Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control 3030675246, 9783030675240

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS SERIES EDITOR: GIANLUCA PASSARELLI

Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control Edited by Jung-Hsinag Tsai

Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics

Series Editor Gianluca Passarelli, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics publishes books on all aspects of presidential politics. We welcome proposals for monographs, edited volumes and Pivots on topics such as: • • • • • •

Contemporary presidencies and presidential powers Presidential elections and presidential party politics Presidential relations with the legislature The media and presidential communication The administrative presidency and presidential advisers The history of presidential offices and presidential biographies

The series focuses on presidents throughout the world, including both directly elected and indirectly elected presidents, both single-country and comparative studies of presidential politics. It also includes volumes on conceptual or theoretical aspects, such as how to measure presidential power. Moreover, the series considers book projects on the reform of presidential politics, e.g. the reform of presidential elections. For further information on the series and to submit a proposal for consideration, please get in touch with: • Commissioning Editor Ambra Finotello ambra.finotello@palgrave. com • Series Editor Gianluca Passarelli [email protected]

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15600

Jung-Hsinag Tsai Editor

Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control

Editor Jung-Hsinag Tsai Department of Political Science National Chung Cheng University Chiayi, Taiwan

Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics ISBN 978-3-030-67524-0 ISBN 978-3-030-67525-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © White House Photo/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Editing a book is a daunting challenge since it needs to coordinate the contributors of different chapters on one hand and to apply the analytical framework to all the selected countries or cases on the other hand. As an editor, I am deeply indebted to Professor Robert Elgie. I had a chance to travel to Ireland to discuss the book project with Professor Elgie in 2018. Without his encouragement and thoughtful ideas, this work would not have been possible to be published. Unfortunately, Professor Elgie could not make it to see this book published. His untimely passing is such a great loss to the field of political science. Professor Robert Elgie has been a bellwether of the study of semipresidentialism and presidential powers. Professor Elgie is very prolific and outstanding. He has published 16 books, 50 academic articles, and 40 book chapters, etc. Since the French jurist and political scientist, Maurice Duverger spearheaded the study of semi-presidentialism in Western Europe, Professor Elgie has carried forward the global exploration of semi-presidential countries and to the focus of presidential power. Semi-presidentialism has been adopted by one-third of countries in the world, forming a tripartite distribution of the constitutional types with presidentialism and parliamentarism in the constitutional universe. The enactment of presidential powers is the linchpin of semi-presidential systems or presidential systems. Professor Elgie unremittingly devoted his life to focus on these two important political topics. The main purpose

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of this book is to memorialize Professor Robert Elgie and his academic legacy. My greatest thanks go to the contributors of this book for applying the contextualized factors to explicate how some presidents fail to legislate even though their party has a majority in the legislature, and to clarify the challenges facing a president in leading the legislature in semipresidential or presidential countries. I would also like to thank the editor of Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, Professor Gianluca Passarelli and Ambra Finotello from Palgrave. Without their endeavors, I could not go so far as to get the book published. Finally, I am very grateful to my colleagues of Semi-presidentialism Study Group in Taiwan and would like to especially thank Professor Yu-Shan Wu, Professor Jih-Wen Lin, Professor Hong-Ming Chen, Professor Yu-Chung Shen, Professor Chun-Hao Chang, Professor Tzu-Chiao Su, Professor Pei-Chih Hao, and Professor Feng-Yu Lee. I owe enormous gratitude to their discussions in the annual meetings of Semi-presidentialism and Democracy. My family has been very supportive of my job and this book is dedicated to them as well.

Contents

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Presidents, Unified Government, and Legislative Control Jung-Hsinag Tsai A Gently Slopped Leadership: Parliamentary Support for Presidents in France Damien Lecomte and Olivier Rozenberg Power Scope and Party Disunity of Semi-Presidentialism in Taiwan: The Perspective of Political Participation of Elites and the Masses Yu-Chung Shen and Jung-Hsinag Tsai President and Congress in the Period of Unified Government in America Jung-Hsinag Tsai Political Institutions, Democratization, and Incumbent Party Cohesion Under Unified and Partial Unified Governments in Mexico Yen-Pin Su and Fabricio A. Fonseca Consensual Decision-Making and No Rebels: Presidentialism in Indonesia Patrick Ziegenhain

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Presidents, Unified Government, and Legislative Control: What Have We Learned? Jung-Hsinag Tsai

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Fabricio A. Fonseca is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of Latin American Studies, Tamkang University, Taiwan. Damien Lecomte is a Ph.D. student at the University of Paris I, France. Olivier Rozenberg is Associate Professor in the Center of European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, France. Yu-Chung Shen is Professor of Political Science at Tunghai University, Taiwan. Yen-Pin Su is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Jung-Hsinag Tsai is Professor at the Department of Political Science, National Chung Cheng University. Patrick Ziegenhain is Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations, President University, Cikarang, Indonesia.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 5.1

Causes for the degree of cohesion Average dissent on government bills in the presidential majority group in National Assembly between 1981 and 2019 Analytical framework of semi-presidential operation in Taiwan Evolution of the effective number of legislative parties in the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico (1991–2018) (Source Calculated by the authors)

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 2.1

Table 2.2

Table 3.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 5.1 Table 5.2

Table 5.3

Table 6.1

Legislatures, presidents, and cohesion Average dissent on Government bills, its frequency and average depth in the presidential majority group in National Assembly between 1981 and 2019 President’s unpopularity and average dissent on Government bills in presidential majority group between 1981 and 2019 Background and follow-up political career development of the presidents of the Executive Yuan Presidential victories on roll-call votes of conflictual issues House support and senate support for the president’s position The distribution of seats by political parties in the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico (1991–2018) Incumbent party cohesion in a vote for executive-sponsored bills in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies (1998–2019) Former members of different parties who were elected deputy under the MORENA in the 2018 legislative elections The seats and the percentage of seats of the respective presidents’ parties

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CHAPTER 1

Presidents, Unified Government, and Legislative Control Jung-Hsinag Tsai

Introduction A prominent strain in the conventional wisdom of comparative politics asserts that unified government, in which the same party controls the presidency and the legislature, fosters smoother relations between the executive and legislative branches than the divided government. Unified party control is said to be more effective in enacting legislation since the executive has the necessary majority in the legislature. However, this book argues that under unified government, presidents can be spectacularly unsuccessful in getting legislation passed. Unified party control of the branches of government does not automatically provide a solid basis for presidents to dominate the legislature; a lot depends on the president’s institutional strengths and partisan powers. Some presidents have a more divided and much less powerful coalition than others under unified government. When the president and the majority in the legislature have

J.-H. Tsai (B) Department of Political Science, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7_1

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a conflicting policy and electoral goals, deadlock may ensue, even when the government is unified. Schattschneider (1942: 131) acutely observes that in the United States, most of the president’s troubles are likely to be made for him by his partisans in Congress and the roll calls demonstrate that parties are unable to hold their lines in a controversial public issue when the pressure is on. Unlike executives in parliamentary systems, U.S. presidents cannot count on members of their party to support their policy preferences, and even with unified party control, the American system guarantees conflict between the president and Congress (Bond and Fleisher 1990: 81–82). Equivalently, in France, presidents can face serious internal cleavages from their parties in the parliament. Ninety-seven deputies of the ruling party (Union for A Popular Movement) in the National Assembly opposed the tax shield to set a ceiling of 50% for the wealthy people in the 2011 budget which was proposed by President Sarkozy (Reuters 2010). On the same token, with a legislative majority in the National Assembly, President Hollande faced intraparty conflict as three socialist deputies voted against and 41 others abstained in the vote on the government’s stability program, 2014–2017 in 2014 (Kuhn 2014: 445). Unified party control can link two of the branches of government together, but it does not guarantee that they are on the same page all the time. We cannot assume that a single party with a majority in the legislature must have a high degree of cohesion and provide consistent support to the president. Overemphasizing unified control over separated branches can be the consequence of a failure to account fully for the different degrees of lawmaking power in various contexts. Presidents, even under unified government, must exercise their legislative influence within the constraints of institutional features and political dynamics. Through the lens of this analysis, we seek to provide insight into the failure of some presidents to legislate even though their party controls a majority in the legislature and to clarify the challenges facing a president in leading the legislature. Within the president’s party in the American Congress, the mainstream faction of members would support the president and cross-pressured members would oppose the president (Fleisher and Bond 1996: 731). The president’s legislative success or failure depends on whether his/her coalition is unified or divided. If most members of the party endorse the president’s policy proposal and can garner enough votes for a majority, then the few members opposing the proposal will not change

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the outcome. When the legislative coalition is split, then the president will have immense difficulty in putting through an agenda. The U.S. and French experiences lead us to ask an important question: Why do some unified governments turn out to be more divided than others? Answering this question is the focus of this book. Within unified governments, some presidents are less successful than others in influencing the parliamentary agenda. Some members of the majority party in the legislature may have a substantial incentive to develop their own proposals to counter the president’s initiatives in pursuit of their electoral goals. The factors that drive these members apart from the president and their own party will be thoroughly scrutinized in this book. The principle of the separation of powers consists of the deliberate division of power between the president and legislature. The legislature is designed to be independent and powerful, able to legislate alone. When the president’s party also controls the legislature, the branches of government are merged into one instead of being separated. The president can employ party mechanisms to bring the legislature into line. However, unified partisan control does not guarantee that the president and the legislature will act in unison. Even presidents with considerable partisan support in the legislature may find it difficult to muster enough votes to pass every one of their proposals. For example, President Donald Trump’s party controls the two houses of the U.S. Congress, but he still failed to persuade the Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) when some Republican senators refused to vote with the majority (Binder 2018: 83). On January 20, 2018, the U.S. federal government was shut down after the Republican-controlled Senate failed to pass the stopgap budget when five Republicans voted against it (Cowan et al. 2018). These are not deviant cases. According to one study, presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Carter enjoyed below-average success in getting legislation through Congress during periods of unified government (Rudalevige 2002: 184). Specifically, President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was unable to pass his hospital cost containment bill even though the Democrats controlled the two houses of Congress (Peterson 1990: 18). Between 1947 and 2000, 47.9% of the agenda was deadlocked even when there was unified party control of the presidency and Congress in the United States (Binder 2003: 45).1 In recent decades, even 1 When government was divided during this period, only a slightly higher percentage (53.8%) of the agenda was deadlocked (Binder 2003: 45).

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members of Congress within the president’s party have not hesitated to challenge the president when they felt the institutional power of Congress was illegitimately threatened, or if they had major policy differences with the president (LeLoup and Shull 2002: 6). The constitutional separation of powers provides a recipe for intraparty conflict since legislative majorities can defeat presidents without driving them from office and presidents can veto legislative proposals (Samuels and Shugart 2010: 9). In addition, the constitutional design assures that the president and members of Congress face somewhat different electoral circumstances and that ideological homogeneity within Congress and across the branches is never absolute (Sinclair 2006: 240). There is no democratic principle to resolve the problem of dual democratic legitimacy (Linz 1994: 7). When the president and the leadership of the legislative majority are members of the same party, differences in perspective and goals can make for a fragile relationship between them. The majority party leadership usually believes that its interests lie in acting on the president’s behalf and capitalizing on the available resources to pass many of the president’s initiatives. If there is perceived to be a legitimate mandate for the president’s agenda, stonewalling the enactment of such legislation may be seen as a political backfire. If the president’s agenda is unpopular, however, failing to amend it may be regarded as political suicide. Moreover, the party leadership, including the speaker and party leader, may consider that blocking the president’s agenda is the best way of achieving their members’ goals. If supporting the president fundamentally conflicts with furthering members’ goals, party leaders are likely to put their members first. Supporting positions of the national party and the president that conflict with local interests can be costly; the costs of opposing the national party and the president are minimal (Bond and Fleisher 1990: 83). The legislative process is not necessarily presidency centered, and lawmaking varies depending on which branch, the president or the legislature, is preponderant. Legislative stalemate can occur even in the presence of a majority in the legislature capable of pushing policy changes. During periods of unified government, presidents do not always have an advantage throughout their terms. Gaining an edge in the legislative process depends on how the president interacts with the legislature and members from the same party or alliance. Presidents may have political resources, such as decree power, patronage, arrangements for pork-barrel programs, and control over party or campaign resources, which can be used to reward loyal party

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members and punish opponents. Under unified conditions, presidents of some countries have a stronger basis from which to set the agenda and pursue their own independent policy proposals while others are in a more fragile position. This book aims to explain why some presidents are more successful than others in winning the support of legislators during periods of unified government. Specifically, it analyzes the influence presidents can exert under a system of separation of powers in competing for a share of power and what factors encourage or discourage parties from acting as cohesive and responsible collectives. To do this, it is essential to explore the effect of institutional arrangements on how presidents and their copartisans quarrel with one another during the process of legislation—that is, we are interested in the conditions under which divisions can occur in executive-legislative relations, or within the ruling party or coalition, under unified government. By unified government, we mean a situation in which the president’s party or coalition controls an absolute majority (more than half of the seats) in the legislature. If the legislature is bicameral, then unified government means that both houses are simultaneously controlled by the president’s party. In terms of government type, it is possible to form a single-party government or a coalition government, depending on the party system and the legislative constellation. Presidents in single-party governments may face challenges from within their party while presidents in coalition governments may have problems coordinating coalition parties. In this book, we try to shed light on the different causal mechanisms of executive-legislative interaction in single-party governments and coalition governments. First, we will review the literature on the interaction between the president and the legislature over legislation. Second, we will discuss the role of the political party in unified government. Finally, we will propose a framework for explaining the balance of power between the president and the legislature using the variables of confidence vote, electoral system, candidate nomination system, and unilateral presidential power.

Literature Review Previous studies have attempted to explain how the type of government affects the ability of presidents to pass their legislative agendas. Is it the case that important laws enacted during a period of unified government pass by large margins, while important laws enacted during periods of divided government pass by small margins? Mayhew (1991) argues

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that the performance of important legislation was similar between 1947 and 1990 in the United States, regardless of whether the government was unified or divided.2 However, some related studies refute Mayhew’s argument, asserting that presidents oppose significant legislation more often under divided government, and much more important legislation fails to pass under divided government than under unified government (Coleman 1999; Edwards et al. 1997). These studies focus on a comparison of different government types rather than differences within the same government type. Another work emphasizes the importance of political parties. Majority parties are legislative cartels that use their power to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation (Cox and McCubbins 2007). Similarly, according to the thesis of conditional party government, when the preferences of party members are more homogeneous, party members in the majority party are more likely to give their legislative party institutions and party leaders stronger powers and greater resources and policy outcomes can be toward the center of opinion in the majority (Aldrich and Rohde 2000: 33–34). However, in some situations, the preferences of members of the majority party can be very heterogeneous or polarized, especially when the constituencies of some legislators are in serious conflict with official party policy. Another study highlights the tendency toward presidentialization, that is, of presidents have executive autonomy, bypassing the parties in the legislature and relying on personalized leadership (Poguntke and Webb 2005). Party features such as centralization or decentralization can influence the degree of presidentialization (Passarelli 2015). The presidentialization thesis has put the concentration of power above the separation of powers. However, not all presidents can dominate throughout their terms and some of them can be very vulnerable in handling intraparty or interbranch conflicts. Some presidents are forced to negotiate with leaders within the party or the legislature in order to push legislative proposals forward or introduce policy change. The balance of power within parties can decide whether presidents do or do not toe the party line in the legislature. One school of thought provides an insightful thesis for this book. It is quite common for popularly elected presidents to be in conflict with their parties, because presidents do not necessarily offer the resources of 2 Mayhew (2008: 124–125) indicates that even during the period from 1993 to 1994, when there was unified party control under the presidency of Bill Clinton, some landmark bills, such as the health care bill, failed to pass.

