resources. For example, granting coalition partners more seats in the cabinet may be an extremely effective way of securing their support, but the award of a prized position outside of the president’s party generates substantial costs in terms of the president’s control over the political agenda and economic resources. Using budgetary powers to buy support, for example through the extension of pork to coalition partners, may be less costly politically—depending on the context—but can also introduce economic distortions or administrative inefficiencies. By contrast, the deployment of partisan powers, and the selective use of the president’s legislative powers, are likely to be less costly. If a president can use his or her influence and personal networks to ensure party unity, or can utilize his or her constitutional authority to ensure discipline without undermining his or her legitimacy, economic costs are negligible and political costs are likely to be lower. Other things being equal, then, we expect that in cases where presidents enjoy considerable partisan and legislative powers they will be less likely to grant coalition partners high levels of cabinet representation. Third, the choice of tools and the frequency of intervention in the coalition derive from the president’s own assessment of how he or she is performing. If coalitions are a means to an end, and that end is policy as enacted by the legislature, then the criterion here is rather straightforward: the president can fairly easily observe whether he or she is getting good returns on his or her investment. Presidents, after all, sign bills into law. Moreover, in most countries presidents also have reasonably good information on popularity and approval ratings. Fourth, we expect that coalition management will be affected by time: the cost of governing via coalition will be ‘cheaper’ during the honeymoon period and more ‘expensive’ during the lame duck phase. Given that coalitions tend to erode towards the end of the presidential term, a term-limited

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executive will likely need to intervene more directly in coalitional politics in his/her terminal phase. Fifth, the costs of using various tools can be shaped by exogenous factors not under the control of the president, such as war, natural disasters, international economic crises, or the emergence of corruption scandals. An international financial crisis might make it easier for a president to appoint non-partisan technocrats to key ministries; hyperinflation may lower the costs of using decree authority; terrorism, separatism, or interstate war could lead to unity cabinets. We expect presidents to respond accordingly. One implication of this expectation is that presidents’ coalitional decisions need to be understood in both their local and temporal context. Sixth and finally, we expect that the costs of each tool are in part affected by the use of other tools in the toolbox. This is the principle of substitutability (Raile, Pereira, and Power 2011; Kellam 2015). The tools are all valuable strategies available to the president, but they are unlikely to be equally effective in different political contexts. We thus expect that the tools of coalition management are imperfectly substitutable such that high values of one tool can offset low values of another. As the next five chapters focus on individual tools, we largely leave the discussion of comparative deployments to Chapter 10. * * * To simplify our analyses in the next five chapters—each of which corresponds to one of the tools in the presidential toolbox—we prefer to distil these disparate expectations about the factors affecting costs into three broad categories: systemic, coalitional, and conjunctural. System-level factors shaping the costs of tools include issues of constitutional format and of institutional design, including electoral rules and the nature and type of political parties. Presidents differ in terms of their agendasetting powers in the legislature, in terms of the number of parties with which they must negotiate, in terms of the party-centric or candidate-centric nature of the electoral system, in terms of centre–periphery relations, and so on. Table 4.1, which displays the values on these variables for several important presidential periods, illustrates the impressive variation across our nine countries in terms of these systemic factors that affect the costs of tool usage. Coalition-level factors encompass characteristics of the formateur, of the constituent political parties, and of the interparty bargain itself: they apply differently to each discrete experience of one executive with coalitional politics, i.e. the configuration that is specific to one presidential term in office. It is within this cluster of factors that we incorporate the embedded costs of Day One coalitions as analysed in Chapter 3: i.e. the foundational choices by the formateur in terms of the size, fairness, and heterogeneity of the coalition.

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Table 4.1. Variation on system-level factors affecting coalition management strategies: selected presidents and years

Country (year)

Incumbent president

Benin (2007)

Thomas Boni Yayi

Legislative power of Centrepresident periphery 3

Unitary

Electoral system ENP PR

3.89

Personal vote index as of 2005 1

Malawi (1999)

Bakili Muluzi

2

Unitary

FPTP

2.55

10

Kenya (2003)

Mwai Kibaki

2

Unitary

FPTP

4.78

10

Brazil (2011)

Dilma Rousseff

5

Federal

PR

10.64

7

Chile (2010)

Sebastián Piñera

8

Unitary

PR

5.25

5

Ecuador (2009)

Rafael Correa

5

Unitary

PR

4.17

3

Armenia (2003)

Robert Kocharyan

4

Unitary

Mixed

5.85

10

Russia (2000)

Vladimir Putin

5

Federal

Mixed

7.85

10

Ukraine (2010)

Viktor Yanukovych

5

Unitary

PR

3.39

10

Notes: All variables measured at the assembly level refer to the lower or unicameral chamber. The country year chosen was based on the presidential term during which most members of our respective cohorts of interviewees had served. Legislative power of presidents is an additive index summing eight powers coded in the Comparative Constitutions Project: package veto, partial veto, two-thirds override, decree power, no decree approval procedure specified, budgetary initiative, exclusive power of legislative initiative (in the areas of organic law, tax bills, finance bills, spending bills) and the power to propose referenda (see Table 5.1, Chapter 5). ENP is the effective number of parliamentary parties. Personal Vote Index, which is measured only as of 2005, is an ordinal ranking of electoral systems (1 through 13) in which higher values represent greater incentives to cultivate a personal vote; this is based on Carey and Shugart (1995) and recoded and updated (except for Benin) by Johnson and Wallack (2010). We code Benin as party-list PR (score of 1). For countries with two-tiered electoral systems (Armenia, Russia, Ukraine in 2005) the score applies to the tier with the greater incentives to personal voting. Armenia’s electoral system is now predominantly proportional (two-thirds of seats). Ukraine has normally had a 50–50 split between FPTP and PR (like Russia) but used party-list PR for the 2007 convocation of the Rada, which we surveyed (a PVI of 1). Ukraine returned to a mixed system in 2011 (PVI of 10).

We refer the reader to Table 3.1, which shows the wide range of presidential choices on these variables. Finally, conjunctural factors shaping the costs of tools refer to exogenous variables such as presidential popularity, economic performance, and external shocks such as corruption scandals, war, internal unrest, and the like. These variables are highly contingent and are linked to rapidly unfolding events and processes; they are period effects that can only be analysed with close attention to local context. The aim of our five analyses of presidential tools is to interpret their usage— in isolation or in combination with other imperfectly substitutable tools—as a function of these system-level, coalition-level, and conjunctural influences. We begin, in Chapter 5, with analysis of the legislative powers available to directly elected presidents.

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....................

5

....................