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the executive to reinforce the direction of party leaders in the legislature and can even alienate some legislative copartisans from legislative party leaders (Carey 2009a: 178). Even presidents with a strong legislative majority can have problems with cross-branch coordination (Samuels 2007: 706). Presidents can take different policy stands from their parties, and branches of the same party can confront each other from positions of mutual independence and must therefore negotiate (Samuels and Shugart 2010: 38). Party unity has been proved to be lower in systems with popularly elected presidents than in pure parliamentary systems (Carey 2009b: 158). Separation of powers maximizes incentives for incompatibility between branches of the same party (Carey 2009b; Samuels and Shugart 2010). The inability of presidents to force their agendas through the legislature is common, of course, in all democracies, more so in presidential systems (Ames 2002: 191). Presidents with extensive legislative powers can be constrained by the policy positions of their allies within the legislature, and weak presidents may be well-positioned vis-à-vis other players to build the coalitions necessary to legislate (Alemán and Tsebelis 2016: 1). Presidents in semi-presidential systems face the same challenges as their counterparts in presidential systems. This book offers an institutional and behavioral slant on relations between the president and parliament in periods of unified government. It aims to explain why some presidents succeed in winning the support of legislators and why others face more problems in getting certain legislation approved. Under a unified government, the president is an agenda-setter, free to initiate proposals. Usually, the president is the party leader and able to work indirectly through and with party leaders or whips over legislation. Lawmaking in a democratic system of separated institutions is more complicated than in a parliamentary system. In separated systems that accord substantial legislative powers to presidents, legislators have fewer incentives to value collective party goods and/or provide legislative support to the executive—because voting against the president and/or losing a particular vote in the legislature does not necessarily weaken the party or the individual legislator’s chances of nomination or reelection (Owens 2003: 23). Members of the legislature can propose bills on their own initiative or amend the president’s proposals. In the United States, between 1953 and 1996, two-thirds of the congressional agenda of potentially significant legislation was initiated by members of Congress, while presidential initiatives accounted for the rest (Edwards and Barrett 2000: 122). Under this system, both the president and the legislature can

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set the agenda. Some proposals only succeed by working across the aisle to reach a consensus between the ruling and opposition parties. Major policy proposals are unlikely to pass through the legislature unchanged. The president cannot expect to have the final authority to make laws. Not only can the content of legislation be the cause of disagreement between the president and the legislature, but also the sequence of bills can drive them apart. Presidents may have their own priorities when it comes to the order of legislation, and party leaders in the legislature may have very different ones. The president must sometimes take a lesser role in legislation because of changing political dynamics and multiple dependencies in the legislature. For example, the president may wish to change the status quo on some matter, while some groups or the public in general may want to keep things as they are. In these circumstances, the legislature can be caught in the middle. Because legislators need to respond to popular preferences rather than those of the president, they have a different perspective on how best to solve the nation’s problems. It is highly possible that the president will be rebuffed by the legislature and suffer more defeats on legislation.

Political Parties Under Unified Government Political parties are an indispensable instrument for carrying out a popular mandate and for bridging the gaps between the separated branches of government (Sundquist 1988). Under unified government, the majority party in the legislature has an incentive to reach an agreement between the branches, so the government is more effective (Sundquist 1988: 629). Party leaders in the legislature can serve the president by helping to get the presidential program passed or by stonewalling proposals the president opposes. However, presidents can face challenges from their party in the process of legislation. Lack of party cohesion in the legislature is the greatest barrier to effective presidential legislation. How successful presidents are in getting their program through the legislature depends on the extent to which presidential policy preferences and those of the parliamentary majority coincide or conflict. In the United States, the success rate for presidential initiatives between 1953 and 1996 was only 53%, even during periods of unified government (Edwards and Barrett 2000: 127). This means that 47% of presidential initiatives failed to become law. Even when presidents have had a partisan advantage, they have still traveled a bumpy road in the U.S. Congress. If the ruling party is divided, some

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members might vote against government-initiated bills or even vote with the opposition. For example, in April 2011, fifty-nine of the most conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives defected on the floor voting of the tax-cut bill even though the Republican Party had majority status (Aldrich and Rohde 2017: 42). A low level of cohesion in the president’s party disadvantages the president, as party leaders are forced to choose between the president and their rank-and-file members in the legislature. Party leaders in the U.S. Congress do not always support the president since they lead an undisciplined army that makes its own demands on them (Fleisher and Bond 2000: 161). Party leaders are influenced by their rank and file and must respond to their preferences, which sometimes conflict with the president’s position (Fleisher and Bond 2000: 163). Majority party leaders play an agenda-setting role during the process of legislation in the United States (Sinclair 2000: 143). Furthermore, speakers from the president’s party can use their procedural and party resources to oppose the president’s will. In the United States, the speaker exercises considerable control over the legislative agenda by means of gate-keeping authority, closed rules, and the right to offer counteramendments (Diermeier and Feddersen 1998: 611). Taken together, the legislature, whether in a presidential or semi-presidential system, is the hub of policy change, and intraparty conflicts can break out even in a period of unified government. The president and legislators from the president’s own party may also have different electoral incentives which will likely lead to friction over legislation. First, when a president finds it hard to achieve a balance with members of his/her own party, the whole program may be stalled or postponed, as the legislature may be unwilling to progress certain presidential proposals. The president will be pulling in one direction and the legislature in another. Even when there is agreement between the president and the majority in the legislature, it is likely that both sides will have to compromise and neither will get what they wanted at the outset. Second, some bills expose rifts in the majority party, as some party leaders will support them and others will oppose them. The minority party can take advantage of this situation to form an opposing majority against a government-initiated bill. Splits within the majority party occur more often when the president is unpopular, as in order to get reelected, some members of the majority party will desert the president when their voters

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pressure them to do so.3 Keeping their party together is a difficult task for party leaders and even more so for presidents. In the United States, presidents failed to win the support of their own party about one-third of the time over roll call vote during the periods of unified government between 1953 and 1996 (Edwards 2000: 65). American plurality elections induce members of Congress to be individually responsive to their voters, while the presidential system eliminates the fear of losing a vote of confidence and thus makes the whipping efforts of party leaders more difficult—hence members’ higher levels of independence (Coman 2015: 363). We can therefore see that institutions influence the degree of party unity and personal vote appeal. Unified government does not guarantee the loyalty of the majority party cohort in the legislature. Primaries can dilute the influence of party leaders over members of the legislature. The fact that legislators have to raise their own campaign funds and that their chances of being reelected may not depend on the president’s legislative success both help to diminish cohesion in the president’s party (Edwards 2000: 64–65). In the United States, presidents are the nominal leaders of their parties, but their copartisans in Congress have little say in the selection of a president or in the policy positions a president takes, while presidents have little control over who wears their party’s label in Congress or the policies they support (Fleisher and Bond 2000: 158). On average, one-third of members of the president’s party have voted against the president in the House (Fleisher and Bond 2000: 168). As the president and members of Congress are independently elected and have different constituencies, there is no assurance that their legislative preferences will be identical, even if they are party colleagues (Sinclair 2003: 42). Presidents cannot routinely count on the votes of members of their own party, even during periods of unified government.

3 This situation can also arise under the British parliamentary system. Of the 167 members of the ruling Labour Party in the House of Commons, 138 voted against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which they knew to be unpopular with voters (Owens 2003: 26–27). Benedetto and Hix (2007) argue that members of parliament who have been refused ministerial office or who are ex-ministers cannot be controlled by the promise of ministerial office and are hence free to vote against the government and in accordance with their own policy preferences. However, in general, party unity in governing parties is higher under parliamentarism than under presidentialism (Carey 2007: 95).

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The Balance of Power Between the President and the Legislature In systems with separation of powers, the president and the legislature check and balance each other. When faced with a recalcitrant Congress, U.S. presidents can use their veto or threat of veto to wrest policy concessions from the legislature (Cameron 2000). Use of the veto or the threat to use it is likely to move legislation toward the president’s position (Sinclair 2006: 248). The threshold for overriding a veto can significantly affect the balance of power between the president and the legislature. If the threshold is a two-thirds vote in the legislature, the veto will prevail if legislators cannot muster enough votes. If only a simple majority is needed, it will be more difficult for a presidential veto to succeed. Presidents who wish to use their veto powers to induce the legislature to send them acceptable bills the first time around need to communicate with the legislature when it strays out of their acceptable range (Sinclair 2003: 48). Veto threats are a signal that the president needs to communicate with the legislature. In unified governments, the use of the presidential veto declines, but presidents can still use the threat of a veto to increase their influence over legislative outcomes (Sinclair 2006: 250). Presidents can also use the veto or veto threat to solidify a fragmented majority party or to make some members of the legislature neutralize their positions or amend their proposals. Usually, presidents have a package veto—meaning that they must accept or reject the entire bill. Other presidents have both package and item veto powers. Veto power is a reactive form of power that gives presidents a say in the process of legislative decision making. Faced with a president with veto power, a legislature can still push the envelope to a certain degree. In the United States, Congress will press forward with a bill despite the threat of a presidential veto, and if the president signs the bill, Congress wins by getting exactly the bill it prefers (Gilmour 2011: 473). It is a strategic game of taking it or leaving it between the president and Congress. By passing a popular bill that the president will veto, members of the majority in Congress can claim credit for themselves and generate blame for the president (Gilmour 2011: 473). If the president does veto the bill, Congress can override the veto by mustering a two-thirds vote. If the override fails, Congress can then pass another bill, throwing the ball back into the president’s court. Since the veto power in United States is a wholesale

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action, Congress has three strategies it can use in response to this presidential prerogative. First, it can pass a bill by a two-thirds vote, so the president cannot use the veto. Second, Congress can attach the legislation as a rider or amendment to another bill, so if the president dislikes the rider but likes the bill to which it is attached, he/she has no choice but to accept the bill (Wasserman 2011: 115). Riders on appropriations bills are quite common, since appropriations are necessary for the government to operate and riders allow members of Congress to push through a piece of legislation that might not survive on its own merits (Fisher 2014: 132). Congress also uses limitations riders to stop the government from spending money for specific purposes in order to control the president and the administration (Macdonald 2010). The third strategy Congress uses to get around the presidential veto is to delay some legislation that is necessary to address certain problems in order to damage the authority of the president. In other supermajorities such as three-fourths, legislative attachment and inaction are powerful weapons for the legislature to use in confrontations with a president who has a say in legislation. Simply put, Congress can assert its power in some situations and the positions of Congress may not always square with the positions of the president. The president and Congress are, at least implicitly, involved in a zerosum power game in which the ascendency of one institution must come at the expense of the other (Peterson 1990: 5). From time to time, the policy initiatives of the president can be stymied by Congress and bills passed by Congress can be vetoed by the president. Different institutional settings offer a rich context in which to explore the determinants of cohesion in the legislature and executive-legislative relations. First, restrictive rules, such as the confidence vote, are a useful instrument for prime ministers or presidents seeking to persuade legislators within the ruling party or coalition to support governmentinitiated policies. Second, for legislators seeking reelection, electoral systems provide incentives either to pursue their vote or to rally behind the party. Third, candidate selection methods can influence the voting behavior of legislators. Fourth, presidential prerogatives, such as decree power, can provide the resources necessary to curry favor with legislators and win their support on legislation. The four institutional variables described above account for most of the variance in executive-legislative relations in this study. Here, we examine the degree of variation in cohesion between a president and a legislature controlled by the president’s party or coalition by focusing on presidential or ruling-party bills

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which fail to be passed in the legislature.4 We are mostly concerned with major items of legislation that fail to be passed during periods of unified government.

Confidence Vote and Cohesion The confidence vote is an institutional arrangement that exists only in some semi-presidential countries (and never in presidential systems). It allows prime ministers to couple the passage of a bill with government survival or breakdown (Huber 1996a, b). If the bill fails to pass, then the legislature must be dissolved for new elections. To avoid the cost of an election with an uncertain outcome, members of the ruling party in the legislature, especially dissidents, would tend to vote for the governmentinitiated proposal. To ensure vote unity, prime ministers invoke the confidence procedure when faced with important votes that divide their coalitions (Coman 2015: 363). Confidence votes can solidify the cohesion of the ruling party, but they are weapons of last resort for prime ministers wanting to strengthen discipline in the legislature.5 Some party members or parties may have strong incentives to support the precise policies that their constituents most prefer, and the prime minister invoking a confidence vote can iron out the divergences within the party or across the coalition parties (Huber 1996b: 280). Concurrently, a confidence vote allows dissenting members, who are prompted to accept a controversial bill by default, to air their dissent in an electorally useful way (Döring 2003: 151). This kind of restrictive rule makes some dissenting members of the legislature shift the electoral burden to the party. The enactment of a confidence vote is strongly affected by the level of policy conflict between the prime minister and members of the legislature. A confidence vote creates an incentive for those copartisans who profit from the current government to vote for the government’s proposals and allows ruling coalitions to capture more of the distributive benefits from the legislative process (Diermerier and Feddersen 1998). Party leaders in systems with a vote of confidence procedure are more likely to push for the development of mechanisms that allow them to control 4 Ruling party bills include bills initiated by the president or the cabinet or sponsored by legislators from the ruling party. 5 Cohesion and discipline are different concepts. Cohesion is a party acting in unison and discipline is simply one way to achieve this outcome (Hazan 2006: 3).

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backbenchers or to filter out voters, because their use brings greater benefits and they are more acceptable to backbenchers because they help to avoid some collective problems (Coman 2015: 364). In France, under Article 49.3 of the constitution, “the prime minister may, after deliberation by the Council of Ministers, make the passing of a finance bill or social security financing bill an issue of a vote of confidence before the National Assembly. In that event, the bill shall be considered passed unless a resolution of no-confidence…is carried.” The government’s proposal is passed automatically unless a majority of legislators votes to censure and bring down the government (Becher et al. 2017: 253). In a recent example of the use of a confidence vote in France, the Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls shepherded a contentious economic reform package through the parliament in 2015 despite being faced with a revolt by the left wing of his party (Becher et al. 2017: 256). A recent cross-nation study of thirty-six countries also found that the relationship between vote of confidence and vote unity is statistically significant (Coman 2015: 376). The confidence vote is a powerful weapon that prime ministers can use to enforce discipline when their party is divided or faltering. Semi-presidential countries also have a no-confidence mechanism which the opposition can use to topple the government. If it succeeds, the legislature must be dissolved. This institutional design encourages members of the legislature to toe the party line and prevent the cabinet from being sacked. We would expect semi-presidential countries with the confidence vote or no-confidence vote mechanisms to have more vote unity than presidential countries without these two arrangements.

Electoral System and Cohesion To varying degrees, strong or weak party discipline can demonstrate the strength of a legislature. Strong party discipline means that members stick with their party most of the time, whereas if party discipline is weak, legislators are more concerned with their personal reputation among their constituents than with the views of their party when voting (Carey and Shugart 1995: 419). Electors are said to support candidates who vote according to their personal view—if those views accord with the voters’ own—but to sanction legislators who fail to live up to their personal reputation (André et al. 2014: 233). A candidate’s personal vote is that portion of the candidate’s electoral support that originates

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in their personal qualities, qualifications, activities, and record (Cain et al. 1984: 111). For example, in the United States, incumbents rely on a number of mechanisms to increase their personal vote, including obtaining federal tax dollars for projects within their districts (commonly referred to as pork-barrel projects, earmarks, or more formally as fiscal legislative particularism); undertaking casework for individual constituents or groups within the district; and a range of other activities, such as arranging tours of federal buildings, nominating congressional interns, and attending public meetings and other events in their district (Martin 2011: 344). Party reputation or party vote is the portion of a legislator’s electoral support that depends on the degree of party unity or disunity. A unified party record helps enhance the party’s electoral performance, as it creates a clear brand name with which voters identify (Shomer 2017: 63). In these circumstances, legislators with a party label have strong incentives to adhere to the party’s leadership and maintain party unity. However, a unified party can use its disciplinary tools to punish recalcitrant legislators even to the extent of refusing to renominate those who fail to follow the party line (Shomer 2017: 69). All in all, there is a trade-off between demanding that legislators follow the party line and giving them scope to cultivate their personal vote by responding to diverse interests (Carey 2009b: 29). Institutional incentives and constraints can affect legislators’ decisions whether to pursue their personal vote or their party vote, and the electoral system is an important one of these. Reelection is the proximate goal for any legislator, and the electoral system constitutes the rules of the game for attaining that goal. Electoral systems may be divided into two broad categories: party centered and candidate centered. Closed-list proportional representation systems and single-member district systems with party endorsement are the most party-centered systems, while openlist proportional representation systems, multi-member district systems, and single-member district systems with open endorsement are the most candidate-centered ones (Carey and Shugart 1995; Hix 2004; Owens 2003). Closed-list systems allow party leaders to exert a high degree of control over their legislators, who have no incentive to break ranks with the party (Hix 2004: 196). Party unity is stronger where electoral lists are closed than where legislative candidates compete against members of their own parties for personal votes (Carey 2007: 94). With more party reputations, members of the parliament would vote along the party line while members of the parliament with more personal reputations have more

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autonomy to vote on bills based on their own judgment or the preferences of their constituents (Depauw and Martin 2009). Simply put, cohesion or voting unity is stronger in the countries adopting party-centered electoral systems than the countries enacting candidate-centered electoral systems.