Legislative Powers and Coalition Management In December 2010, the World Bank froze $1.5 billion in loans to state-owned companies in Ukraine, alleging that the country’s lax public procurement rules were too conducive to corruption in government contracts. A month later, the European Union followed suit, suspending all financial assistance to state institutions in Ukraine until glaring exemptions from public procurement legislation were eliminated. Stung by these developments, the minority president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, was pressured to introduce new legislation on public tendering that would conform to international standards. These proposals immediately became the focus of criticism within Yanukovych’s coalition. All four parties that comprised the coalition—Yanukovych’s own Party of Regions, the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Lytvyn Bloc, and the newly created Reforms for the Future—stubbornly defended various loopholes in public tendering laws, including exemptions for energy companies, the agrarian sector, and subnational governments.1 Thus, Yanukovych was quickly hemmed in by contradictory demands: he was caught between his international obligations and his coalitional commitments. On 17 May 2011, the Verkhovna Rada passed a watered-down version of Yanukovych’s proposed reform of procurement legislation, leading the EU and the World Bank to renew publicly their criticism of Ukraine.2 Presented with an unsatisfactory bill, Yanukovych needed somehow to find the ‘sweet spot’ between his coalition and ‘the West’. The president opted to use his ample legislative powers in order to find that spot. Relying on Article 106 of the Ukrainian constitution, Yanukovych took the dramatic step of vetoing the

1

These exemptions essentially allowed for one-bidder procedures in government contracting, with no requirement of prior approval from the Ministry of Economic Development. 2 See Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, ‘International Bodies Also Call on President to Veto Public Procurement Bill’, 8 June 2011, available http://www.khpg.org/en/index.php?id= 1307484944 (accessed 15 December 2016).

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bill (causing the desired headlines in the West), but at the same time availed himself of an unusual presidential prerogative known as ‘amendatory observations’ (Tsebelis and Rizova 2007). These took the form of suggestions for changes that were sent back to the Verkhovna Rada along with the vetoed bill; essentially, these would create more open and transparent tenders for most state enterprises, while preserving the exemption for utility companies. If the Rada were to accept these changes, the president was bound to sign the bill into law.3 Yanukovych’s gamble paid off. On 8 July, the 450-member Verkhovna Rada accepted the president’s suggestions for amendments and passed the revised bill with 263 votes, corresponding almost perfectly to Yanukovych’s working coalition of 257 seats. With this outcome, the president achieved the best of both worlds: he pleased Ukraine’s creditors in the West while at the same time holding together his unwieldy multiparty alliance in the Rada. Yanukovych was able to engineer this outcome not only because of his institutional power to suggest changes to a bill he disliked, but also because of his ability to diagnose correctly the amount of legislative intervention that his coalition would be willing to tolerate. As Tsebelis and Rizova (2007: 1163) note, the effectiveness of this particular power ‘is conditional on the president’s ability to make a winning counterproposal’. This example illustrates several principles of the executive-centric world that is coalitional presidentialism. Modern presidents can be co-legislators along with parliament, not only procedurally but also politically: this is because constitutional powers can allow presidents to dominate the legislative agenda. Far from being a remote, one-off proponent of legislation, Yanukovych in fact made four separate moves. The first move was proactive (introducing the original bill on 15 March), the second was reactive (vetoing the Rada’s version on 17 June), the third was again proactive (making a counterproposal on the same day in June), and the fourth again reactive (signing the final bill into law on 8 July). Because of the back-and-forth, interactive nature of the process, Yanukovych was able to develop continually improving information about the preferences of his coalition and about the location of the median legislator within it, at least with respect to the controversial issue of public procurement rules. This shows that constitutional powers that are apparently designed to help presidents govern countries often have another useful purpose: they help presidents govern coalitions as

3 Academic readers will recognize this scenario as a ‘revise and resubmit’ with the president in the role of journal editor.

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well. And as we argued in Chapter 1, the rise of minority presidentialism around the world means that governing countries and governing coalitions are often one and the same. In this chapter, we introduce the first of the five tools in the presidential toolbox, which we will refer to generically as ‘legislative powers of presidents’. As noted in the preceding chapter, it should already be apparent why this expression should be used in the plural: presidents normally have more than one way by which to establish and influence the legislative agenda. Our analysis will then follow a structure that will be repeated in Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9. First, we will describe the systemic, coalitional, and conjunctural factors that shape the costs of deploying legislative tools in coalition management. Second, we will illustrate the ways in which presidential calculations of these costs affect the strategies of presidents with reference to four real-world cases. Finally, we will discuss the ways in which legislators understand the significance of these tools, based on our survey findings from interviews with legislators across the nine country cases.

F A C T OR S AF F E C T I N G T H E CO S T S O F U SI N G LEGISLATIVE POWERS In Chapter 4, we discussed our understanding of the legislative powers of formateurs. Shugart and Carey (1992) drew attention to six such powers: package veto, partial veto, constitutional decree authority (CDA), exclusive initiative, budgetary power, and the right to convoke referenda. A similar catalogue of eight formal powers was developed by the Comparative Constitutions Project, and the resulting additive index of presidential power is presented for our nine country cases in Table 5.1. The legislative powers of directly elected executives, which vary considerably among our nine cases, are critical to understanding the politics of minority presidentialism. As Shugart and Carey (1992) hypothesized, these powers tend to be greater in countries where constitution-makers anticipate that political fragmentation will continue in the future, thus threatening ‘governability’. Therefore, we should expect a positive relationship between the Index of Coalitional Necessity (ICN)—a measure of political fragmentation that takes into account the size of the president’s party and the overall dispersion of legislative seats—and the amount of law-making authority delegated to the executive. This relationship holds for our nine country cases depicted in Figure 5.1. Our three African cases cluster together with low ICN

No decree approval Decree procedure power (CDA) specified

Package veto

Partial (‘line item’) veto

Strong veto (at least 2/3 override)

Exclusive initiative of budget

Exclusive initiative of other legislation

Can propose popular referendum

Total score in CCP coding

Armenia (2003)

1

0

0

1

Benin (2007)

1

1

0

0

1

0

0

1

4

0

0

0

1

Brazil (2011)

1

1

1

3

1

0

1

0

0

5

Chile (2009)

1

1

Ecuador (2009)

1

0

1

1

1

1

1

1

8

1

1

0

0

1

1

Kenya (2003)

0

5

1

0

0

0

0

1

0

Malawi (1999)

2

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

2

Russia (2001)

1

0

1

1

1

0

0

1

5

Ukraine (2010)

1

0

1

1

1

0

0

1

5

Country and year

Source: Comparative Constitutions Project database (http://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org).

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Table 5.1. Formal legislative powers of presidents in CPP country cases, representative years

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Legislative Powers and Coalition Management CHI

8.0 Formal Legislative Powers of the President

97

7.0

6.0 ECU

5.0

BRA

RUS

UKR ARM

4.0 BEN

3.0 MWI

2.0 0.00

20.00

KEN 40.00

60.00

80.00

100.00

Index of Coalitional Necessity

Figure 5.1. Coalitional necessity and legislative powers of the president in CPP country cases. Notes: For formal legislative powers, see Table 5.1. Index of Coalitional Necessity is taken from representative episodes featured in Table 2.2.

and low legislative powers of the president,4 and the former Soviet Union countries also show similarity. Latin America corresponds to the Shugart and Carey image of high fragmentation and high presidential power, but with more heterogeneity on the latter variable. The legislative powers of presidents have both direct and indirect effects on the ways in which presidents manage coalitional support. The direct effects refer to how legislative powers allow presidents to set the policy agenda and use this authority to discipline their supportive coalitions in parliament. These patterns are amply documented in what is now a massive literature on executive– legislative relations in Third Wave presidential democracies. Yet the legislative 4

To differing degrees, Benin, Kenya, and Malawi reflect a modal sub-Saharan path of regime change in which (a) authoritarian-era presidencies were constitutionally weak because power was exercised in other ways, via personalism and patrimonialism; and (b) the gradual transition away from dominant-party authoritarianism saw only a low to moderate expansion in the effective number of legislative parties. Our African cases illustrate that a tradition of dominant presidents is not incompatible with formally weak presidencies.