Nomination and Cohesion When the nominations procedures are under the control of party leaders, it is a centralized mechanism for candidate selection and when citizens or party members can directly choose their candidates such as primary or preference vote, it is a decentralized way for candidate selection (Sieberer 2006: 154). In some parliamentary systems, prime ministers or chancellors exercise complete control over nominations which can maximize cohesion by rewarding loyal members of parliament and by punishing rebellious ones. Control over nomination gives party leaders an important stick to control MPs who are concerned about finding themselves in electable positions in upcoming elections, but also allow leaders to filter candidates and select those who are more likely to share their views and thus to toe the party line once in parliament (Coman 2015: 367). If prime ministers fully control the nomination and deselection of candidates, they are equipped with both sticks and carrots. In some presidential or semi-presidential countries, presidents or prime ministers dominate the candidate selection process, while in others only voters or party members have a say in selection. When selection is in the hands of the president acting as party leader, it can reinforce party unity in the legislature. When presidents have no direct power to veto the nomination of party candidates, party discipline in the legislature may be less rigid as nomination is decentralized. Different candidate selection methods produce different institutional effects. We can divide these methods into five categories depending on their degree of inclusivity. The most inclusive method is to have the entire electorate choose candidates; another highly inclusive method allows party members to decide; then there is the selectorate method which uses party delegates; a more exclusive selectorate that consists of only the party elite; and the most exclusive method of all that involves selection by a single leader (Rahat and Hazan 2001: 301–303; Hazan and Rahat 2010: 36–37). In the United States, political parties choose their candidates through primaries. Primaries, especially open primaries, are the most inclusive method since voters can opt for candidates directly. When party

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delegates or the party elite choose the candidates, prime ministers or presidents have substantial influence over the result if they control the party apparatus. Direct elections of candidates are the least subject to control by prime ministers or presidents.6 But if a prime minister or president can single-handedly decide the list of prospective candidates, this method becomes the most centralized system of nomination. When legislators are chosen by small selectorates, such as the party elite or party delegates, they will display a fairly high degree of party cohesion and tend to promote the demands and interests of the party (Hazan and Rahat 2010: 150–151). Party unity may be at its lowest when legislators are selected through primaries, since nominees have to be responsive to voters rather than the party. As for candidates who are chosen by all members of the party, they may face conflicting pressure from both voters and their party, and that can have a detrimental effect on party unity (Hazan and Rahat 2010: 151–152). To sum up, different candidate selection methods can impact the degree of party cohesion in the legislature.7 Party unity is higher when legislators are responsive to a party elite or party delegates, while parties are less united in systems in which candidates have to make a direct appeal to voters.

Unilateral Presidential Power and Cohesion In the American presidential system with separation of powers, the president is an independent authority who can act in a way that may not be a simple reflection of congressional will (Moe and Howell 1999: 855). Presidents can issue unilateral action to change the status quo and has a fait accompli advantage for agenda control if Congress is not able to pass new legislation that would overturn or change it (Moe and Howell 1999: 862). Presidents have always made law without the explicit consent of Congress, sometimes by exercising the general powers delegated to them 6 Lundell (2004: 30) argues that the dimensions of centralization versus decentralization and inclusiveness versus exclusiveness also to some extent overlap. 7 Itzkovitch-Malka and Hazan (2017) argue that candidate selection methods can condition the effect of electoral systems on legislative attitudes and behavioral norms, and under exclusive candidate selection methods, substantial differences of degree of party cohesion exist between proportional representation (PR) and single member district (SMD) electoral systems. This means that cohesion can be influenced by many institutional or interactive factors. For related discussions of electoral systems and candidate selection, see also Hazan and Voerman (2006).

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by congresses past and present, and at other times by reading new executive authorities into the constitution itself (Howell 2003: 13). Decree power and statutes are two important tools that presidents use to shape legislation or policy unilaterally. Decree power is the authority of the executive to establish law in lieu of action by the assembly (Carey and Shugart 1998: 9). There are two kinds of decree power: constitutional decree authority and delegated decree authority. Constitutional decree authority grants the president to unilaterally initiate policies by decree while delegated decree authority connotes that assemblies pass legislation to give the president the authority to make new laws by decree (Carey and Shugart 1998: 5). Constitutional decree authority (CDA) effectively enhances the ability of executives to introduce policy changes that legislators might not have initiated and might not have approved in the absence of this instrument (Negretto 2004: 532). Through decree power, presidents can set the policy status quo and lead the process of shaping the support of a legislative majority for the policies they wish to implement. Executive orders satisfy the preferences of legislators, because legislators are the actors who delegate this power and who have ample opportunity to overturn (via their own considerable lawmaking powers) any undesirable presidential policies initiated by executive orders (Pereira et al. 2005: 181). For example, in Brazil, decree power makes presidents powerful legislative actors, but this power is largely delegated by the Congress which selectively influences policies in areas that are politically relevant to its members (Reich 2005: 7). When legislators are less supportive of presidential preferences, presidents have unilateral power to promote their policies. By resorting to decrees, politically insecure presidents not only find ways of circumventing other institutional actors who might be opposing them, but also enjoy the privilege of position-taking, framing policy questions, or delivering directly on promises made to key constituencies (Pereira et al. 2005: 183). Apart from decree power, presidents in various countries can also use statutes to increase their influence over legislation. Presidents can offer political rewards or monetary payments by enacting statutes to buy off cross-pressured legislators who face a seesaw battle between following the party’s orders and pleasing their constituents (Saiegh 2011: 26). In countries with institutionalized party systems, party leaders can use the carrot of advancement and the stick of nonadvancement to impose a certain degree of organizational loyalty on their membership, while in countries with inchoate party systems, money payments are a possible strategy for

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governments to control individual legislators (Saiegh 2011: 114). For example, in the United States, policy coalition leaders have strategically capitalized on pork-barrel benefits to purchase legislators’ votes in favor of broad-based, general interest legislation in line with the leaders’ policy preferences (Evans 2004: 2). By the same token, in Brazil, some presidents have strategically proposed pork-barrel programs in exchange for supporting votes in Congress (Ames 1995). Deputies in the Brazilian Congress trade pork for money because pork-barrel success helps incumbents raise their campaign finance by rent-seeking from government contracts (Samuels 2002). Pork barrel can really grease the wheels in the legislature where wavering or ambitious legislators are possible to derail. Figure 1.1 demonstrates four explanatory variables for a high or low degree of cohesion in presidential systems and semi-presidential systems. Table 1.1 displays a ranking of institutional factors affecting legislative cohesion in presidential and semi-presidential countries. By comparing these factors in different countries, we can explain why some legislatures are more unified than others during periods of unified government. First, this study asserts that countries with a confidence vote are likely to have greater party unity than countries without a confidence vote, as the confidence vote mechanism is a potent weapon that party leaders can use to bring their legislators into line. Second, when candidate nomination tends to be concentrated in the hands of the president or leaders of the president’s party, the degree of cohesion in the parliament is higher than when nomination is more decentralized. If candidates are High Cohesion Confidence

Partycentered

Without Confidence

Candidatecentered

Cenralized

Decentralized

Low Cohesion Fig. 1.1 Causes for the degree of cohesion

High Unilateral

Low Unilateral

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Table 1.1 Legislatures, presidents, and cohesion Legislature

President

Cohesion

Confidence vote

Electoral system

Nomination

Unilateral power

Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No No

Party-centered Party-centered Candidate-centered Candidate-centered Party-centered Party-centered Candidate-centered Candidate-centered

Centralized Centralized Centralized Centralized Decentralized Decentralized Decentralized Decentralized

Strong Moderate Strong Moderate Strong Moderate Strong Moderate

or Low or Low or Low or Low

Ranking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

produced by primaries or selected by local delegates, they cannot easily be controlled by the president or party leaders. When presidents or party leaders have a lot of power over nomination, they can punish wayward legislators by removing them from the ballot. Third, candidate-centered electoral systems encourage personal voting in the legislature, whereas party-centered electoral systems incentivize legislators to vote along party lines. It has been proved in a comparative study that party unity is lower when legislative candidates have to compete against members of their own parties for personal votes than it is when nominations are controlled by party leaders and electoral lists are closed (Carey 2009b: 134). Fourth, presidents who have strong unilateral powers—including powers to veto legislation and issue decrees, etc.—can exert more pressure on legislators to act in ways contrary to the wishes of their party or their constituents than presidents who have only moderate or low levels of unilateral power (Carey 2009b: 15). This is because presidents with high levels of unilateral power can curry favor with legislators by offering resources; they can not only provide incentives to toe the party line but also impose sanctions on legislators who breach discipline. When presidents are aligned with the leaders of the majority party, party unity is strengthened. Argentina is a good example of a country with strong party discipline. Argentina has a presidential system but does not have a no-confidence vote. It does, however, have other institutions that provide a basis for strong party discipline. It has a closed-list proportional electoral system which allows party members or party elites to control the list of candidates (Jones 2012: 49). The nomination system is therefore fairly centralized. Presidents

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in Argentina have a moderate level of decree power which incentivizes legislators to toe the line. The level of party discipline in the Argentine Congress has been high (Jones 2002). This shows how institutional arrangements can encourage cohesion within political parties. Weak party discipline ensues when countries do not have such institutional mechanisms as the no-confidence vote and when they have candidate-centered electoral systems, decentralized nominations, and only moderate presidential decree powers. In these circumstances, it can be hard to prevent majority party legislators from voting against government-initiated legislative proposals. The presidential system in Brazil is illustrative of this scenario. Brazil does not have the institutional arrangement of the no-confidence vote. Party discipline in the Brazilian Congress is influenced by other institutional features—it has an open-list proportional electoral system which tends to be more candidate centered than party centered (Ames 1995: 326). However, state-level party leaders play an important role in determining nominations for federal deputies (Samuels 2003: 4). In other words, nomination is decentralized to a certain degree. Presidents in Brazil have constitutional decree power, which allows them to rally support and enforce party discipline in the Congress through, for example, pork-barrel programs. Yet despite these presidential powers, some deputies obstinately refuse to support their party’s proposals (Ames 2002: 197). Presidents in Brazil cannot marshal the support of coalition parties all the time. Institutional features have contributed to a weakly disciplined party system in Brazil and party disunity is common. When the multiple institutional factors facilitating collective solidarity combine, party unity is high, but the opposite is the case when there is a combination of those institutional factors promoting legislative individualism. Potential conflicts of interest are, to varying degrees, inherent in all relationships between presidents and legislatures. This book centers on the institutional arrangements that drive or hamper party unity in the legislature and on the factors determining the capacity of presidents to put their stamp on legislation. There are two broad categories of presidential or semi-presidential government—single-party government and coalition government. Coalition government denotes that the president’s party is represented in the cabinet with other parties. Coalition governments can be more unstable than single-party governments, especially when, in a presidential or semipresidential system, the survival of the president does not depend on that of the government. In some presidential regimes, the lack of party

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loyalty and discipline means that a minimal “winning” coalition may not be enough to win consistently over time; minimal winning coalitions are also suspect in that they give inordinate power to smaller coalition parties which can become hostage takers (Raile et al. 2011: 324). A president without a clear majority in a multiparty situation with ideological and disciplined parties would find it difficult to govern (Linz 1994: 35). Multiparty presidentialism is likely to produce immobilizing executivelegislative deadlock, ideological polarization among parties, and difficulties with interparty coalition building (Mainwaring 1993). Coalition unity on legislative votes is reduced when cabinet posts are distributed disproportionally among coalition parties, while unity is increased when posts are distributed according to the number of seats each party holds in the legislature (Amorim Neto 2002). In presidential systems, parties do not need to be highly disciplined, but frequent indiscipline makes it more difficult to establish stable relationships between the government, the parties, and the legislature (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997: 419). With less-disciplined parties, presidents are sometimes forced to rely on ad hoc bases of support rather than counting on party leaders who can deliver the votes of their fellow legislators (Mainwaring and Pérez-liñán 1997: 454–455). In addition to party features, the power structure in the coalition cabinet can have a bearing on party unity in the legislature. Party unity is reduced when the president’s party is a minor party in the coalition and increased when the president’s party is dominant, all else being equal. In comparative terms, party unity is more difficult to achieve in coalition governments than in single-party governments. Within semi-presidentialism, there is a dual executive: president and prime minister. Unified government indicates that the president and prime minister are from the same party or alliance. In the scenario of the unified government in a single-party semi-presidential regime, the president and prime minister belong to the same party affiliation. In the scenario of the unified government in a multiparty coalitional semi-presidential regime, there are two possible modes. One is that the president and prime minister are of the same party. The other is that the president and prime minister are from different parties but are united within the same coalition. Global research shows that single-party governments perform better than coalition governments in terms of government legislative success (Cheibub 2007: 89). The task of satisfying all coalition partners is not easy and can cause intra-coalitional tensions (Chaisty and Chernykh 2017: 764). We expect that coalition governments will

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have more legislative conflict or deadlock than single-party governments, other things being equal. Here we treat the type of government is a contextual factor since different countries have different degrees of party fragmentation and ideological division.

The Structure of the Book Previous research indicates that when a president’s party holds a majority of the seats in the legislature, presidential initiatives have an easier passage, there is less conflict in the legislature, and the likelihood of executivelegislative deadlock is reduced. However, this book argues that the success of presidential initiatives depends on party dynamics and the president’s various institutional advantages. Under certain circumstances, a few legislators are confident enough to challenge a president from their own party. Some presidents have sufficient institutional powers and selective benefits at their disposal to sanction wayward legislators while others have to accept that some of their legislative initiatives will be defeated. To increase their chances of reelection, legislators from the ruling party may opt to be close to or independent from the president, depending on the president’s popularity. When legislators have to respond to constituents’ demands, they may vary their support for the president accordingly. Features of a country’s electoral system—for example, decentralized candidate selection—can make legislators from the majority party more responsive to local interests than to the national concerns of the president or the president’s party. Some presidents have resources at their disposal that encourage party cohesion, including decree powers, statutes, pork-barrel programs, and patronage, all of which are highly valued by legislators. However, these mechanisms can only succeed when legislators from the majority party do not face cross pressure from their constituents. As reelection is the top priority for legislators, they tend to cultivate their personal vote rather than remaining loyal to the president or the majority party. This book covers five presidential and semi-presidential systems with a wide variety of institutional arrangements and political dynamics. In Mexico, the presidencies of Ernesto Zedillo, Enrique Peña-Nieto, Andrés Manuel López Obrador are illustrative of unified governments, whereas Indonesia provides an illuminating example of executive-legislative interaction under coalition governments. The United States is a prototype of

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presidentialism and a basis for comparison. France and Taiwan respectively represent two different subtypes of semi-presidentialism, premierpresidentialism and president-parliamentarism. We choose Indonesia, Mexico, and United States because they have fewer constraints in terms of institutional features of presidentialism over legislative control. For France and Taiwan, they have some constraints within the constitutional contingency of semi-presidentialism. This book elaborates on explaining how institutional factors influence the ability of presidents to pass their legislative agendas through comparisons across presidential and semipresidential systems.

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Martin, Shane. 2011. Electoral Institutions, the Personal Vote and Legislative Organization. Legislative Studies Quarterly 36 (3): 339–361. Mayhew, David. 1991. Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946–1990. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mayhew, David. 2008. Parties and Policies: How the American Government Works. New Haven: Yale University Press. Moe, Terry M., and William G. Howell. 1999. Unilateral Action and Presidential Power: A Theory. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29 (4): 850–872. Negretto, Gabriel L. 2004. Government Capacities and Policy Making by Decree in Latin America: The Cases of Brazil and Argentina. Comparative Political Studies 37 (5): 531–562. Owens, John M. 2003. Explaining Party Cohesion and Discipline in Democratic Legislatures: Purposiveness and Contexts. The Journal of Legislative Studies 9 (4): 12–40. Passarelli, Gianluca. 2015. The Presidentialization of Political Parties: Organizations, Institutions and Leaders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pereira, Carlos, Timothy J. Power, and Lucio Rennó. 2005. Under What Conditions Do Presidents Resort to Decree Power? Theory and Evidence from the Brazilian Case. The Journal of Politics 67 (1): 178–200. Peterson, Mark A. 1990. Legislating Together: The White House and Capitol Hill from Eisenhower to Reagan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Poguntke, Thomas, and Paul Webb. 2005. The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rahat, Gideon, and Reuven Hazan. 2001. Candidate Selection Method: An Analytical Framework. Party Politics 7 (3): 297–322. Raile, Eric D., Carlos Pereira, and Timothy J. Power. 2011. The Executive Toolbox: Building Legislative Support in a Multiparty Presidential Regime. Political Research Quarterly 64 (2): 323–334. Reich, Gary. 2005. Executive Decree Authority in Brazil: How Reactive Legislators Influence Policy. Legislative Studies Quarterly 27 (1): 5–31. Reuters. 2010. France’s Sarkozy Faces Budget Rebels from Own Party. https:// www.reuters.com/article/france-budget/frances-sarkozy-faces-budget-rebelsfrom-own-party-idUSLDE6962AI20101007. Accessed 5 May 2018. Rudalevige, Andrew. 2002. Managing the President’s Program: Presidential Leadership and Legislative Policy Formulation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Saiegh, Sebastián. 2011. Ruling by Statute: How Uncertainty and Vote Buying Shape Lawmaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Samuels, David J. 2002. Pork Barreling Is Not Credit Claiming or Advertising: Campaign Finance and the Sources of the Personal Vote in Brazil. The Journal of Politics 64 (3): 845–863.

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Samuels, David J. 2003. Ambition, Presidentialism and Legislative Politics in Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Samuels, David J. 2007. Separation of Powers. In The Handbook of Comparative Politics, ed. Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, 703–726. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Samuels, David J., and Matthew Shugart. 2010. Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 1942. Party Government. Westport: Greenwood Press. Shomer, Yael. 2017. The Conditional Effect of Electoral Systems and Intraparty Candidate Selection Processes on Parties’ Behavior. Legislative Studies Quarterly 42 (1): 63–96. Sieberer, Ulrich. 2006. Party Unity in Parliamentary Democracies: A Comparative Analysis. The Journal of Legislative Studies 12 (2): 150–178. Sinclair, Barbara. 2000. Hostile Partners: The President, Congress, and Lawmaking in the Partisan 1990s. In Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, ed. Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher, 134–153. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Sinclair, Barbara. 2003. Legislative Cohesion and Presidential Policy Success. The Journal of Legislative Studies 9 (4): 41–56. Sinclair, Barbara. 2006. Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sundquist, James L. 1988. Needed: A Political Theory for the New Era of Coalition Government in the United States. Political Science Quarterly 103 (4): 613–635. Wasserman, Gary. 2011. The Basics of American Politics. New York: Pearson Longman.

CHAPTER 2

A Gently Slopped Leadership: Parliamentary Support for Presidents in France Damien Lecomte and Olivier Rozenberg

Introduction In May 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected President with a comfortable majority of two-third in the second round. One month later, his newly created party obtained 314 seats out of the 577 in the National Assembly, i.e. a majority of 54% and even 63% including a coalesced group. In July, one of the first bills to be discussed dealt with “moralization and trust in politics.” It was a clear commitment the President made during the electoral campaign and it was supported by public opinion. In short, the political situation was optimal for Macron. Yet, converging

D. Lecomte European Center for Sociology and Political Science, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] O. Rozenberg (B) Center of European Studies and Comparative Politics, Sciences Po, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7_2

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testimonies indicate that the passing of the bill was much discussed within the majority. Although there was no suspense over finally getting the green light from the Assembly, the content of the bill was modified in Parliament. An advisor to the minister in charge indicates for instance having spent three hours on phone with a key frontbencher in order to persuade him of the relevance of some bill provisions.1 The fact that an internal discussion was needed although the President was in the most favorable position possible is indicative of the lack of automaticity of parliamentary support for the President legislative initiatives in France. The 5th Republic established in France since 1958 is a well-known example of rationalized parliament (Huber 1996) to the point that Philip Norton once hesitated to consider the National Assembly and the Senate as proper legislatures (Norton, 1990). With the exceptions of periods of divided governments (1986–1988, 1993–1995, and 1997– 2002), the political system is dominated by the President. Since 2002, directly elected presidents have beneficiated from a clear support in the lower-assembly with the president’s group obtaining an absolute majority of seats. Presidents usually announce the legislative agenda during press conferences or TV interviews. They personally select the ministers in charge of preparing bills that are seemingly approved with no suspense in parliament. And yet, the example developed previously indicates that this tale of an unlimited leadership of the President is only one part of the story (see also Milet 2018). The details of each bill often have to be discussed at length under closed doors within the majority. Public criticisms are occasionally voiced by majority backbenchers. This has been particularly the case under the last parliament (2012–2017) with a group of about 30–40 socialist majority MPs among 295, month after month more openly opposed to the government (Lecomte et al. 2017). On some occasions, presidents even had to withdraw some proposals, as right-wing President Sarkozy over the forfeiture of nationality and left-wing President Hollande on the same topic. These difficulties for passing government bills in France call for analyzing in-depth the foundation of presidential influence in majority votes in the low assembly. We especially support the view that if the four institutional hypotheses developed in the introduction to this volume

1 Interview in Paris, 11 April 2019.

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matter in France, three contextual ones are also of increasing significance: the popular support for the president, the ideological cohesiveness of the majority and the majority micromanagement when passing bills. After having quickly presented the French political system, the trends related to the support for majority bills in the National Assembly are discussed in details. Periods of unified government have been considered without taking into account the Senate’s color. Indeed, as the National Assembly is given the last word in case of disagreement (except for constitutional issues and some institutional ones), the opposition of the Senate does not constitute a durable constraint for the President. In a third section, the four institutional hypotheses common to this volume are considered (confidence vote, electoral rules, candidates selection and decree power) before discussing the three contextual ones.

A Semi-Presidential System Driven by the President There is a rare consensus among scholars and practitioners about the weakness of the French Parliament. The significance of the 1958 shift largely explains this consensus. Before 1958, under the 4th Republic, France was characterized by a traditional parliamentary regime where unstable parliamentary majorities regularly broke governments. In 1958, De Gaulle conditioned his comeback on a new constitutional settlement that was far less favorable to Parliament. Constitutionally, the legislative branch faces two types of disadvantages. First, the President of the Republic holds important powers which do not require the countersignature of the Prime minister. Since 1962, this President is elected not by Parliament but directly by the people and, most importantly, Parliament can neither dismiss nor oversee him. This constitutes a major source of disequilibrium because the National Assembly (but not the Senate) can be easily dissolved by the President. Second, there is still a Government which is headed by a Prime minister and which can be censured by the Assembly (not the Senate), but many constitutional provisions are designed to protect the Government’s stability and agenda to the detriment of the Parliament. Those rules are numerous and cover all aspects of political life: Government formation and resignation, the oversight of the Government, the definition of the legal field, and, last but not least, the legislative procedure. In addition to these numerous constitutional limitations, a political one was added in 1962 with the election of a pro-President majority in the NA

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following a tense dissolution. Ever since, presidents have usually had at their disposal a rather solid majority in the Assembly which strictly follows the voting instructions of the Government. Many elements contribute to maintaining what has been called le fait majoritaire: the choice of the voters, the threat of dissolution, the effect of the plurality electoral system and the ascendancy of the presidential election over political life. Exceptions to this have been the three periods of divided governments (cohabitation) in 1986–1988, 1993–1995 and then the longest one in 1997–2002. As a result of the opposition between the Assembly majority and the President, the Prime minister was de facto imposed to the President and held most of the power. However, two reforms undertaken in the early 2000s have made such a situation less likely: the alignment of the duration of the presidential term with the legislative one (five years) and the decision to vote for the president before the Assembly—the parliamentary majority somehow owing its victory to the President. As a result of this constitutional imbalance, the capacity of the Parliament to initiate bills or to define autonomously its own agenda is strictly bounded. An aspect of the asymmetry between the executive and legislative power can be observed through the origin of adopted bills. Depending on the years, between one quarter and one-third of the bills originate from the Parliament. This proportion is certainly not negligible but an insight into the issues covered reveals that private bills often tend to focus on secondary topics related to day-to-day life rather than on major society choices. In addition, some of the private members’ bills indirectly originate from the Government because some ministers seek to avoid endorsing them publicly. Moreover, the Parliament is further constrained by limitations on its capacity to amend the texts it has initiated. While the Constitution (Article 44) states that both the Government and MPs have the right to amend legislative proposals, some additional dispositions privilege the Government. Financial amendments are strictly controlled as MPs cannot decide on their own to increase public spending. Article 44.3 also provides for a procedure for “package votes” which authorizes the Government to ask for a single vote on an article with the amendments it has presented or accepted. Constitutional amendments have sought to restore the role of the French Parliament. Since 1974, the Parliament has been allowed to request a constitutional review in the Constitutional Council with 60 MPs of the National Assembly or 60 senators. In 1995, a nine months

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yearly session has been implemented versus two short ones previously. In 2008, a major revision gave many new provisions to the Parliament, be it regarding the legislative procedure or oversight activities. For instance, governmental bills are considered in the plenary session as they have been modified previously by one of the eight standing committees—and not through their original version anymore. The authority to decide on the plenary agenda is not any more totally decided by the Government. Those numerous changes have not revolutionized the French political system but they clearly contribute to strengthening the situation of the French Parliament. In parallel with this “normalization,” a certain derationalization of parliamentary politics can also be observed for the last twenty years (Rozenberg). Collectively, MNAs are seemingly more active in tabling amendments and private member bills, questioning or just sitting in the hemicycle. Parliamentary groups duplicate less than before the national party system and tend to increase with a record of ten groups in the 2017–2022 National Assembly. And last but not least, unusual episodes of majority backbenchers rebellion have been observed during the terms of President Sarkozy (2007–2012) and Hollande (2012–2017). The next part gives a precise assessment of this last phenomenon.

A Strong Support, a Constant Decline Political party cohesion in Parliament, which was very precarious under the previous French regimes, was considerably strengthened under the 5th Republic: while the first legislature (1958–1962) still experienced internal party divisions, the 1962 dissolution marked a major turning point and an increase in bipolarization between the majority and the opposition (Sauger 2009). Majority discipline is indeed extremely strong in the French National Assembly and Government bills are systematically adopted: thus, when the President has authority over the Prime minister, i.e., when his party has a majority in the National Assembly, the Head of State manages to have all the bills submitted by his ministers adopted. The French President with a majority in the Assembly is undoubtedly more powerful, legislationmaking-wise, than, for example, a President of the United States whose party has a majority in Congress. However, this majority discipline is not absolute; on the contrary, it has tended to erode in recent decades. To objectively measure the support for the President of the Republic within the majority group of the National

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Assembly, public ballots are available: by default, voting in the National Assembly is by show of hands, but a public ballot may be held by decision of the president of the Assembly or at the request of the Government or the chairman of a parliamentary group or his delegate. During the public ballot, MNAs members of the National Assembly vote electronically and can press one of the three buttons on their personal boxes: “Support,” “Against,” or “Voluntary abstention,” the latter option being distinct from not taking part in the vote. From September 1981, at the beginning of the 7th legislature of the National Assembly, the verbatim report does not only list the names of those who voted one way or the other: the results are also recorded group by group, each time specifying the names of the parliamentarians who voted differently from the majority of their group.2 If one takes into account all public ballots on an entire Government bill during periods of unified government, i.e., excluding periods of cohabitation, it is possible to establish the degree of dissent that the president faces in the majority parliamentary group in the National Assembly. A complete count of dissenting votes was conducted for all public ballots on an entire Government bill from September 1981 in the 7th Parliament until the end of the 2018–2019 ordinary session of the 15th Parliament. It simply consists in noting, when there are any, the votes “against” a bill and the “voluntary abstentions” in the parliamentary group of the President of the Republic’s party. The number of dissenting votes is then related to the total number of members of the parliamentary group: this gives the proportion of voting units that the president “lost” during this public ballot on this bill. This calculation takes into account the “clarifications” (mises au point ) that MNAs can make in the verbatim report of the session when the vote mistakenly displayed is not the one that the MNA wanted to make. For each legislative term—or part of a legislative term—in which the president’s party holds the majority in the National Assembly, here is the average percentage of votes “against” and “voluntary abstentions” in the majority group for all public ballots on a Government bill, as well as the average percentage of total dissenting votes. It also indicates the frequency of these dissenting votes—i.e., the number of ballots on a bill for which there is at least one dissenting vote—and the average depth of the dissent—i.e. the average percentage of dissenting votes in those 2 Until 1993, the leaders of parliamentary groups could vote by proxy for all absent group members. Since then, the proxies are strictly limited to one per person at the National Assembly. Data on who delegate is made available since 2018 only.

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dissenting ballots (depth). Table 2.1 presents all data for the whole period and Fig. 2.1 offers a representation of the trend regarding dissent only (i.e., opposition and abstention). Table 2.1 Average dissent on Government bills, its frequency and average depth in the presidential majority group in National Assembly between 1981 and 2019 President

Party

Period

Mitterrand PS Chirac Sarkozy Hollande Macron

Public Against Abst. ballots (%) (%) on Gov bills

1981–1986 1988–1993 RPR 1995–1997 UMP 2002–2007 2007–2012 PS 2012–2017 LREM 2017–2019

190 134 14 83 123 132 101

0.01 0.04 0.06 0.63 0.60 0.66 0.06

0.15 0.08 0.42 0.96 1.24 1.75 0.41

Dissent (%)

Frequency (%)

Depth (%)

0.17 0.12 0.47 1.59 1.84 2.42 0.47

8.42 5.22 42.86 46.99 76.42 60.61 31.68

1.99 2.30 1.10 3.38 2.41 3.99 1.47

Source National Assembly, own calculations

3.00% 2.50% 2.00% 1.50% 1.00% 0.50% 0.00% MiƩerand 1981-1986

MiƩerand 1988-1993

Chirac 1995- Chirac 2002- Sarkozy 2007- Hollande Macron 20171997 2007 2012 2012-2017 (2019)

Fig. 2.1 Average dissent on government bills in the presidential majority group in National Assembly between 1981 and 2019

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The results demonstrate, not surprisingly, the very strong cohesion of the majority group in the National Assembly: the average dissent in all public ballots never reaches 2.5%. However, this confirmation of the stability of government majorities in France should not mask a dissension that tends to increase significantly in frequency and depth and can be particularly high in some public ballots. During the two five-year periods during which the Socialist Party was in the majority under the presidency of François Mitterrand,3 the Socialist Group experienced a rather high degree of cohesion to vote on the Government’s bills. During President Mitterrand’s first seven-year term, most of the dissenting votes came from the few radicals on the left associated with the Socialist Group and are mainly about electoral reforms. During the second seven-year term, the Socialists were mainly divided on the Maastricht Treaty, establishing the euro as the single European currency. The brief period of unified government in the first two years of Jacques Chirac’s seven-year term is more difficult to analyze, due to its brevity and the small number of public ballots on government bills. The right had a large majority in the National Assembly elected in 1993 and the President’s party, the Rally for the Republic (RPR), was the dominant party in the majority coalition. Dissenting votes in the presidential party were on average more numerous and much more frequent but still limited. The largest number of defections took place on President Chirac’s bill to end military service in February 1997. Dissent can be considered as a legacy of the “civil war” within the right during the 1995 presidential race when two candidates from the same party opposed each other. Since 2002 and while every five years the president’s party has always obtained an absolute majority, the dissension on Government bills among successive parliamentary majorities has clearly increased, despite a decline since 2017 under Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. After Jacques Chirac’ reelection, the new Union for a Popular Movment (UMP) became the hegemonic party on the right with about 360 seats in the National Assembly. President Chirac’s authority over his majority was declining

3 It should be noted that between 1988 and 1993, did not have an absolute majority in the Assembly (or abstention) of communist or centrist votes: in fully correspond to an unified government between (Rozenberg 2020b).

however, the socialist Government and had to rely on the support this sense, this period does not the President and the Parliament

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during this five-year period: the elderly Head of State, who had a long political career behind him, carried out his second term and, lost popularity in public opinion, especially after his failure to get the European Constitutional Treaty adopted by referendum in 2005. He was all the more weakened by the rise of his minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who took over the leadership of the UMP in 2004 and became a candidate for his succession. This situation did not result in a breakdown of the parliamentary majority in the National Assembly: the prospect of a possible victory in the 2007 presidential election with a new leader contained some divisions and the President’s parliamentary action was more paralyzed than challenged. However, government bills were met with hostility by several dozen majority MNAs. This was particularly the case with the constitutional revisions at the very end of the mandate, relating to the electorate of New Caledonia (63 votes “against” and 36 abstentions), the responsibility of the president (31 against and 22 abstentions) and the constitutional prohibition of death penalty (20 against and 10 abstentions). During the term, several bills also generated dissenting votes from some UMP parliamentarians: against banning religious symbols in schools, privatization of public energy companies, pursuit of devolution, regulation of copyright on the Internet, etc. In total, dissent in the UMP Group was becoming more frequent, affecting almost one in two Government bills, and deeper on average. But dissensions became even more frequent during Nicolas Sarkozy’s five-year term and, if the average extent of the dissension decreased, the general dissension was nevertheless greater than under his predecessor. The Head of State had to impose his authority on a reduced majority in 2007 to around 320 seats, certainly reelected in the wake of his victory and who had rallied to him, but who was not fundamentally “Sarkozyist” and in which he lacked loyal relays. In the meantime, Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential “style” was quickly challenged as being too authoritarian, agitated, and omnipresent in the media. The situation got worse as the president became unpopular in the first year of his mandate, leading to the defeats of his party and his allies in local elections and making his reelection increasingly uncertain although there was little doubt about his candidature. In this context, the various tendencies of the majority expressed themselves in Parliament: several Government bills were met with hostility from MNAs who did not hesitate to make their differences heard.