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powers of presidents also have indirect or conditional effects that have received less attention from scholars. One such effect is visible in the coalition formation phase (discussed in Chapter 3): the greater the constitutional authority of the president, the stronger the incentives for parties to join the coalition in the first place. Therefore, the membership of some parties in the coalition may be endogenous to the expected legislative dominance of the president in the future. Nonetheless, we cannot take these arguments too far, as they would lead to a ‘flat’ prediction that all parties should support all constitutionally powerful presidents everywhere, all the time; in other words, organized opposition should never emerge. Yet opposition can and does occur for various contextual reasons, including historical cleavages, ideological distances between parties, competition for the same voters, regional or subnational conflicts, personal rivalries among elites, and (especially) impending presidential elections. The question is whether the legislative powers of presidents have an indirect effect in shaping pro-government sentiment net of these other important factors. Although possessing robust legislative powers may allow presidents to recruit parties to their cause, the deployment of these powers in subsequent coalition management can impose costs on the executive. Our theoretical framework, as outlined in Chapter 4, claims that a president will choose the coalition management tool that appears to him or her as being the least costly option at a given moment in time. This understanding blends two very simple ideas: a cost minimization approach (politicians are misers when it comes to political capital) and a bounded rationality approach (politicians have incomplete information and scarce time, and therefore they will reach for the tool that seems the most efficient given these limitations). As discussed in Chapter 4, we identify several clusters of variables that typically shape presidential perceptions of costs: these are system-level factors, coalition-level factors, and conjunctural factors. In this chapter and in the following Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, all of which deal with presidential tools, we reflect on how these intervening variables affect recourse to the toolbox. The question at hand, then, is: what factors shape the cost of deploying legislative powers? At the system-level, we expect that the electoral system, the party system, and the overall strength of the legislature will influence the relative cost to presidents of deploying legislative tools. The early literature on comparative presidentialism from the 1990s yielded some dominant hypotheses about the interrelationships among electoral system design, party system configurations, and the relative costs that presidents incur when they deploy direct policymaking instruments. Delegation theory (Carey and Shugart 1998; Negretto 2004) makes two related claims in this regard. First, legislators may be concerned that extreme party fragmentation may lead to decisional paralysis, and this may lead them to cede constitutional decree authority (CDA) to the

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president in order to secure governability. Second, given the strong extent to which electoral systems shape the incentives for the career advancement of politicians, legislators consumed by parochial (as opposed to national) affairs may delegate national policy-making authority to the president in order to focus on the localized issues that link them to their constituents (Shugart and Carey 1992). As a member of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, which uses a highly personalizing version of open-list proportional representation, commented about CDA and urgency provisions: In reality, what the legislature ends up doing is [merely] confirming or rejecting proposals that come from the executive…[These are] presidential decrees (medidas provisórias) and urgency requests. Presidential decrees, which, in my view should not have any particular priority, end up being debated in the legislature. So, the legislature has become a kind of ‘counter-signatory’—that is, as long as it is taken care of by individual amendments that secure political support for members in their electoral bases. I reiterate that we have neither single-member districts, nor closed-list PR, nor public financing. The whole thing is just too wide open. (BRA40)

The Brazilian case has often been held up in the literature as a combination of strong presidents with weak, undisciplined parties (e.g. Mainwaring 1999; Ames 2001). Yet a contrasting case is provided by Chile, where stronger, more cohesive parties enter into preelectoral coalitions, form governments, and participate in dialogue with the president. A Christian Democrat with deep experience inside the centre-left Concertación coalition described the practice of regular party meetings with the president: Rather than in our party, every Monday we had meetings in La Moneda [the presidential palace] where we devised the legislative agenda. There were no surprises regarding either presidential announcements nor the legislative urgencies. As you know, in a presidential regime, the legislative agenda is set by the president, but we communicated the needs of our districts, of our communities. We would say to the government ‘you know what? This is happening, why not legislate about this?’ and when we did so we got some very important feedback. On Mondays, we held meetings with our parliamentary group leader and our party’s president where we determined the political agenda for that week. I would say that we did not do so unanimously, because these sorts of decisions are never unanimous, but the truth is that there were never any surprises regarding legislative priorities. (CHL25)

Our Chilean MP reveals that legislators clearly acknowledge the agendasetting role of the formateur, but at the same time describes a far greater role for party leaders than is the case in Brazil, and this can elevate the relative cost to Chilean presidents of deploying unilateral tools. As we discuss in Chapter 7, leaders of coalition parties in Chile are usually on the inside of government agenda-setting.

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For legislative tools, the system-level factors that are the most favourable to the president—i.e. that imply the lowest relative costs to the use of legislative powers by the formateur—are high levels of party fragmentation and a parochial legislature. These characteristics are present to varying degrees in all of our country cases. Although Chile’s parties are disciplined and sit in a professionalized legislature, the country has a notably high level of party fragmentation, as did pre-Correa Ecuador; and of course Brazil consistently has the most fractionalized party system in the democratic world. Kenya, Benin, and especially Malawi present lower overall levels of party fragmentation, but the parties in each of our African cases rank highly on parochialism and clientelism. The mixed electoral systems used in Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia are highly conducive to the cultivation of personal vote bases among legislators (see Table 4.1 in Chapter 4), which is likely to induce them to delegate important policy domains to the president. These system-level factors present highly favourable terrain for the deployment of legislative tools by presidents. Given the high association of party fragmentation with minority presidents, we should expect presidents under coalitional presidentialism to use the policy-making tools at their disposal to overcome problems of coordination in fragmented multiparty legislatures. The exceptions are cases like Chile, which as we will see in the next section possessed an electoral system counteracting this impulse. Turning to coalition-level factors that affect the relative cost of deploying legislative powers, the behaviour of formateurs is likely to be affected by those key features of coalitions that we describe in Chapter 3: the size of the presidential party, the ideological configuration of the coalition, and the degree to which the cabinet is composed of partisan ministers (as opposed to technocrats). Other things being equal, the relative cost of deploying legislative tools is likely to be lower when the president’s own party holds a dominant position within the floor coalition. This can lead to the formation of ‘agenda cartels’ in the legislature, which prevent the assembly from interfering too much in the legislative laundry list of the formateur (Amorim, Cox, and McCubbins 2003; Zucco 2009; Zucco and Lauderdale 2011). Conversely, if formateur parties are relatively small but still aim to channel the content of the presidential agenda, then the president is exposed to more intra-coalitional veto players, and is likely to choose ordinary means of legislation over unilateral tools. As we showed in Chapter 3, the cases covered in this book observe immense variation in formateur party dominance. We illustrate examples of the effects of this factor in the following section. Ideological heterogeneity within the floor coalition may also affect the formateur’s decision to deploy legislative powers as a tool of coalition management.