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The reform of bioethics in 2011, a sensitive issue affecting the personal conscience of parliamentarians, attracted the most dissenting votes with 15 votes “against” and 32 abstentions. But the UMP Group was also divided on subjects as varied as the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture (10 against and 32 abstentions), the reform of local and regional authorities (7 against and 26 abstentions), two laws tightening immigration policy (3 against and 21 abstentions on the first reading then 12 against and 16 abstentions on the second), Internet regulation (6 against and 17 abstentions), institutional reform (13 against and 5 abstentions), etc. Socialist nominee François Hollande won against Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 and his party gained a narrow absolute majority in the National Assembly with a group of just under 300 MNAs. This parliamentary term saw the strongest dissension within the majority group against Government bills: slightly less frequent than in the previous one, it was however significantly more massive. In addition to the huge unpopularity of President Hollande, which was reflected in the local elections, the ideological divisions of the Socialist Party and a gap between the candidate’s campaign orientations and the president’s policy leaded to unprecedented challenges against the President in the parliamentary majority (Kuhn 2014; Lecomte et al. 2017). From the first years of the term, disagreements were expressed among Socialist MNAs against the ratification of the European Budget Pact (with 20 against and 9 abstentions) and the first reform of labor law (4 against and 36 abstentions). But the protests went on an unprecedented scale with the “fronde”4 that emerged in the group after the lost 2014 municipal elections and the appointment of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In a concerted and massive way, between thirty and forty socialist parliamentarians abstained on several budgetary bills until the end of the mandate. The rebellion reached its highest level against the president’s plan to enshrine in the Constitution the forfeiture of nationality for terrorists:

4 «La fronde» (the sling) was the name given by the media to describe the leftist socialists who opposed President Hollande more and more vocally during his term. Putting in parallel kings of the ancient France and contemporary presidents, the name makes reference to some nobles’ opposition to the royal absolutism during the mid-seventeenth century.

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with 82 votes “against” and 36 voluntary abstentions, more than twofifths of the Socialist Group refused to support the constitutional bill. Beyond the concerted and massive protests by the “frondeurs ” targeted on budgetary bills, some dissenting votes were cast against various texts: in particular the merging of the regions (8 against and 11 abstentions), the reform of the intelligence system (11 against and 17 abstentions) and the reform of the pension system (18 abstentions). After the increase in dissension between the President and the parliamentary majority over the successive parliamentarian terms, Emmanuel Macron’s presidency shows a certain revival of unity with regard to public ballots on Government bills. The presidential party The Republic on the Move (LREM) is an unstructured party, founded exclusively around the person of the Head of State. Its parliamentary group is initially composed of about 310 MNAs including 90% of new MPs and even 55% of persons who had never been elected in any political position before.5 In those unprecedented circumstances, the political “contract” between the MNAs and the party founder ensured the group’s consensus on most votes on Government bills. However, the conditions for the foundation of LREM also result in a certain lack of ideological homogeneity, which leads to dissenting votes on some texts. The most significant defections on a bill to date have been on the ratification of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and European Union (10 against and 54 abstentions) and immigration policy (one against and 16 abstentions). Divisions were also expressed on internal security-related issues, most visibly on a Government-supported right-wing opposition bill against acts of violence in demonstrations, on which some 50 parliamentarians of the presidential party abstained. More generally, out of almost one in three Government bills, one or two LREM parliamentarians abstain. What general conclusions can be drawn from this short history? Undoubtedly, on the whole, there is a very strong discipline of the presidential party, which has always had an absolute majority alone since 2002. The President of the French Republic is very strong in Parliament—regardless of the situation of his party in the Senate given the asymmetry of the two chambers—and is assured that his Government’s bills are adopted. The only examples of a Government bill rejected in 5 Source: Le Monde, «Voyage en Assemblée inconnue: enquête sur le profil des 577 nouveaux députés», 27 June 2017.

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the Assembly can be regarded as “coups de théâtre” and result from an underestimation of the mobilization of the opposition.6 While there is no doubt that France is one of the democracies where the president is the most powerful, this power must be nuanced. First, the observation of dissent in the majority group shows that the president’s control over his party’s parliamentarians is not absolute and that there are indeed, and until recently more and more often, dissenting votes that have a political cost in terms of authority and credibility in public opinion. The mean numbers of dissension on all Government bills must not hide the importance that dissension on some specific texts can achieve as well as the political importance of some of these texts: abstentions in the Socialist Group on budgetary bills are particularly serious, for example. Not to mention that this does not take into account bills for which the Government is led to incur its responsibility to avoid a vote.7 Secondly, focusing on the adoption of Government bills has its blind spots. First of all, this does not make it possible to measure the anticipation effects of the constraint represented by the parliamentary majority: the president only tables bills for which he considers that he has a reasonable chance of obtaining a comfortable majority. Above all, it says nothing about the content of the bills adopted and the compromises that the president’s Government must be able to make during the legislationmaking process. Indeed, by looking at all public ballots, not only those on Government bills as a whole but also those relating to amendments or articles of bills, the cohesion of the majority groups, in particular the LREM group under the Macron Presidency, appears even more nuanced. It can thus often be observed that the Government, in order to better secure the support of a majority for most of its policy, sometimes has to make compromises at least on secondary or technical aspects of the bills. Even since the establishment of the five-year term, successive presidents of the Republic have always had to take into account their parliamentary majority, and this sometimes had consequences. Jacques Chirac at the end of his second term of office could hardly act given Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise in the parliamentary group. The latter kept his Prime Minister François 6 On October 9, 1998, the private member bill supported by the Government to create a civil union accessible to same-sex couples was rejected. On April 9, 2009, the Government’s bill to protect intellectual property on the Internet was rejected. In both cases, however, the bill was subsequently reintroduced and adopted. 7 Cf. the explanations on the confidence vote procedure in France.

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Fillon in office when he was considering replacing him, partly because of the support Fillon received from the UMP. Finally, the “fronde” within the Socialist Group was largely a trigger for François Hollande’s renunciation to run for reelection, as he was to be forced into a competitive primary despite his status as an incumbent.

A Discussion of the Four Hypotheses for Parliamentary Support Four institutional hypotheses have been detailed in the introduction of this volume in order to explain the level of support for the President in parliament. This part assesses successively each of them in the French case. Confidence Vote Procedures in the Hands of the President According to the first hypothesis developed in introduction, confidence votes would solidify the cohesion of the ruling party for two reasons: they constitute an incentive for PMs to anticipate what the parliamentary win-set is and they almost always come with the right to dissolve the parliament (also Coman 2015). Keeping a no-confidence vote procedure made part of the conditions that MNAs put when De Gaulle was charged to prepare a new Constitution in 1958. If the principle of parliamentary responsibility has been kept within the 5th Republic, the procedures are favorable to the executive, that is to say, most of the time, to the president. First, investiture vote is not compulsory which allowed for forming minority governments in 1988–1993. Second, when a no-confidence vote is organized, only the votes of opponents to the Government are counted and must reach the absolute majority of all Assembly members. France therefore breaks with the general principle of reciprocity between investiture and censure according to which, most of the time, lower chambers are influential either for making governments or for breaking them (Sieberer 2015). Clearly, the National Assembly is in a weak position in both cases. And the fact that the only successful no-confidence vote, in 1962, was followed by a dissolution won by the President also plays in favor of the executive power. The French Constitution is well-known for its Article 49.3 that enables to consider that a bill has been approved by the National Assembly without organizing a vote on it. The only possibility for MNAs to avoid

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this is censuring the government (Huber 1996). The 49.3 can be considered as a kind of institutional blackmail made by the Prime minister (in practice, the President) over hesitating majority or pivotal MNAs: do they disagree with the bill to the extent they want a Government breakdown which means opening an institutional crisis that may be closed by a dissolution of the chamber? Do they want, in other words, to run the risk of losing their job? The last examples of the use of Article 49.3 provide clear evidences for bills imposed to critical majority backbenchers. In 2015, Prime Minister Valls made use of the procedure for a bill mixing various economic issues as some socialist MNAs had decided to oppose it and not only to abstain as they previously did. He admitted in his speech doing so because his majority was uncertain. One year after, he used again the procedure for a bill reforming labor law. Each time, the procedure was used on three occasions: one by reading in the National Assembly. Despite those examples, we consider that this weapon is secondary and even adjunct in the management of the parliamentary majority by the President. This assertion is supported by two points. First, most of the time the procedure has not been used in order to silence rebel majority MPs. It has been so from 1978 to 1981 when the right-wing President Giscard was reluctantly supported by Gaullist MNAs. But since then, the procedure was occasionally used with other different aims: winning time against filibustering tactics developed by the opposition or passing laws under minority governments from 1988 to 1993 (Rozenberg, 2020b). In addition, the use of the procedure has been constitutionally limited to one law a session since 2008 in addition to the budget and social budget laws. This provision may constitute an incentive for the Government to table “monster” or omnibus laws as it was the case for the 2015 bill on unrelated economic aspects. Yet, it constitutes a strong restriction for the Government. Second, the procedure entails a significant cost for the Government, both in terms of public image and regarding the management of the majority. Becher et al. (2017) calculated that, over the 1979–2008 period, the impact of the procedure on the Prime minister approval rate was equivalent to a one percent decline in economic growth. The “49.3” is the only procedure of the French constitution called by its number in the French public debate. It is well known and unanimously assimilated to a denial of democracy. The popular rejection is so important that Valls, once he became a candidate for the left presidential primary in late 2016,

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even proposed to abolish a procedure that he had used on six occasions. There is also a cost for the Government in the management of majority rebels. Indeed, using the procedure is perceived by those MNAs as a noncooperative attitude. It can therefore accentuate the tensions within the majority and make more difficult the passing of future bills. The development of the rebellion during Hollande’s term (2012–2017) provides a good illustration for that phenomenon. When Valls decided first to use the 49.3 in 2015, the socialist rebels did not react. But when he reiterated the procedure one year later, a group of about twenty-five socialist MNAs, with the help of their ecologists and communists colleagues,8 tried to table a motion of no confidence. Letting open the question of whether they intentionally failed to reach the threshold or not, it should be noted that it was the first time under the 5th Republic when tens of majority MNAs were not only opposing governmental bills but the very existence of the Government. If confidence votes procedures do not help, on a day-to-day basis, the Government to obtain loyal support for the majority, it constitutes a rather unnoticed asset for the President in his unofficial rivalry with the prime minister. In the imaginary case of an open fight between a President and a Prime minister from the same majority, the fact that the prime minister’s existence depends on the support of a majority of MNAs can be regarded as an asset for the President. A rebel prime minister— for instance if she refuses to resign as asked by the President—would face troubles within her parliamentary majority that could lead to a noconfidence vote. Something the President does not have to fear for. In other words, the confidence vote procedures usually do not help the President to be supported in parliament but they do so vis-à-vis the Government. A Candidate-Centered Electoral System As said in the introduction, majority legislators can be all the more rebel to the president that the electoral system lead them to be concerned with their personal reputation among their constituents. The electoral system

8 56 MNAs signed the motion—58 being required. Those members refused yet to join their force with the right-wing opposition when the latter’s initiated motion of no-confidence was voted on.

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for the elections of the French National Assembly is clearly a candidatecentered system that allows for the existence of a personal vote. Yet, this election is strongly framed by the result of the presidential election that is often9 organized a few weeks before (Blais and Loewen 2009). This electoral system is not enshrined in the Constitution but is governed by law in the Electoral Code. Since 1958, parliamentary elections have always been by a two-round plurality system, with one exception in 1986, when the National Assembly was elected by closed-list proportional representation. The voting system therefore consists of the election of one member of the National Assembly per constituency: the candidate obtaining an absolute majority of the votes cast is elected. If no candidate obtains an absolute majority, a second round takes place in which only candidates who have obtained at least 12.5% of the votes of the registered voters (and not the votes cast) may stand and a simple majority is sufficient to be elected. This electoral system is supposedly less “brutal” than the first-pastthe-post system and allows several political forces or candidates to form an alliance in the second round, but nevertheless promotes a certain bipolarization. Thus, according to the “Duverger Law” concerning the effects of voting modes on party systems, two-round voting allows for a certain multi-party system with parties that are dependent on each other. The parliamentary elections voting system is commonly considered to contribute to the existence of large majorities, since it amplifies in seats the advance of the majority party or coalition in votes, which is then over-represented in the National Assembly (Dolez 2002). This candidate-centered electoral system, where voters in each electoral district elect a single representative, constitutes an incentive to cultivate a personal vote. Especially since the constituencies are relatively small with a number of 577 parliamentarians for the entire French electorate since 1986.10 Candidacies are free and do not necessarily require the nomination of a political party. In this context, each MNA theoretically has the possibility to communicate with the voters in its constituency about its personality and parliamentary action, in order to encourage a personal vote that is related to them and not to their political party.

9 In 1981 and 1988 due to a dissolution and systematically since 2002. 10 Taking into account the 2000s population, there is, as a mean, 114,000 citizens by

MPs which is slightly more than for the UK (96,000).

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So why does the Fifth Republic, which restored the two-round majority electoral system in 1958, breaking with the closed-list proportional representation system of the Fourth Republic, have a much stronger majority discipline than in the past? This is because of the transformations in electoral competition, with the increase in the weight of political parties and the nationalization of legislative elections (Gaxie 1992) and the ascendency taken by the presidential race. Legislative elections are not a sum of local elections but are structured around the same national issues, the same cleavages, and the same leaders. The significance taken by the presidential election contributed to this “nationalization” of politics. Partisan identification would therefore be the first factor determining citizens’ choice (Converse and Pierce 1986). If there is a “personalization” of parliamentary elections, it is less around the candidates than around the national leaders of the parties to which these candidates belong (Karvonen 2010; Garzia 2012). For the President of the Republic’s party, the Head of State is the first political personality with whom candidates for the parliamentary elections are identified. The weight of the result of the last presidential election has been significantly increased since 2002 with the introduction of the five-year term and the reversal of the electoral calendar: since parliamentary elections are only held a few weeks after the presidential election, they have become a by-product of the presidential election, a vote to confirm it (Dupoirier and Sauger 2010; Fauvelle-Aymar et al. 2011). Since 2002, the National Assembly election campaign has only really begun after the election of the President of the Republic and has received much less media and voter attention, as shown by the sharp drop in the turnout rate from one election to the next. The election campaign seems to be heading toward a foregone conclusion given the honeymoon period between the President and the electorate. In 2017 for the first time, less than one voter out of two (48.7%) participated to the first round of the presidential election. As candidates not only need to gain an absolute majority of votes cast in order to be elected but also one-quarter of the registered vote, the number of MPs elected at the first round logically declined: they were only 4 in 2017 versus 36 in 2012 and even 110 in 2007. As a result, the electoral strategy of the elected President’s party is entirely oriented toward the defense of the “presidential majority”, which must be converted into a parliamentary majority to give him the power

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to govern. In 2017, while many of LREM’s candidates were complete strangers in their constituencies, being the candidates officially endorsed by Emmanuel Macron allowed them to be elected. Surveys indicate indeed that only 43% of the LREM MNAs were born in the département of the constituency where they had been elected (Rouban 2017). The consequence is therefore an electoral dependence of the MNAs for the nomination of their party and, more specifically, on the result of the presidential election and the success of their party’s presidential candidate. This encourages majority backbenchers to respect the party’s line and support the President of the Republic, on the one hand to increase his chances of success in the next presidential election if he will run for a second term, and on the other hand not to be excluded or lose the party’s nomination—and potentially the President’s support—in the next parliamentary elections. However, despite the strong influence of the recent presidential election on the parliamentary elections, personal voting is not totally absent. Its importance depends on the electoral context, the territories, and the candidates, but the local issues and the personal weight of parliamentarians in their constituencies have not completely disappeared. The dependence of the MNAs on their party, even if it is real, is not a oneway street and representatives can obtain a margin of autonomy (Sawicki 1992; Desrumeaux 2016). The rare studies on the subject in France clearly show the existence of a candidate effect (Brouard and Kerrouche 2013): the evaluation of a candidate by voters who know him/her sufficiently can have a positive or negative effect that compensates for partisan identification or the evaluation of the leader. A survey focused on the 2007 election also showed that some parliamentary activities such as private member bills sponsorship have a positive effect on MPs’ reelection (François and Navarro 2017). There are cases of MNAs who are so well established in their constituencies that they have little to fear from a break with their party. A member of Parliament who was a member of the UMP until 2007 but who broke away from the candidate and future President Nicolas Sarkozy, Nicolas Dupont-Aignant was able to leave the party just before the presidential election and create his own, without losing his constituency in which he was mayor of the largest city. Similarly, the socialist René Dosière, who did not hold the Socialist Party nomination in 2007 and 2012, was reelected as an independent candidate against the socialist nominee. In many cases, national parties show a lax attitude toward

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incumbent MNAs reelected on their own colors: after a few months, there are usually discreetly reintegrated among the party group as a full or associated member. This is especially the case for the right where discipline and cohesiveness are less central as collective norms (Haegel 2012). Up to 2017 when it was forbidden, the local connections of the MNAs have been further strengthened by the simultaneous holding of local offices such as mayors. For more than thirty years, this practice has been generalized with between 80 and 90% of cumulating parliamentarians. Arguably, this French specificity gave political autonomy to backbenchers vis-à-vis party leaders. Yet, surveys tend to minimize the electoral bonus associated with holding simultaneously a local position (Bach 2012). They also clearly indicate that cumul was detrimental to parliamentary involvement over issues unrelated to the constituency. In that sense, it can be said that it was politically more comfortable for the President to face an empty assembly with members-only occupied in and by their district (Carcassonne 2004). This ability to be elected by one’s own name is very unevenly distributed among parliamentarians. It is nevertheless clear that the candidate-centered electoral system can help to facilitate rebellion, because it offers parliamentarians the possibility of seeking a personal vote, even if this possibility is very constrained by national political factors. A Differentiated Capacity for Presidents to Select Candidates The control of the nominations procedures by party leaders would logically lead to greater discipline within the parliamentary majority. The candidate selection differs for the three political parties who gave presidents to France since 1981: rather decentralized for the socialists, centralized for the Gaullist right, and highly centralized for Macron’s party. The Socialist Party follows the traditional logic of social-democratic parties: candidates for all elections have to be locally and formally supported by party members through secret elections. Yet, internal bargains are often organized locally in order to avoid truly competitive selection—the local vote being more symbolic (Squarcioni 2017). The procedure is not fully decentralized as the national branch of the party makes the decision in case of conflicts and may decide to privilege a type of candidate in terms of gender and ethnicity or even to “freeze” the constituency in view of coalition agreements. National decision-making units, in the Socialist Party,

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strictly reflect the equilibrium between the party streams as identified during previous national congresses—sometimes years before. The Gaullist family follows a more top-down approach (Costa and Kerrouche 2007). Leaders of the party, and even sometimes a single leader, have a solid capacity to name candidates, some of them being airdropped in a constituency they do not know. There is indeed a national committee in charge of selecting candidates which composition is largely decided by the party leader but should also provide some seats to internal opponents. The leader capacity to name candidates was all the stronger for President Chirac in 2002 and Sarkozy in 2007 that their leadership was not seriously challenged at that time. LREM, Macron’s party, can be regarded as even more centralized but also more original (Fretel 2019). In 2017, the candidate Macron personally named nine members of an investiture committee which assessed the online application of no less than 19.000 persons. He de facto imposed many names to this committee and let it choose the others imposing many constraints in terms of gender equality or political background. He also decided that there would be no candidate in some constituencies where incumbent socialists or right-wing MNAs were close to LREM. What has been the impact of those different candidate selection systems over parliamentary loyalty? In the case of the Socialist Party, the fact that some left-wing MNAs owned their selection to the joined support of local party members and national leaders of their stream within the party made more possible the expression of dissent during Mitterrand’s second term (1988–1993) and, to a much greater extent, during Hollande’s one (2012–2017). The control over local party members has then been a major stake for socialist internal politics which caused frauds and patronage. Regarding the right, the centralization of the selection certainly pushed for more loyalty. Yet, as Parliament elections are organized according to the single-member districts rules, it should be noted that most of the incumbents in nearly all parties (but especially on the right) are renamed as candidates (Squarcioni 2017). This has constituted a significant limitation for right-wing presidents in their capacity to pick among candidates. As he came with a new political party, Macron did not faced this constraint and was personally more crucial in choosing his candidates. To be complete on candidate selection, it should be noted that, at least within traditional parties, the recent evolution of French politics tends to reduce the president’s capacity to name parliamentary candidates. Open

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primaries for selecting candidates to the presidency have been organized for the first time with the Socialist Party in 2012 and for both the socialist and the right-wing ones in 2017. In all cases, those primaries selected a candidate who was not the ongoing party leader and can be regarded as a challenger. In those circumstances, it is harder for those candidates to impose names for the legislative elections. It is all the more difficult to do so that, as the elections for the Assembly are organized a few weeks after the presidential ones, most of the candidates for the Parliament have to be selected before the presidential race. Thus, a President from the socialist or Gaullist party during his first term tends to have less leadership over the candidate selection for the legislative elections. This constitutes an additional explanation for Hollande’s difficulties. Limited Decree Power but Strong Statutes Resorting to decrees constitutes a clever way for presidents to secure support in parliament: either by avoiding to legislate or by threatening to do so. Constitutionally, French Presidents have a remarkably limited role in the legislative procedure or regarding decrees given their central place in the political system. They cannot veto legislation—they can at best ask for a second reading which they hardly ever do. Decree authority is mainly in the hands of the prime minister—not the president (Article 21 of the Constitution). The President is only asked to sign, jointly with the prime minister, the decrees which are discussed during the weekly Councils of ministers (Article 13). Those are politically important11 but not numerous, co-signed and, in practice, prepared under the authority of the prime minister. The prime minister of the 5th Republic holds strong decree powers. Given the substantial definition of the field of legislation in the Constitution, the prime minister is given some possibilities to adopt decrees in total independence with the Parliament. The delegation of legislative power, called ordinances, is also foreseen and frequently used, for instance

11 They deal with: (a) nomination to senior civil service positions, (b) the implementation of a specific kind of institutional laws (loi organique), (c) the implementation of laws regarded as important by the government (with no further legal precision), and (d) the modification of decrees previously adopted according to the same procedure. Those kinds of decrees frequently deal with international relations and defense.

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in view of transposing European legislation. From 2003 to 2017, 44 ordinances had been adopted yearly12 —mostly in order to avoid filibustering in Parliament but also in view of limiting dissent within the majority. Knowing that the prime minister is politically controlled by the President (except during periods of divided governments), her executive power may indirectly serve the authority of the latter. We find indeed cases where the Government invokes its executive domains during the legislative procedure in order to avoid dissent and divided votes within the majority. This has been for instance the case for defining precisely when wild birds are allowed to be hunt: ministers deny parliamentarians the right to make decisions in order to silence dissident “hunting” majority MNAs (Rozenberg 2020). Yet, as made obvious by this example, the executive prerogatives tend to be used in order to avoid position-taking rather than framing totally a policy agenda. The statutes and rewards indirectly at the disposal of the president in order to find support in Parliament are of different types. Given its decree powers, the prime minister can bring pork-barrel benefices to MNAs. It seems yet that this strategy has been followed to the main profit of pivotal MNAs rather than majority ones. Testimonies indicate that the socialist minority governments survived from 1988 to 1993 partly thanks to “reasonable” amounts of pork given to centrist or communist députés (Rozenberg, 2020b). Stick and carrot tactics are more commonly used regarding majority MNAs. In addition to the prime minister, the President can also rely on the leadership of the majority parliamentary group. Indeed, the latter controls access to different types of “rewards” related to parliamentary activity, in particular in terms of speaking time and responsibilities in the legislative procedure. For instance, a survey of the socialist rebels under Hollande indicated that they were given less legislative rapports (1.5 vs. 2.6 for compliant members during the last two years) or right to ask oral questions (1.4. vs. 3.6) (Lecomte et al. 2017). The executive branch can also offer career advancements to parliamentarians as incentives for loyalty. Indeed, MNAs can officially be given a “mission” by the Government. A mission is a period of six months maximum where parliamentarians should investigate a given issue. Those

12 Source: Secrétariat Général du Gouvernement.

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missions are increasingly numerous: about 75 ones were given by parliamentary term in the years 2000s13 vs. more than 50 missions in 2018 only. In addition to the benefice of a senior civil servant provided by the Government, they are appreciated as a symbolic reward and enable MNAs to polish a reputation of policy specialists. But the main “carrot” in France consists in entering the Government. Nearly three-quarters of government members under the 5th Republic originate from the Parliament—a ratio that had remained stable from the 1990s to 2017.14 Under the periods of unified governments, the President de facto selects most of the ministers. The logics of selections encompass a variety of complex criteria. Some MNAs are selected because they have remained loyal to the President in key episodes. On the contrary, others are selected in order to avoid further dissidence. This has been the case for instance of Christian Eckert under Hollande. This socialist MNA, first elected in 2007, occupied the key position of budget rapporteur from 2012 to 2014. As he was more and more openly criticizing the government economic policy, Prime Minister Valls proposed him to become budget minister—a position where he could only be loyal. President Macron seemingly broke with those patterns in 2017 by choosing one minister out of two from outside the political realm. Yet, the numerous reshuffles organized since indicate that both assemblies are back key fishponds where new ministers are found (Haegel and Rozenberg 2018).

Three Determining Contextual Hypotheses In addition to the four institutional explanations considered, other important elements tend to explain why and to which extent the presidents’ legislative agendas are supported by a majority in the National Assembly. MNAs are indeed all the more loyal that: (a) the President is popular; (b) the majority and the President are ideologically close; and (c) the executive is able to manage smoothly the majority.

13 For the 1997–2015 period. Law committee of the Senate, 27 January 2016. In addition, MNAs in mission are allowed to delegate their votes to colleagues which also strengthens the cohesion rate among the majority. 14 Own calculations. Source: National Assembly.

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Popularity in Decline We have seen that despite the existence of a candidate-centered electoral system, the portion of personal vote in the electoral support of parliamentarians was limited by the weight of national political factors and especially the result of the presidential election: the electoral dependence of the MNAs of the presidential party on the President of the Republic therefore encourages them to be disciplined. This has been all the truer since 2002 that after each renewal of the National Assembly, the presidential election is the next national election and directly precedes the next parliamentary elections, making parliamentarians dependent on the success of their party’s presidential candidate. But if the President’s authority over the parliamentary majority is based on the electoral dependence of his party’s MNAs on him, then this authority also depends on the president’s ability to lead his party to victory in subsequent elections and to be an electoral asset for the parliamentarians of his party. If the popularity of the President of the Republic declines, the incentive for partisan cohesion and discipline toward the Head of State becomes less pronounced. If the president becomes not an electoral asset but potentially a handicap that risks leading to the party’s downfall, each parliamentarian of his party may find an incentive to dissociate themselves from the president, whether with the aim of generating a personal vote in their constituency based on their own parliamentary action, or to put pressure on the Government to obtain compromises and a shift in its policy. If a parliamentarian has no hope of being reelected because of the unpopularity of the president and the party, and no hope either of influencing Government policy, he could allow any ideological disagreements to be expressed, assuming that considerations of electoral efficiency no longer justify keeping them to silence. And indeed, it can be seen that the trend of increasing dissension in successive parliamentary majorities goes hand in hand with a serious trend toward a decline in the popularity of successive presidents of the Republic, especially since the introduction of the five-year term. Jacques Chirac’s case between 2002 and 2007 is particular: his second term of office looks like the end of his reign and, even if he reaches very low levels of popularity, a third candidacy on his part appears largely improbable anyway, while Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise offers an alternative candidature for the UMP. This partly blocks the action of the Head of State but also

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gives the majority a reason not to tear itself apart before the next election and partly compensates for the unpopularity of the president. The situation is different for Nicolas Sarkozy between 2007 and 2012 and François Hollande between 2012 and 2017: each of them carries out his first term and their future bid for a second term seems a natural and obvious thing to do. The fate of the parliamentary majority is therefore even more directly linked to the Head of State and his chances of reelection. However, both of them very quickly experienced a profound unpopularity, with François Hollande in particular beating all previous records. The decline in the president’s popularity thus leads to a weakening of his credibility and authority on the parliamentary majority and all the more so as it has concrete electoral consequences on the members of his party. Local elections during the course of the mandate are each time heavy defeats for the presidential party and its allies, which the MNAs sometimes observe directly because many are also local elected officials. Intermediate elections thus become evidence of the unpopularity shown by polls and of the consequences of this unpopularity on candidates of the same party as the president. It can be seen that the “fronde” within the Socialist Group against President Hollande, as a concerted rebellion against his budgetary policy, was born after the March 2014 municipal elections, in which several Socialist MNAs were defeated. Since 2017, the political dependence of the LREM MNAs on the president of the Republic has been all the stronger as the party was newly created to support the president and its parliamentarians are for many of them new political figures elected only with the support of the President. Emmanuel Macron’s decline in popularity, which is more irregular than his predecessors but nevertheless real, may have the effect of weakening the cohesion of the majority group in the National Assembly, even if the inexperience of the parliamentarians of the presidential party may facilitate the maintenance of control by the Head of State. To test the hypothesis of the impact of the president’s popularity on the discipline of his party’s MNAs, the data previously shown on public ballots on Government bills can be used. The dissent is now calculated, not over an entire parliamentary term, but by semester, from 1981 to 2019. Excluded are periods of cohabitation and semesters of elections during which the National Assembly does not sit or hardly sits at all. The unit of analysis is therefore the parliamentary presidential majority group during a given semester: this gives a total of 53 observations.