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In cases where the coalition is ideologically diverse, the transaction costs of securing agreement on policy may be unacceptably high for the president, leading him or her to use unilateral legislative measures (such as exclusive initiative or CDA were it exists) to establish a new status quo with minimal participation by the assembly (Pereira et al. 2005; Remington et al. 1998). Ideological diversity, understood especially as distance of the floor parties from the president, also raises the possibility that one or more coalition legislators may seek to amend draft legislation proposed by the executive. In these cases, the formateur may choose to deploy veto power—or even the threat of a veto—in order to maintain priority legislation intact. There is also the possibility that the president himself might be an independent, an ideological extremist (i.e. distant from the median coalition partner), or both. In such cases, the potential for intra-coalitional conflict is significant, and supporters of the president may prefer to tolerate a more active legislative role for the formateur. Finally, the relative cost of deploying direct legislative power can be raised or lowered by several key conjunctural factors. The most important of these revolve around variants of crisis conditions, which can be related to economic performance, international or domestic conflicts, or other situations of emergencies, whether real or imagined. Perception of crisis is likely to alter the motivations of both coalition legislators and formateurs. From the perspective of coalition partners—that is, sitting members of the national legislature—policy crises may take different forms, but they often have three things in common. First, national crises require rapid legislative responses. Second, the agility of the assembly may be hampered by collective action problems. Third, many crisis situations require the adoption of policies that may prove to be unpopular (e.g. austerity measures, fiscal conservatism, conscription, amnesties, peace treaties, and the like). If all or even only some of these conditions are present, legislators face a scenario approximating the delegation theory referred to earlier (Carey and Shugart 1998). From the perspective of formateurs, crises serve as a reminder that the president is the only politician elected from a single national district and who has policy responsibilities for the entire nation. The more severe the crisis, the more likely the incumbent is to assert the prerogatives of executive leadership. Of the five tools in the presidential toolbox, the tool that is most congruent with this view of leadership is the formateur’s direct legislative power. No other tool in our framework—neither partisan power, nor cabinet authority, nor budgetary prerogatives, nor the exchange of favours—is likely to afford the president such a rapid and direct pathway toward a signature initiative. For this reason, the legislative powers of presidents are often used in high-visibility

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policy areas wherein the executive has a clear stake in credit-claiming and where the cost of coalitional defection is prohibitive. Some notable examples of minority presidents using legislative power to induce coalitional unity occurred during moments of severe economic crisis. In Brazil in 1990, Fernando Collor unveiled a daring plan to defeat hyperinflation by freezing 80 per cent of all consumer banking accounts. Collor used presidential decrees (then valid for 30 days) to implement all aspects of the plan, estimating correctly that his plan was so draconian that it would present a fait accompli to even his most sceptical supporters: overturning these decrees would create financial chaos in the country. For Collor, inflation control was indisputably the do-or-die objective of his presidency, but for his Russian contemporary Boris Yeltsin the equivalent issue was privatization. In the first half of 1994, Yeltsin spent months negotiating a privatization plan with his own coalition in the Duma, finally bringing it to a dramatic roll-call vote on 21 July 1994. Although the bill received 212 votes in favour and only 74 against, it fell 13 votes of the 225 necessary for adoption—in part due to strategic abstention by some of Yeltsin’s own coalition members. Yeltsin responded by using his presidential decree authority to implement the plan the very next day. Although Collor outflanked his own coalition and Yeltsin was partly abandoned by his, both used their constitutional legislative powers to secure their signature policies: proactively in Collor’s case, and reactively in Yeltsin’s. Yet while the costs of relying on legislative tools may be lowered by the presence of crisis, these costs may rise if legislative tools are routinely overused by presidents. Collor’s loss of legislative support by the end of his first year in office was linked to an excessive reliance on presidential decrees (Power 1998); similar reputations were developed by other formateurs in our sample (e.g. Yeltsin in Russia, Yanukovych in Ukraine), and even some interviewees who supported these presidents were quick to offer criticisms of their dependence on unilateral initiatives. A similar but perhaps more overlooked form of intra-coalitional tensions is generated by presidential use of the veto pen, especially when the partial veto is applied to legislation emanating from within the coalition itself. This phenomenon was cited by members of the Kocharyan coalition in Armenia (e.g. ARM36), but was especially acute in Rafael Correa’s coalition in Ecuador: the use of the presidential veto was the most frequently cited reason for intra-coalitional conflict between Correa and his Alianza PAIS. It is hardly surprising that formateurs would want to be the legislators-in-chief of their own coalition, but excessive enlargement of this role over time (absent the mitigating circumstances of the crisis factors cited above) can potentially elevate the costs of relying on legislative tools as the presidential term advances.

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This brings us to our final conjunctural factor: time. The fixed terms of presidentialism make time important in politics, as indicated by well-known ‘honeymoon’ and ‘lame-duck’ effects (Shull 1997; Howell and Mayer 2005). Both of these effects can be understood as shaping the capacity of a given coalition to say ‘no’ to its formateur: low ability during the honeymoon, high ability during the lame-duck phase. During the honeymoon, it is a nearly universal practice among elected presidents to introduce a major package of legislation (whether this package delivers on electoral promises or represents a bait-and-switch U-turn need not concern us here), and this inevitably leads formateurs to deploy their legislative powers for the first time on or shortly after Day One. The fresh electoral mandate combined with a desire to mark early successes is likely to bias the coalition toward greater tolerance of legislative tools in the first 100 days. The lame duck period—described variously as the final year of a presidency or as the period after a mid-term election—generates the opposite effect. Operational challenges inevitably emerge over the course of a president’s term and these can erode the formateur’s legislative effectiveness as the task of reelection, or electing a suitable successor, becomes more pressing (Amorim Neto 2002; Pereira et al. 2005). The key difference between honeymoon and lame-duck effects is that the former is likely to exaggerate the importance of a single tool—legislative powers—above all others, whereas the latter effect may have no clear directional impact on the choice of tools. The precise tools for coalition management in the final year of a presidency will also be contingent on time-variant coalition-level factors such as preelectoral alliances, the early departure of ministers from the cabinet, and of course the presidential aspirations of the non-formateur parties within the alliance. Although lame-duckness may not necessarily affect the selection of tools in a clear way, we suspect that it will tend to dull the effectiveness of all tools in the toolbox, as the authority of the incumbent president begins to deteriorate. Therefore, the effect of time is a conjunctural factor to which we will return again and again in our analysis of all presidential tools.

L E G IS L A T IV E T O O L S AT WO R K The ways in which presidents deploy legislative tools of coalition management are illustrated by four different presidents in this section: Chilean President Ricardo Lagos (2000–06), Russian President Vladimir Putin (2000–03), Beninois President Boni Yayi (2006–11), and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff

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(2010–14). As we explained in Chapter 3, each president faced different challenges in terms of coalition maintenance on Day One: Boni Yayi5 and Lagos (low maintenance); Dilma and Putin (high maintenance). Demands facing each president interacted with their agenda-setting prerogatives to shape the relative cost of deploying legislative tools. This is observable across a wide array of policy areas, including Lagos’s support for new taxes to finance social programmes; Putin’s legislation on sales tax; Boni Yayi’s ratification of overseas loan agreements; Rousseff ’s legislative amendments to the Forest Code. For Lagos and Putin, the political costs of unilateral legislative action and the prohibitive costs of deploying alternative tools of coalition management resulted in both presidents applying their agenda powers through ordinary means of legislation. In contrast, the divided coalitions that existed under Boni Yayi and Dilma weakened the constraints on, and thus lowered the costs of, deploying unilateral legislative powers. Each case also illustrates distinct patterns of legislative tool deployment in the face of different types of coalition resistance. President Lagos used legislative tools to cement intra-coalitional accords; Putin to co-opt superior policy ideas from other members of the coalition; Boni Yayi to win time and preserve a vulnerable status quo ante; and Dilma to reverse the effects of a legislative rebellion caused by ideological divisions in her coalition. The use by presidents of either proactive or reactive legislative strategies or a combination of both proved effective in each case. Legislative Tools to Cement Intra-coalitional Deals. It is a mistake to believe that legislative tools are used only in crisis moments, or only to discipline unruly coalitions. As the following Chilean example shows, presidents may choose to deploy their legislative powers even when their coalitions are apparently stable, programmatic, and disciplined. Elected in 2000, Ricardo Lagos was the first socialist to hold the presidency of Chile since the ill-fated Salvador Allende 30 years earlier. Having promised a major expansion of the social safety net, in 2002 Lagos was looking for new revenue in order to fund a set of welfare initiatives known collectively as Chile Solidario. In July of that year, he proposed a package of tax increases to Congress, including a hike in value-added tax (VAT), but also new levies on tobacco, diesel fuel, and alcoholic beverages. Lagos used his constitutional power to designate his revenue bill as one of ‘maximum urgency’ (suma urgencia). However, his coalition partners, the centrist Christian Democrats (PDC) objected to some of the tax increases as 5 The coalition that we refer to here was formed after the legislative elections of 2007 and not the presidential elections of 2006.

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well as to the fast-tracking of the bill, and pressured Lagos to withdraw the suma urgencia in order to permit further debate. When he did so, intracoalitional differences spilled immediately into the open, forcing the Lagos administration to retreat. The revenue proposals never made it past the Health Committee in the Chamber of Deputies, and the bill died a quiet death. This was a rare failure of coordination within the Concertación coalition that had governed Chile successfully since the transition to democracy in 1990. A year later, Lagos tried again. This time he negotiated behind the scenes with the Christian Democrats, achieving prior agreement on a phased introduction of the new VAT rates. He conducted a major media campaign in favour of his revised bill, and personally contacted dissident legislators. When he concluded that a deal was in place, Lagos sent a new bill to the lower house on 11 June 2003, again designating it with suma urgencia. This tactic gave the Chamber of Deputies only ten days to debate and vote on the bill,6 starting with the Finance Committee. The committee quickly amended the language to eliminate the tax on alcohol, and reported the modified bill to the floor with a favourable recommendation on 18 June. During the floor stage, Lagos made use of yet another constitutional prerogative of the president, this one allowing the executive branch to propose ‘on the fly’ amendments in the middle of congressional debate. The executive tried to reinstate the levy on alcoholic beverages, but was defeated on a separate vote, meaning that the Finance Committee’s version of the bill prevailed. Since the alcohol tax accounted for less than 10 per cent of the new revenues in the legislation, Lagos concluded that his deal was still basically intact. He allowed the bill to go to a roll-call vote on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, where it passed by two votes—with every member of the Concertación voting for it, and every member of the opposition voting against it. The process was then repeated in the Senate, again using the suma urgencia fast track. After some minor reconciliation of the Chamber and Senate versions, Lagos had his legislation back for signature on 10 July, only four weeks after he sent it to Congress. The final bill did not preserve his proposed taxes on alcoholic beverages, tobacco, and diesel fuel, but it gave him 90 per cent of the revenue increases that he needed for Chile Solidario. Lagos signed the bill. The Chilean tax debate of 2002–03 is instructive, with several clear implications for coalition management. First, President Lagos—who had been elected in Chile’s closest-ever run-off, whose Concertación enjoyed only slim majorities in Congress, and whose own party held the lowest share of

6 In 2010, a constitutional reform extended the period of suma urgencia debate from 10 to 15 days.

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seats within the coalition compared to any of his democratically elected predecessors—would not have won the day without deploying his impressive agenda-setting powers. This is a counterfactual claim, but one that is well supported by analysis of the earlier, aborted attempt at raising taxes in 2002. When Lagos relaxed his agenda control in 2002 (removing the suma urgencia as requested by the PDC), he simply removed the lid on simmering intracoalitional conflicts, dooming his proposals. Second, agenda-setting power in and of itself does not necessarily allow presidents to establish policy that is contrary to the will of the assembly; agenda powers work best in concert with a disciplined coalition or a pre-crafted ad hoc majority. In 2002, Lagos had fast-track authority but had no prior political deal with the allied Christian Democrats; in 2003 he had both. The 2003 scenario thus echoed Huber’s (1996, 1998) classic findings on France: that agenda powers are used not to impose executive preferences on a hostile majority, but rather to cement political deals that have been previously reached. Third, Lagos had multiple instruments of agenda control at his disposal: not only the right to request that each house of Congress act on his bill in ten days, but also the authority to fine-tune his legislation right up to the last moment by proposing amendments on the floor. This diversity of weapons in his arsenal gave him maximum control over the timing and content of his proposals. Fourth and finally, the Chilean tax reform shows that presidents are often empowered with various ways to dominate the legislative agenda short of the splashiest one, the power to issue a decree with immediate force of law. Constitutional decree authority (CDA) may be the best known of executive agenda-setting powers, and is stereotypically associated with dominant presidents (e.g. Carey and Shugart 1998), but many presidents make use of less dramatic legislative powers such as exclusive initiative, amendment rights, fast-track provisions, and strong veto authority. This returns us to the cost minimization approach outlined in Chapter 4. Lagos, as can be gleaned from Table 5.1, also possessed CDA—but he refrained from using it. Why did he do so? The answer highlights the two major cost factors affecting the outcome of this case: (1) the strongly programmatic nature of Chilean parties and (2) their extreme aversion to intracoalitional conflict. This aversion was due to the ‘binomial’ electoral system then in effect, which essentially reproduced the same alliances in election after election (Lagos was the third consecutive president elected by the Concertación coalition).7 For Lagos, the cost of deviating from the preferences of the 7

This system, which existed from 1989 to 2015, used open-list PR in districts with a magnitude of two. Each of the two main coalitions would nominate two candidates for the seats in question. To win both seats, the first-placed list would have to win twice as many votes as