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Table 2.2 President’s unpopularity and average dissent on Government bills in presidential majority group between 1981 and 2019

Estimate

Std. Error

p-value

(Intercept) −0.025004 0.007198 0.00106** President’s 0.060378 0.011995 6.36e-06*** unpopularity – Residual standard error: 0.01213 on 51 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared: 0.3319, Adjusted R-squared: 0.3188

As an indicator of popularity, the monthly barometers of the TNSSofrès polling institute, renamed Kantar TNS in 2016, are used: this polling institute gives access to the archives of its monthly political opinion barometers since 1978. This barometer asks about the president of the Republic with the following question: “Do you trust completely, rather trust, rather not trust or not trust at all [name of the President in office] to solve the problems that arise in France today?”. From all these data, linear regression models are constructed with, as a dependent variable, dissent over the corresponding semester and, as an independent variable, the average of the unpopularity rates of the President during this semester (Table 2.2). The results are interesting: the unpopularity of the President of the Republic seems to have an effect on the average rate of dissent within the majority presidential party, with each additional percentage point of unpopularity of the President leading to an additional 0.06 percentage point of average dissent within the group.15 The number may seem low and we have observed how the groups remain generally very disciplined. But we have also seen this increase in the average dissension across all public ballots on Government bills can manifest as a high number of defections on a particular vote. The Uncertainty of Ideological Cohesiveness Parliamentary groups must deal with their internal ideological pluralism: this is particularly true for the majority group which is composed of

15 Results for 2002–2019 only are not different.

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several hundred members and which is directly confronted with the concrete exercise of power. Parties bring together several political sensibilities that are more or less divergent and more or less institutionalized into factions or movements within the party or parliamentary group. This internal ideological pluralism is constitutive of the identity of these parties since it is what allows them to extend their political and electoral base. It is also for this reason that voting cohesion to support policies and adopt Government bills requires party discipline: the voting unity is not spontaneously achieved by aggregating the personal ideological preferences of parliamentarians. It is because the parties are more than just a union of MNAs already agreeing on everything that voting cohesion is the result of party discipline (Khrebiel 1993, 1999). Research on this subject clearly shows that parties and parliamentary groups often succeed in constraining individual preferences to ensure that the party’s line is respected (Kam 2009). However, if party cohesion is imperfect, it is also because of ideological differences that no partisan or electoral pressure can contain. Some Government bills have a lower consensus than others in the parliamentary majority. The President’s policy may activate ideological divisions within his party leading to dissenting votes. Public ballots in the National Assembly, where the majority group is divided, show many ideologically coherent dividing lines. When it was created in 2002, the UMP was the merger of several parties: its ambition was to become the “single party of the right and center” by bringing together the Gaullist and conservative right of the RPR on the one hand and the parties considered centrist with the Christian Democrats of the majority of the UDF and the DL Liberals on the other hand (Haegel 2012). The new UMP is marked by different tendencies that sometimes transcend the former Gaullist and centrist parties: in economic terms, from the most interventionist to the most libertarian, in social terms, between conservatism or cultural liberalism, regarding the European construction, to which sovereigntists are opposed, or immigration and security, between those who support toughness or moderation. Contrary to its initial intentions, the UMP leadership has never officially recognized the “movements” within it, except for a brief period within opposition between 2012 and 2015, but some of its internal tendencies are constituted as “parliamentary clubs.” The most famous during Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency was the “Collectif parlementaire de

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la droite populaire,” the Popular Right, a caucus that brought together up to fifty UMP parliamentarians. The Popular Right embodied the right wing of the UMP supported a hard line on immigration and national identity, in the face of competition from the far right National Front. In the meantime, UMP parliamentarians claiming to be more moderate and humanist have been opposed to this right-wing group: they have voted against or abstained from voting on the Government’s two bills toughening immigration policy in 2007 and 2010. In contrast, in 2011, it was the advocates of a tougher security policy who did not want to support a bill on police detention (garde à vue) that would guarantee the rights of the persons in custody. European integration has been a subject of recurrent conflict within the neo-Gaullist groups: MNAs claiming to defend national sovereignty have repeatedly opposed the ratification of European treaties or the revision of the Constitution to allow the adoption of these treaties. The divisions resulted in the formalization of a parliamentary role of sovereigntists according to which opposing to the party line was valorized in the name of ideological purity (Rozenberg 2020a). The intensity of ideological divisions has been particularly important during François Hollande’s presidency. Unlike the UMP, the Socialist Party is statutorily organized into internal streams recognized according to the militants’ votes, and even if these streams have lost their ideological structures (Lefebvre and Sawicki 2006), there are still cleavages mainly on economic and European issues, between the moderate majority of the party and its left wing. These divisions were expressed at the beginning of the mandate in 2012 on the ratification of the European Budget Pact when the left wing opposed to strict rules in reducing public deficit. Ideological conflicts tooke on even greater proportions from 2014 onward when Hollande defended the pursuit of a fiscal policy favorable to companies and reduced public spending for households and local authorities. This policy, described as “supply-side socialism,” was embodied by a new Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, known to be at the right of the Socialist Party. This political orientation provoked not only the opposition of the traditional left wing, but also of several social democrats who were members of the reformist majority and accused François Hollande of turning away from his campaign commitments and of imposing a major ideological shift on his party. It is this ideological confrontation that is reflected in the many dissenting votes against the Government’s budget bills between 2014 and 2017.

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It can be noted that the ideological heterogeneity of these two parties, the UMP, which became The Republicans in 2015, and the Socialist Party, has led to splits. Some of the centrist members of the UMP left the party in 2012 with Jean-Louis Borloo to found the Union of Democrats and Independents with the New Centre party. Similarly, in 2017, parliamentarians left the Republicans to get closer to Emmanuel Macron by founding the Agir party, while some former members of the Popular Right joined Marine Le Pen’s far right. On the left, while many socialist parliamentarians have joined LREM, members of the left wing have also split since then, including 2017 socialist presidential nominee Benoît Hamon. All these transformations are largely the result of the ideological conflicts that stirred up these two parties when they were in government. Ideological divisions within the governing right and governing left are obviously not specific to France. Cleavages within the social-democratic family between supporters and opponents to globalization for instance can be found all around advanced democracies. What is more specific to France is the central role played by a two-round national election in view of choosing a President. The necessity to qualify for a second round, especially in a national contest, leads candidates to give preference to their core supportes first against a Downsian run for the median voter. As explained by Brouard (2009: 396): “The right-wing and left-wing candidate should be able to attract enough voters respectively from the far right-wing and far left-wing parts of the political spectrum in order to qualify for the second round.” Arguably, such specific institutional feature is likely to create a gap between campaign discourses and actual public policies. To be elected, presidents should flirt with the extremes to the risk of betraying their platform once in office. As a result, majority MNAs may be tempted to dissent in order to cope with the initial line of the campaign and the party platform. It has been often noted for instance that the pro-market turn of the Socialist Party in 1983 has never been fully acknowledged by its leaders since. 2017 is an obvious exception with the qualification of a centrist candidate. But what is saved in terms of ideological radicalism may have to be paid by a lack of cohesiveness. The LREM party has the particularity of not having been founded on a common ideology but almost exclusively around the person of Emmanuel Macron, bringing together political figures from the left and the right in a claimed desire to overcome divisions. If one considers for instance the 310 members of the LREM group elected in 2017, 68 of them originates from the Socialist

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Party, 20 from the center-right, and 10 from The Republicans.16 Since its foundation, the party has organized deliberations to try to define its identity and the content of the progressivism it claims to promote. This lack of common basis facilitates occasional ideological disagreements on certain issues that have led to dissenting votes since 2017. To be complete on ideological issues, it should be noted that the ideological divisions between parliamentarians also deal with the very conception of party discipline. Remarkably converging surveys realized in 1969 (Cayrol et al., 1973), 2006 (Costa and Kerrouche 2007) and 2011 (Rozenberg and Vigour 2018) indicate that voting discipline is culturally much more legitimate among left-wing voters than among right-wing ones. In 2011 for instance, nearly two-thirds of right-wing MNAs indicate that they would follow their view in case of disagreement with the party versus a majority of their socialist colleagues who would toe the party line. The relation to the party is more collective in one case and individualistic (or trustee) in the other. As seen, those ideological preferences do not translate automatically into behavior. It is even during a socialist term, Hollande one, that the level of cohesion was the lowest. Yet, the ideological conception of discipline may precisely provide an explanation for the 2014–2017 fronde. When refusing to vote the budget or to support the government, many rebel socialists had the feeling of remaining loyal to their party doctrine. Moreover, the collective nature of the rebellion was in line with their collective conception of their mandate. By contrast, sovereigntist right-wing MPs had all the more the feeling of fulfilling their duties that they were standing alone against the crowd. The Crucial Micromanagement of the Majority A last element of explanation for the level of parliamentary support visà-vis the President lies in the way the executive interacts with majority backbenchers on a day-to-day basis. The Government usually has the means of forcing decisions in the lower chamber. Since 1958, it can discretionary use package votes, second deliberations and the accelerated procedure. Since 2008, it can impose a limitation to the length of plenary debates. In extreme cases, we have seen that the 49.3 procedure can be used. Politically, the executive also holds harmful weapons: collective ones

16 Source: Le Monde, «Voyage…» art. cit.

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as the threat of dissolution (formulated for instance by Hollande in 2014) or individual ones as the exclusion from the party. Yet, those procedures come with a cost. Majority backbenchers can have the feeling of not being heard and respected and may either “exit” (i.e. stay in their constituency) or “voice” (i.e. speak and vote against the government). In details, the quality of the management of the majority by the government refers to three different elements. First, the avoidance of the frequent use of the institutional rules mentioned above. Second, the implementation of early and informal routines of cooperation with some senior majority backbenchers. A minister preparing a bill may for instance meet in advance the chairperson of the corresponding standing committee, a potential rapporteur and influential MNAs. She may accept, early in the process, to add or remove key provisions. In some cases, the broad lines of future scenarios are defined at that stage. Some articles remain rather imprecise in order to give the opportunity to amend them during the formal passing of the bill in committee or in plenary. The third point is related to the second: an efficient management of the Parliament supposes for the Government to accept to amend the initial bill and also a certain publicity over the process. Some majority backbenchers should be in a position where they can publicly claim the benefice for this or that amended legislative provision. Thus, the relations between the Government and the parliamentary majority are marked by a form of structural misunderstanding, according to the testimony of a former advisor to Prime Minister Manuel Valls.17 When the Government tables a bill, it is the result of a long process: negotiations with trade unions or interest groups, inter-ministerial arbitrations, review by the Council of State, etc. The Government therefore tends to consider that its bill reaches a point of balance that must not be affected. On the other hand, for parliamentarians, the tabling of a bill is not the end but the beginning of a process: that of parliamentary deliberation. Consequently, if MNAs are not involved in the early preparation of a Government bill—and they are not involved in most cases—they feel that they are being imposed a done deal. In addition to the factors considered throughout this paper, the rate of approval of governmental bills depends therefore on the capacity of the President and the Government to “treat well” their backbenchers

17 Interview in Paris, November 19, 2019.

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(Carcassonne 1993). Such capacity relies on a diversity of factors such as the seniority of ministers’ advisers, the parliamentary background of the ministers, the frequency of political alternations or the troubles caused by the opposition’s filibustering strategies. Beyond those factors, it can be noted that, in France, the executive power is rather ill-equipped for managing well the majority. The differentiation between a President in charge of setting the agenda and a Primer minister in charge of the daily deal with the parliament favors authoritarian reflexes on behalf of the ministers—“this is what you should do because it is what the President wants.” The absolute majority held by the main party group in the National Assembly since 2002 may lead to consider as unnecessary any kind of bargains and compromises at the parliamentary stage. More generally, the lack of parliamentary culture of many French politicians may be a source of institutional tensions. Those last elements provide an original explanation for the slight development of parliamentary rebellion within the majority over the last years. While both assemblies have been given greater influence within the legislative procedure since 2008, the structural elements leading the executive team to neglect the Parliament also gained ground: lack of genuine governmental coalition, personalization and presidentialization of politics, systematic alternations, the surprise victory of a maverick in 2017, etc. The conjunction of those different elements has led the president, the ministers, and their advisors to be tempted by a kind of authoritarianism. In some cases, as during Hollande’s term, a sort of vicious circle resulted from this as the lack of support of left-wing socialist MNAs and the poor governmental management of the majority backbenchers fed each other.

Conclusion In conclusion, the French case illustrates how the general factors for legislative compliance play in a complex way. The existence of confidence vote procedures is an incentive for voting cohesion but the use of the 49.3 entails a remarkably high cost for the President. The electoral system for the lower chamber belongs to the candidate-centered ones but is also highly dependent, to say the less, on the previous presidential election. The nominating powers of the President over his party’s candidates to the parliamentary elections vary from one party to another but are limited given the incumbents’ bonus. Those powers had generally tended

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to decline from 2002 to 2017. In 2017, the election of a new President (Emmanuel Macron) who had just created his own party suddenly changed the picture. Last, the president holds limited unilateral powers to obtain compliance or to avoid legislating but, under periods of unified governments, he can rely on a Prime Minister who possesses strong executive prerogatives. If we take into account jointly the four factors, the French system can be located in the middle of the ranking established in the introduction chapter in terms of parliamentary cohesion. Its specific feature probably lies in the major impact of the direct election of the President over the composition of the lower assembly. It is, eventually, the key explanation for the strong voting discipline among majority MNAs and it probably contributes to locate France higher in the above-mentioned ranking scale. In other words, French majority MNAs are more compliant with the President voting instructions than what the four general factors would suggest given the determining role of the presidential election. The discussion also showed the significance of contextual factors and their role in the steady progression of rebellion within the majority. The President’s legislative agenda is all the more supported by his MNAs than: (a) presidents are popular in public opinion; (b) the majority is ideologically cohesive; (c) the management of the majority backbenchers by the Government is efficient. On those three aspects, we have observed a trend toward less cohesion from 2002 to 2017 that reached a peak during the presidency of Hollande (2012–2017). It is too early to say if Macron, a new neither left nor right president, will break with that trend. Generally speaking, a parliamentary group made of 90% of newcomers elected thanks to Macron, and only thanks to him, would be more inclined to approve his legislative proposals than to reject them. Yet, if one considers less the institutional relations between powers and more the sociology of MNAs, there are reasons to doubt that the episode of rebellion is closed. Indeed, contemporary parliamentarians increasingly appear as kinds of self-made politicians, focusing on their career or on policy issues and with a low party identification (Boelaert et al. 2018). Those political entrepreneurs could develop a relation to their group that would be both more utilitarian and more critical. So far, this has not been translated into voting patterns among the pro-Macron MNAs. Yet, the LREM group experienced a slow decline in membership. It counted 314 members in 2017 the days following the elections. Two years and a half after, at the middle of Macron’s term, they were just 300. Some have been excluded but most of them have decided to leave. This suggests that the lack of

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loyalty could follow the “exit” option rather than the “voice” one to use the old Hirschmanian categories.

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CHAPTER 3

Power Scope and Party Disunity of Semi-Presidentialism in Taiwan: The Perspective of Political Participation of Elites and the Masses Yu-Chung Shen and Jung-Hsinag Tsai

Introduction The study of constitutional regimes has always been one of the key issues in comparative politics. Among the constitutional systems, presidentialism, parliamentarism and semi-presidentialism that differ in terms of interactive logic between the executive and legislative branches are the

Y.-C. Shen (B) Department of Political Science, Tunghai University, Taichung City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] J.-H. Tsai Department of Political Science, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7_3

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basic types of systems in the comparative constitutional study. On this basis, in the past decades, much research on the comparative constitution has been carried out. Robert Elgie (2005) summarized three waves of development for constitutional system studies in the past 30 years. The first wave is the early 1990s when Juan Linz and Donald Horowitz debated whether presidentialism or parliamentary system was beneficial to the operation of the democratic system. At this stage, the study of contemporary constitutional systems combined the empirical and comparative approaches with realistic consideration, i.e., the constitutional system was deemed as a key component to the construction of “a desirable democratic regime.” This stage was characterized by the discussion on the causality in the method of single variables, using the presidential system and the parliamentary system as independent variables and democratic construction and stability as dependent variables. Elgie further noted that following the first wave of debate, in addition to the government system, the second wave of constitutional system studies incorporated more abundant themes such as party system, electoral system, presidential power, and other factors, combining with the features of the constitutional regime for analysis. Moreover, dependent variables represented not only a continuance of democratic existence but also richer concepts such as governance efficiency and democratic deepening, which were used for discussion. The third wave of constitutional system studies continues till now. It breaks through the limits of methodology and presents the diverse development of research patterns. For example, rational choice, new institutionalism, veto players theory, principal–agent theory, and other kinds of research approaches and methods are introduced into constitutional system studies (Elgie 2005: 106–122). In Elgie’s literature review, it can be seen that in recent years, the developmental wave of the entire constitutional system studies has been initiated by presidentialism and parliamentarism as two constitutional systems. In terms of practical experience, the constitutional systems designed or adopted by many emerging democratic countries in modern days are neither typical presidentialism nor parliamentarism; instead, they are the constitutional framework of “semi-presidentialism.” Related studies on semi-presidentialism have drawn increasingly more attention in the past decades, making it an important issue in comparative politics and constitutional studies. The main reason is the theoretical richness and diversity of such a system and its practical value for Taiwan’s constitutional studies. First, its theoretical richness and diversity are mainly

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present because semi-presidentialism integrates partial elements of both presidentialism and parliamentarism. Regarding the definition of semipresidentialism, the French scholar, Maurice Duverger published a thesis on semi-presidentialism in English in 1980, in which he proposed the most representative definition among current related studies. Semi-presidentialism is constitutional in nature and combines the elements of presidentialism and parliamentarism. Therefore, its practical operation may reflect the characteristics of both presidentialism and parliamentarism. Furthermore, the chemical effect generated by integrating both systems is more likely to form a unique constitutional connotation. On the whole, semi-presidentialism is a constitutional framework of the “dual executive system.” The dual executive system co-managed by the president and the prime minister forms a triangular relationship with the parliament, leading to complex changes in the institutional check and balance of authority and responsibility as well as the integration and consistency of party politics. With regard to the connotation of these operations, semi-presidentialism provides room for the theoretical construction of numerous traditional issues such as democratic stability, governance efficiency, resolution of ethnic conflicts, party politics, and electoral studies, etc. Furthermore, semi-presidentialism has practical research values. At present, among all the democratic countries, the number of countries whose constitutional regime is semi-presidentialism is higher than that of those adopting presidentialism or parliamentarism.1 This semipresidential group includes old European democratic countries, independent former colonies, and former communist countries that went through democratic transition after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Wu 2011: 5–10). In addition, Taiwan essentially changed the relationship of authority and responsibility between the president, the Executive Yuan (cabinet), and the Legislative Yuan (parliament) after the fourth constitutional amendment in 1997, which conforms to the definition of semi-presidentialism in formality. In the past two decades since 1997,

1 According to a scholarly statistics, as of 2005, 29 countries were classified under semi-

presidentialism among 81 democratic countries in statistics; 28 countries were classified under parliamentary system; and 24 countries were classified under presidentialism. This indicated that at the least 65.4% of democratic countries had their respective directly elected presidents, and the majority of countries were under semi-presidentialism among the three types. Please see Samuels and Shugart (2010: 6).