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allied Christian Democrats was prohibitively high, as he discovered in his abortive tax reforms of 2002. In the successful resurrection of his proposals in 2003, he incorporated programmatic preferences of his allies but also kept them on the inside of legislative progression. Despite his impressive constitutional powers (the strongest in our sample), Lagos abstained from CDA, a decision fully consistent with the internal tradition and practices of his Concertación coalition (Siavelis 2000, 2014). Like other Chilean presidents, he found the costs of using cabinet tools unacceptably high as well, because the informal cuoteo system of portfolio allocation (discussed in Chapter 6) left him little room to manoeuvre.8 Lagos opted in the end for a series of secondtier legislative powers, but lowered the cost of their use by engaging in dialogue with his coalition partners. In some ways, the path followed by Lagos resembles that of Yanukovych in the Ukrainian public procurement reforms discussed earlier: presidents can combine proactive and reactive powers in a series of iterated interactions with the assembly. Even an outright failure of coalition management, i.e. one in which the president is defeated by his/her own coalition on the floor, can be salvaged through the use of reactive powers. Legislative Appropriation. A second example of the deployment of legislative tools illustrates how presidents may occasionally manage coalitions by offering policy concessions to their own allies, even as a second-order preference. This can be achieved by abandoning a given presidential initiative and adopting an alternative policy more congruent with the median legislator in the coalition. In Russia, the four-party coalition assembled by President Vladimir Putin during the Third Duma (2000–03) almost never defied the executive branch. A major exception occurred in mid-2001 when the government tried to implement a new sales tax. A 5 per cent sales tax had been tried and aborted on two previous occasions, in 1991 and 1998, but Putin believed that the tax should be made permanent as part of his broader attempts to reform fiscal policy in the early 2000s. Atypically, the president’s attempt to dominate the debate quickly ran into a voice with significant policy expertise—deputy Georgy Boos, who had the second-placed list; otherwise the second seat would be awarded automatically to the secondplaced list. This overrepresented the right-wing coalition and locked in a system of competition between two large alliances. 8

This informal institution grew out of the foundational agreement of the Concertación. Essentially it held that the constituent parties would receive cabinet portfolios proportional to their size in the floor coalition (similar to Gamson’s Law) and also that in each ministry, the number two official (sub-secretary) would have to come from a different party than the minister. For a discussion, see Siavelis (2006).

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served as tax minister in the Primakov cabinet under Yeltsin (1998–9). In 2001, Boos happened to be the deputy leader of Fatherland-All Russia (OtechestvoVsya Rossiya), the second-largest party in the Putin coalition. The debate on sales tax legislation almost immediately produced two rival bills from within the coalition: Boos introduced a private member’s bill in early April, and the Putin government followed suit with an alternative bill in late May. The main differences between the bills concerned whether the regions could add new items to the list of taxable products, whether the rate would be ‘up to’ 5 per cent or set directly at 5 per cent, and the forms of payment that would be affected (the government bill aimed to tax all transactions regardless of the method of payment, whereas the Boos bill was restricted to cash payments). The Boos version clearly had greater support within the four-party Putin alliance. When the government’s bill went to a first reading on 12 July, President Putin was abandoned by his own deputies, many of whom apparently found better things to do that day: his bill was defeated by 129–93, with five abstentions and a massive number of absences (223 in a chamber of 450 seats). When the alternative Boos bill came up for a vote the following day, it was approved by 279–71, with only 100 absences—a rare occasion of Putin being ‘rolled’ by his own coalition. In the wake of this surprising first reading, the major players within the coalition exercised remarkable restraint: Boos and Fatherland did not trumpet their victory, and Putin and his spokesmen did not criticize or retaliate against the dissidents. Rather, Putin instructed his own Unity Party to incorporate some of the ideas from the Boos legislation into a revised government bill. The government’s agenda cartel in the Duma thereafter took full control of the process, marginalizing Boos as a player while leaving his name on the final version of the legislation. The compromise version was passed on second reading in the autumn of 2001. Echoing the Ukrainian example discussed at the outset of this chapter, the Russian sales tax episode illustrates how presidents can use agenda control to calibrate their coalitions by acquiring improved information about the preferences of their allies. Putin supporters sent a message to the Kremlin that was duly received (and by margin of two to one, these allies preferred to send this message via absence rather than by voting openly against the government). What appeared to be an intra-coalitional conflict was handled in a low-key fashion; the case resembles learning by trial and error more than it does a case of outright coalition breakdown. For Putin, the cost of making a policy concession to Boos was rather low compared to either using CDA or awarding Fatherland a seat in the cabinet, which at the time was reserved only for the formateur party, Unity. Furthermore,

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the cost of using his partisan powers to discipline the Unity abstainers was unacceptably high: at the time, Putin was undertaking sensitive negotiations to merge Unity and Fatherland into a single party. These efforts reached fruition in December 2001, only weeks after this episode, creating today’s United Russia (Ivanov 2008: 80). Finally, this is clearly a case of what a Brazilian scholar, Rafael Silva e Silveira (2014), has called appropriation of the legislative agenda in coalitional presidentialism. Legislative appropriation occurs when the executive branch essentially steals, or better ‘co-opts’, policy ideas originating in the floor coalition.9 Even after a lapse in intra-coalitional coordination, both Fatherland and Putin were able to claim paternity of the final bill that was passed. Buying Time. A third example illustrates how presidents who are facing difficulty in managing their coalitions can use proactive legislative powers to preserve a status quo indefinitely. In ‘buying time’, presidents can prevent the emergence of alternative policy proposals and sometimes impose a fait accompli on a sceptical coalition. A French-trained economist, Thomas Boni Yayi was first elected president of Benin in March 2006. Like several other presidents discussed in this chapter (Yeltsin, Correa, Kocharyan), Boni Yayi was elected as an independent with a strongly technocratic bent. Having served as president of the West African Development Bank (BOAD) for ten years, Boni Yayi drew heavily on his connections in international financial institutions. Typical of his early governing strategy was his decision to contract three international loans in order to finance the construction of a 7-kilometre protective jetty on the coastline east of Cotonou, the economic capital. Coastal erosion is especially problematic around Cotonou, where poorer communities and commercial installations, including the port, are threatened by the encroaching water. In 2007 and early 2008, Boni Yayi was successful in signing over $70 million loan agreements with the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID), the Kuwait Fund for International Development (KFID), and the Saudi Fund for Development (SFD).

9

For this reason, Silveira (2014) argues that commonly used indicators of presidential dominance in executive–legislative relations (i.e. the share of approved legislation that was introduced by the president) can be very misleading under conditions of coalitional presidentialism. His work on Brazil shows that legislative proposals may originate among the floor coalition but then be preemptively adopted or reintroduced by the executive. When this happens, formal authorship of the bill will credit to the president an initiative that was not truly his or hers, thus exaggerating most quantitative measures of executive dominance. For analysis of intracoalitional contribution to legislative output in Brazil, see Freitas (2016).

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A review of debates in the National Assembly in 2007–08 shows a high degree of consensus on the rationale for these loans: all main political actors agreed on the need to contain coastal erosion and on the need to seek multilateral financing to do so. Nonetheless, a series of political mis-steps by Boni Yayi led coalition members to use the loan agreements as a form of leverage against the president. The central problem revolved around Boni Yayi’s poor initial use of cabinet tools. Although Boni Yayi was elected as an independent, legislative elections in 2007 gave his political alliance, Cauri Forces for an Emergent Benin (FCBE), a dominant voice in the coalition (over 65 per cent of its seats). With this formateur bonus, Boni Yayi preferred to appoint nonpartisan ministers and individuals connected to FCBE, much to the chagrin of the parties which had endorsed him in the second round of the 2006 presidential election. Although Boni Yayi had included several such parties in his first cabinet, a major cabinet reshuffle in June 2007 caused a deterioration in his ties with MADEP (African Movement for Development and Progress), the RB (Benin Rebirth Party), and PSD (Social Democratic Party). In December, 13 leading deputies defected from the coalition to form a new opposition group styled as the G13. By early 2008, disgruntled coalition deputies began to pressure Boni Yayi for a more partisan cabinet (and of course greater cabinet access for their own parties) in the only way they knew how: by holding hostage the international loan agreements that were so dear to the president’s reputation. Thus began a political stalemate lasting almost three years. While the RB and MADEP retained token representation in the cabinet, their deputies in the Assembly took to defying the president on a routine basis. Boni Yayi’s response was to deploy dramatic legislative powers in order to compensate for his technocratic bungling of cabinet tools. Article 68 of Benin’s 1990 Constitution reads as follows: ‘When the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the Nation, the integrity of the national territory or the execution of international commitments shall be threatened in a serious and immediate manner, and when the regular operation of political and constitutional powers shall be threatened or interrupted; the President of the Republic, after consultation with the President of the National Assembly and the President of the Constitutional Court, shall take within the Council of Ministers the exceptional measures required by the circumstances’ (italics added). On 28 July 2008, Boni Yayi claimed that he was required to invoke this article in order to maintain Benin’s commitments to international creditors, and he promptly used Article 68 to approve the loan agreements and break the stalemate. This would not be the last time he would invoke constitutional decree authority (CDA): he used Article 68 only three months later in order to approve a supplementary budget, and then again for the annual budget laws of 2010 and 2011.

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President Boni Yayi’s reliance on CDA did not occur on the first day of his presidency—very unlike the premeditation seen in the case of Fernando Collor in Brazil, discussed earlier. Rather, it occurred more than two years into his first term, as a strategy to save his presidency. The causal chain ran from misuse of cabinet tools, to a coalitional rebellion, to the deployment of legislative powers. In each stage of the game, the relative cost of deploying CDA became lower and lower when compared to other presidential tools. The president’s gravitation toward CDA was due to Boni Yayi’s international reputation as a multilateral development banker, his need to retain the confidence of external lenders, and his own policy preferences, all of which produced unwavering commitment to the loan agreements. With a view to his external image, Boni Yayi insisted on a cabinet heavy on technocrats, limiting his own options in portfolio allocation, and also refrained from budgetary indiscipline that would unnerve creditors. The end result was that Boni Yayi saw the gradual erosion of his legislative majority, and eventually could depend on only two parties in his original alliance (FCBE) for support, which was not always reliable. The cost of using CDA declined not only because other options were increasingly off the table, but also because there was little reason to fear political fallout from a coalition already in tatters. It is doubtful that Boni Yayi would have been reelected in 2011 if he had been unable to navigate the 2008–10 stalemate through reliance on legislative powers. Article 68 allowed him to buy time until he was rewarded with much greater personal electoral support (winning outright in the first round of the presidential election) and greater legislative support, with his own FCBE winning 41 of 83 parliamentary seats in April 2011. Cleanup After Coalitional Failure. A fourth example illustrates how presidents may use legislative powers to recover from an intra-coalitional defeat, ensuring a favourable outcome under the right conditions. The following case blends elements of the strategic use of veto powers (similar in some ways to the Yanukovych case discussed earlier) with the use of decree authority; in other words, a blending of reactive and proactive legislative powers in order to cope with a major setback. In Brazil in 2012, it fell to President Dilma Rousseff to preside over the final voting of the reform of the Forest Code, a key statute for environmental regulation in the country. The Forest Code delimits conservation areas and provides guidelines for the proportion of land that should be preserved or reclaimed, issues that directly impact the amount of available resources that rural producers can exploit. Given that these issues pit environmentalists against agricultural producers, the process of reforming the Code was protracted and often acrimonious. Legislative debates began in 1999 in the late

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Cardoso presidency and continued throughout the Lula years (2003–10). In December 2011, the Senate approved the Dilma government’s preferred version by a vote of 59–7 and sent it to the Chamber of Deputies. A casual observer of the Brazilian Congress would have assumed that presidential preferences would easily prevail in the lower house: at the time, Dilma’s governing coalition was the broadest and most diverse ever recorded in Brazil or in any of the country cases analysed in this book. Some nine parties were represented in the cabinet, with eight more minor parties participating in the floor coalition, giving the president a working coalition of over 400 seats in the 513-member Chamber. Yet, this large coalition required high maintenance, and was riven by ideological divisions that were evident on environmental policy: the president’s own Workers’ Party (PT) was far more favourable to green politics than the pivotal PMDB, its main coalition partner, which contained a large number of local bosses who benefited from lax rules on deforestation. Even though the bill had sailed through the upper house, Dilma was caught unawares by an eleventh-hour rebellion in the Chamber of Deputies. On 25 April, deputies were asked to vote up or down on a new version of the Forest Code that included last-minute amendments added by Paulo Piau, a member of the pro-presidential PMDB. Piau, an informal spokesman for the cross-party ‘Rural Caucus’,10 sought to take the power of defining conservation areas away from the federal government and give it to the states. This was a clear effort to empower large landowners and ranchers—many of whom double as provincial oligarchs and have strong influence over local law enforcement—against environmental regulators in Brasília. Both President Dilma and her governing PT vocally opposed the proposed changes, and she gave explicit instructions to her co-partisans to push back against deforestation. Yet her heterogeneous governing coalition also included over 100 members of the Rural Caucus, which was openly hostile toward environmentalists throughout the entire process of public debate. Mainly because the watered-down version of the Forest Code split the coalition, the Chamber of Deputies defied Dilma by passing the bill with 274 votes in favour and 184 votes against. This was portrayed as the most important legislative rebellion in Brazil in nearly a decade, and also as an embarrassing example of failed coalitional coordination (Pereira 2014). Despite losing the battle, the President used a powerful cocktail of legislative powers to win the war. On 25 May, armed with her line-item veto, Dilma

10

This cross-party group styles itself as Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária (agriculture, livestock, and landowners’ caucus) and maintains a sophisticated organizational structure complete with membership lists and whips (http://fpagropecuaria.org.br).

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struck out 12 of the 84 articles of the Chamber-approved Forest Code. Simultaneously and separately, she used her constitutional decree authority to make 32 other changes to the Forest Code: these included 13 minor modifications, five completely new clauses, and 14 additional articles that were copied verbatim from the earlier Senate-approved version (effectively, the presidential pen served as the ‘conference committee’ that reconciled the two versions).11 Although the two actions were legally distinct, the veto message was sent to Congress together with the new presidential decree, meaning that Dilma was cleverly using her reactive and proactive powers at the same time to ‘fix’ the Forest Code and recover from her coalitional conflicts. She was aware that her line-item vetoes would likely prevail (veto overrides are rare in Brazil, and there had been none in the previous seven years), and moreover, that if Congress decided to amend her separate presidential decree, she could eventually veto those changes as well. That is in fact what happened. The Chamber of Deputies amended the decree by adding nine clauses championed by the Rural Caucus, and when the decree returned to Dilma’s desk on 18 October,12 she predictably used her line-item veto again to kill those clauses and restore the Forest Code to the version she preferred. This action basically ended the ping-pong game.13 All in all, an embarrassing breakdown of coalition discipline led to a reversionary outcome favourable to the president, although it took six months to achieve. The key causal factor in the Forest Code rebellion was a coalition-level variable: ideological heterogeneity. In a case like the Forest Code that affected both deeply held values (i.e. green politics) and material interests (i.e. land for agribusiness), these tensions could not be managed simply with the aid of cabinet tools and budgetary powers, and the coalition temporarily split. Although Dilma retained considerable partisan powers over her own PT, the PT represented only a fifth of coalition seats; and rather than engage in open warfare with her largest coalition partner, the PMDB, it was easier for Dilma to use her ample legislative powers simply to amend the legislation herself.

11

‘Dilma veta 12 pontos e faz modificações no Código Florestal’, Estado de São Paulo, 26 May

2012. 12

When Congress proposes any changes to a presidential decree, technically it becomes a ‘conversion bill’ (projeto de lei de conversão) and returns to the president in this new form. If a decree is approved verbatim by Congress, it does not return to the president, but is sent to the president of the Senate who promulgates it as law. 13 The Chamber half-heartedly installed a special committee to analyse the new round of vetoes, but the committee capitulated to reality and dissolved itself by December 2012.

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The cost of using legislative powers was low because the upper house had already approved a version of the Forest Code that Dilma liked, and she could claim that she was merely restoring the bill to the status quo ante; and also because the threat of a veto override was not credible. After she exercised her veto and decree powers to fix the Forest Code, Dilma found that coalitional disunity actually worked to her advantage, because no extraordinary countermajority could be formed against her.

HOW M Ps P ERCEIVE THE LEGISLA TIVE POWERS OF P RESIDENTS Although political scientists have attributed great importance to the legislative tools that presidents use to manage their coalitions, the MPs we interviewed placed less priority on their importance than that of other tools. In our survey, MPs were asked to rank the importance of ‘direct legislative powers of the president, such as decree or veto powers’ in the management of coalitions relative to the other four tools in the toolbox: partisan power, budgetary authority, cabinet tools, and exchange of favours (CPP survey item B10). Overall, of 338 valid responses, just 17 per cent of legislators ranked legislative powers in first place and 36 per cent ranked this tool in either first or second place. However, this aggregate result concealed some notable inter-country differences. For example, 35 per cent of Ecuadorean legislators ranked this tool first in terms of importance, whereas only 6 per cent of Brazilians did so. Interestingly, the three countries that ranked this tool in last place were all African cases: Benin (40 per cent), Malawi (33 per cent), and Kenya (32 per cent). This is consistent with the relatively low formal legislative power in the hands of the African presidents included in our analysis. Our survey of MPs also uncovered other suggestive evidence that a constitutionally strong presidency does influence the strategic calculus of parties. When asked why a political party might choose to join a presidential coalition (CPP survey item B9), the percentage of legislators selecting ‘to increase the party’s influence over public policy’ was broadly in line with the legislative powers commanded by presidents in the different country cases (see Figure 5.2). Consistent with the scoring of the legislative powers of African presidents in Table 5.1, the lowest in our sample, African MPs were the least likely to identify the policy benefits of coalition membership. Latin American MPs in our sample were twice as likely to identify policy influence to be an

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% Citing ‘Influence Over Public Policy’ as Main Reason Parties Would Join Coalition

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80.00

CHI

60.00

ECU UKR RUS

40.00

ARM

MWI 20.00

KEN

2.0

BRA

BEN

3.0

4.0

5.0

6.0

7.0

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Formal Legislative Powers of the President

Figure 5.2. Percentage of MPs responding that ‘Parties join coalitions to increase their influence over public policy’ by formal legislative powers of presidents. Notes: Y axis is the percentage of national MPs choosing ‘to increase the party’s influence over public policy’ as the most important of six possible reasons why a party would join a presidential coalition (see text). Sources: CPP Survey of MPs (item B9) and Comparative Constitutions Project (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2). N = 9, r = .853, sig at < 0.01.

important reason for joining presidential coalitions. This is consistent with the higher concentration of legislative power in the hands of Latin American presidents. The result for Chile, the political system that has the highest presidential legislative powers score in our sample (a consequence of the Pinochet-era constitution still being in force) is the most striking. Over 70 per cent of Chilean respondents identified policy influence as the most important reason why parties chose to join the president’s coalition. The overall pattern of the relationship between policy-seeking incentives for coalition membership and the strength of the president’s legislative power illustrated in Figure 5.2 also appears to be significant at the cross-sectional level. With an N of nine cases, the correlation is .853 and is significant at .01. Moreover, in substantive terms, MPs frequently commented on the legislative advantages of being part of the president’s coalition. As a member of the Russian Duma explained:

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Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective

Whereas the position of the faction was decisive in the Supreme Soviet,14 the position of the government became decisive in the passage of bills under the new arrangements.15 [Under the new Constitution] an amendment which was not supported by the government automatically had no chance. I think we still have the problem of imbalance between the executive and legislative powers because law-making functions are delegated to the executive. It [the executive] should be responsible [only] for implementation. In our reality, the government gives itself goals and tasks, distributes resources, defines the institutional environment and criteria for success, and reports to itself along these lines. (RUS35)

A Ukrainian legislator, too, commented bluntly about the advantages of being on the inside of the pro-presidential legislative cartel: You immediately become a member of the decision-makers. When I was recently asked where it is easier to work, in coalition or in opposition, I said: definitely in the coalition. Because I know that there is the majority behind me. A law that I propose, after being discussed with my faction and other factions, will be adopted. (UKR04)

The likely explanation for these responses is that coalitional presidentialism produces agenda cartels that effectively defend presidential preferences on the floor of the assembly and thus provide a strong incentive for MPs to delegate their legislative sovereignty to the executive branch. This hypothesis is supported by the response of MPs to the statement that ‘Presidential coalitions encourage the legislature to transfer policy making authority to the president’ (CPP survey item B2.B). Figure 5.3 shows that of the 353 legislators, 70 per cent agreed with the delegation hypothesis, and there were fewer inter-country differences: national means were all similar to the pooled mean, with only Ecuador (55 per cent agreement) diverging. Mainstream delegation theories of executive–legislative relations would hold that legislators believe that they gain benefits from policy delegation to the president. Our survey statement posits that coalitions themselves are the transmission belt of authority delegation to the president, so it could be hypothesized that attitudes about delegation are shaped by whether respondents belong to the government coalition or to the opposition. Across our sample, members of incumbent coalitions evinced a much higher rate of agreement with the delegation statement (78.4 per cent) than did members of the opposition (58.3 per cent), and this difference is statistically significant at