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there have been numerous debatable issues about the operation of semipresidentialism in Taiwan, e.g., the investiture, presidential authority, presidential relationship with party and cabinet, and even the electoral system of the Legislative Yuan, etc. As a result, based on its theoretical and practical research values, semi-presidentialism has become a newly emerging research topic in constitutional studies, combining traditional studies and innovative issues. From theoretical and practical viewpoints, this wave of semipresidentialism studies has accumulated remarkable research results. According to the research topics, the existing research can be briefly divided into the following three types. The first type is the clarification of concepts and the overview of the systems and research trends. The second type is the research and contrast of subtypes combining other variables (e.g., electoral system and party system) and further discussion on the inclination of semi-presidentialism toward presidentialism or parliamentarism, or even its collapse. This type of research focuses on the comparative study of an individual case or a few cases, for example, the work of Shugart and Carey (1992). The third type is the innovation of methodology, e.g., the introduction of rational choice and the veto players theory. Among these types, the third type has the potential to continue to grow, while the first two types have accumulated abundant knowledge, which will be briefly discussed below. The first type of studies focused on the conceptual clarification of semi-presidentialism and the comprehensive review of related studies. For example, Sartori (1997) strictly clarified the dual executive system of semipresidentialism in his discussion. First, Sartori defined the generation of presidents elected directly or indirectly by the people and established an argument that presidents should be independent of the parliament and should even come directly from people’s specific requirements. Second, and more importantly, the legitimacy of the prime minister in the dual executive system should not only come from the support of the majority in the parliament (or at the least with no objection from the majority) but also should be defined to be independent of the president. In other words, according to the definition of semi-presidentialism provided by Sartori, the dual executive relationship between the president and the prime minister should be under a parallel check and balance framework rather than mutual subordination. Furthermore, the legitimacy of the president should come from direct elections, while the legitimacy of the government should be based on the support of the majority in the

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parliament or the absence of objection from the majority. Compared to Sartori’s narrow definition of semi-presidentialism, some studies provided a broader definition. Elgie (2007) believed that in order to avoid conceptual confusion, a broader definition should be assigned to presidential power and the way that a government is accountable to the parliament in Duverger’s definition of semi-presidentialism. Elgie’s definition aims to avoid disputes about presidential power and the legitimacy of the cabinet composition. The conceptuality was used to contain all possible situations under the two issues. In other words, regardless of the size of the presidential power, the specific content of power, of whether a government shall be positively or negatively accountable to the parliament (or even including the way a government should be accountable to parliament) or whether its generation and operation are related to the president, any system that allows people to elect their president and where the government is designed to be accountable to the parliament can be defined as semi-presidentialism.2 In addition to adopting stricter or broader definitions, the discussion on the subcategory of semi-presidentialism was also common. Shugart and Carey (1992) compared two subtypes of semi-presidentialism using “president-parliamentarism” and “premierpresidentialism.” In this case, there were two possibilities of a dual executive system in semi-presidentialism. Under premier-presidentialism, the government led by a prime minister should be legitimate under at the least one criteria of the negative consent of parliament (i.e., it exists without any objection from the majority of parliament) and should be independent of the president. However, under president-parliamentarism, the legitimacy of the government might come from the parliament or the president mainly because the president has the power to oust the cabinet or even reconstruct the trust relationship between the cabinet and the parliament by dissolving the parliament. Among the studies related to the comprehensive review of semipresidentialism in Taiwan, the academician Wu, Yu-Shan conducted some of the most highly regarded studies. Wu (2011) divided semipresidentialism into an upstream institutional choice, midstream institutional operation, and downstream institutional impact in accordance with the “institutional stream” and further classified the research literature on semi-presidentialism. Moreover, Wu provided some suggestions on 2 Cindy Skach has a general definition on semi-presidentialism similar to that by Elgie. Please see Skach, (2005: 13).

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Taiwan’s semi-presidentialism in his conclusion and attached importance to different groups to which a semi-presidential country belongs and its political tradition. He specifically analyzed the influence of a country’s political environment on the operation of semi-presidentialism, combined the constitutional system with electoral factors (e.g., electoral system, party system, and the relationship with the government) for an exhaustive exploration of the relationship between system and performance, and comprehended the relationship between the president and the prime minister from the two aspects of appointment and dismissal in order to construct a more reasonable subtype. He also attempted to understand the limitation of doctrinarism, emphasized the practical operation mode of semi-presidentialism, and controlled the institutional variables from behavioral aspects. He also explored the democratic breakdown mode of semi-presidential countries and investigated the possibility of a democratic breakdown “sliding into authoritarianism” under a unified government, in addition to the patterns that a non-unified government leads to conflicts. He specifically analyzed the factors affecting the power scope under semi-presidentialism by means of comparative research, discussed the actual situations of Taiwan, and enhanced the studies on governance performance and systematic evolution of semi-presidentialism. He combined the framework with Taiwan’s constitutional development experience, integrated the academic tradition of politics and laws for mutual complementation and learning, and jointly conducted the constitutional studies that are significant to both politics and laws. He reconciled the qualitative and quantitative research methods and facilitated the dialogue and cooperation between both sides to strengthen the methodological foundation of semi-presidential research and integrate with mainstream political studies (Wu 2011: 25). Roughly speaking, it can be seen from the studies providing an overall review and conceptual clarification that plenty of controversial constitutional issues which are worthy of studying in semi-presidentialism mostly focus on the triangle relationship between the president, the government, and the parliament. On this basis, the second category of literature used semi-presidentialism and other variables for single case analyses or comparative studies on a few cases. Generally speaking, the objects of the case study can be briefly divided into the following. First, France, the relatively stable and representative semi-presidential country; second, the relatively unstable and changeable position-communist countries, e.g., Ukraine and Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Croatia, etc.;

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third, Finland, a country whose constitutional system has significantly transformed into parliamentarism. In addition, there are a considerable number of studies on Taiwan. This type of studies shows detailed research findings by analyzing individual cases or comparing a few cases, which are featured by the discussions on issues such as presidential power, institutional design and operation, the majority of parliament, the party system, the generation of the prime minister, the existence of government, party– government relationship, institutional evolution, and legislative efficiency of these countries under the framework of semi-presidentialism. The aforementioned literature is largely concentrated on subtype and case studies where they mutually complement each other. Under the influence of more individual cases and the flexibility of the semi-presidentialism operation, there are more related theories and accumulative practical discussion on the whole. In Taiwan, numerous monographs or special editions of journals explored the issues related to semi-presidentialism, particularly experience in Taiwan. The third category of literature focuses on the innovation of legal theories, among which the most famous is the “veto players theory” proposed by George Tsebelis (2002). The so-called veto player refers to the person who has veto power when a current status is changing. In other words, only when the veto players object to an issue, the current status will be changed. In institutional studies, such veto players might be individuals, groups, organizations, or even systems depending on different research topics and scopes. Tsebelis applied the veto players theory to the studies on constitutional systems and noted that the more the veto players, the more rigid and unstable is the system operation; on the contrary, the fewer the veto players, the more dynamically flexible is the system and the more likely it continues to exist. Beyond that, the ideological gap among veto players is also a variable affecting the stability of the system’s operation. In general, the narrower the veto players’ ideological gap, the more are the options provided for creating a new dimension in lieu of the current situation and the more favorable it is to the adjustment and existence of the system and vice versa. The work of Lin Jih-Wen (2011) named “A Veto Player Theory of Policy Making in Semi-Presidential Regimes: The Case of Taiwan’s Ma Ying-Jeou Presidency” is one of the representative studies. In addition to the research approach of veto players, rational choice is also an increasingly popular research approach in related studies. Lin Jih-Wen (2000)

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built a game model to analyze the characteristics of the semi-presidential operation in emerging democratic countries. His work verified three propositions through the game theory deduction: there is no clear correlation between the size of presidential initiatives and the type of semi-presidentialism, semi-presidentialism with presidential intervention in politics has similar causes, and it is impossible for a prime minister to lead the government in a crisis society. In short, these aforementioned articles combined methodology with formal theories into the research category of semi-presidentialism.

Problem Awareness and Variable Definition in This Study Based on the foregoing, it can be seen from the research background and discussion of semi-presidentialism in the existing literature that the research topics and case studies of semi-presidentialism are becoming increasingly diversified. Most of the studies focus on direct or indirect resolution of the core issue for the dual-track operation of semipresidentialism: shall the president be directly elected by people or do the prime minister have to be supported by the majority of the parliament in order to lead the government? This question also aims at the dual executive characteristics of semi-presidentialism. This chapter attempts to return to the most fundamental question regarding the constitutional operation of semi-presidentialism: in the dual executive system, who is the actual leader in the government, the president or the prime minister? We hope to build a pattern that is “objective to measure all individual cases of semi-presidentialism” as much as possible. Shen and Urianghai (2016) pointed out in their thesis titled The Constitutional Order and Power Transformation of Semi-presidentialism, “under semi-presidentialism,” the knowledge among elites and the masses about the system and the institutional development are intervening variables can be mutually reinforced and causally interrelated, and these two variables are featured by high operability. In addition, the knowledge of elites refers to whether political elites picture the president or the prime minister as the combination of the “center of party politics” and the position. In other words, whether the political leader of a major party will run for president and whether the president plays the role of the actual leader of the party concurrently. The knowledge of the public refers to whether the masses perceive the president or the parliament to be actually

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leading the government. This indicator focuses on the voter turnout rates between presidential and parliamentary elections. The hypothesis is that the society generally believes the president or the prime minister to be the actual leader of the government and the cabinet. If it is believed that a president is the actual leader, the electoral mobilization for presidential elections would be greater than that for parliamentary elections, and thus, the voter turnout rate of presidential elections would naturally be higher than that of parliamentary elections. Conversely, if the competition for parliamentary elections is greater than that for presidential election, it means that the voters generally believe that the prime minister is trusted by the parliament and is actually leading the government. There are many variables impacting on the voter turnout in individual elections, but as a long-term trend comparison, the consistently higher voter turnout rates for presidential elections over parliamentary elections can be explained by the fact that voters pay more attention to the presidency and vice versa (Shen and Urianghai 2016: 8). This chapter continued this keynote and extended the primary research issues for the purpose of understanding whether there is any correlation between the participation of political leaders and voters in semipresidentialism and the inclination of semi-presidentialism toward presidential or parliamentary dominance. The research issues include the following: 1. Observe the correlation between the overlapping duties of the actual party leader and the president or the prime minister and the inclination of semi-presidentialism toward presidential supremacy or quasi-parliamentarism. 2. Observe the correlation between the participation of voters in parliamentary and presidential elections and the inclination of semi-presidentialism toward presidential supremacy or quasiparliamentarism. 3. Observe the correlation between political career planning for the duties of the president and the prime minister and the inclination of semi-presidentialism toward presidential supremacy or quasi-parliamentarism. The variables for the aforementioned research subjects and operations can be illustrated as follows. First, the dependent variable in this

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chapter is the fact that institutional operation is inclined toward presidential supremacy or quasi-parliamentarism. The related database has been established by many scholars on the basis of different indicators. For instance, Wu (2011) classified 41 semi-presidential countries into those with an institutional inclination toward presidential supremacy, alternative cohabitation, decentralized compromise, or quasi-parliamentarism. Robert Elgie’s research website (the semi-presidential one) classified 54 semi-presidential countries in accordance with president-parliamentarism and premier-presidentialism. This chapter aims to discuss the case of Taiwan. In both the aforementioned database and the analyses conducted by multiple scholars, the operation of Taiwan’s semi-presidentialism is defined to be inclined toward president-parliamentarism dominated by the president. This chapter will discuss this point in the later analysis. Second, there are two independent variables: the participation of party elites in the system (from the top down) and the participation of voters in the system (from the bottom up), which are, respectively, used to examine their correlation with the operational type of semi-presidentialism. In terms of party elites, this study attempts to investigate the correlation between the facts that the president or the prime minister concurrently serves as the party leader and the operation of constitutional regimes using the concept of “the center of party politics.” Regarding the specific operations, two phenomena would be observed: 1. When a party leader leads their party to run for a presidential or parliamentary election, will the leader take the position of the president or the prime minister after winning the election? 2. When a single party wins both presidential and parliamentary elections, will the president or the prime minister concurrently serve as the ruling party leader if the constitution does not restrict that president can concurrently serve as a party leader? This hypothesis is to measure the relevance between the trend of “presidentialized party” and the operation of the constitutional regime. The concept of the presidentialized party was proposed by Samuels and Shugart in their monograph titled Presidents, Parties, and Prime Minister, aiming to explore the power distribution relationship between the president and the prime minister under different party organizations. They

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mentioned in the book that, under the atmosphere of direct presidential elections, the president has the power to allocate positions and make decisions; hence, the party’s behavior and organizations are similar to the constitutional framework. In other words, it is possible to develop into a presidentialized party, which is the trend under presidentialism as well as semi-presidentialism (Samuels and Shugart 2010: 15). Moreover, Samuels and Shugart noted that under semi-presidentialism, the prime minister might be dismissed and replaced under the dual influence of both the parliament and the president; thus, their relationship with the party is not easily secured. The development of presidentialized parties (in semi-presidential countries) is more likely than in parliamentary countries (Samuels and Shugart 2010: 99). On the basis of the inference made by Samuels and Shugart, the development of a presidentialized party might be weak in a country where the president is unable to influence the prime minister’s dismissal or survival. Accordingly, the observations on the trend of presidentialized parties and the relevance with the operation of constitutional regimes based on the measurement of the overlapping duties of the party leader, the president, and the prime minister have great significance. The issue regarding the president concurrently serving as the party leader in Taiwan is also controversial. Whether the president shall concurrently serve as the party leader is always one of the topics during election campaigns, and similar consequences with regard to this topic are often observed. A case in point is that although Taiwan’s presidents Chen ShuiBian, Ma Ying-Jeou, and Tsai Ing-Wen declared that they would not concurrently serve as the leaders of their respective party before assuming presidential office, they all later held concurrent roles as party leaders after they took office. Hong-Ming Chen believed that presidents concurrently serve as the party leader in order to avoid having to act as a dual agent between their party and the government (Chen 2009: 42). In other words, in addition to the appointment process, there is no other constitutionally institutional design for the president leading the Executive Yuan such as decision-making power for the plenary sessions and proposals of the Executive Yuan. If presidents are delinked from their party, they will face more difficulty in leading and promoting political and governmental affairs. A president concurrently serving as a party leader will accelerate the development of a “presidentialized party,” which is a key factor in catalyzing the presidentialization of semi-presidentialism.

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The second independent variable in this chapter is the observation of the relevance between the electoral participation of voters and the institutional operation of semi-presidentialism. The major hypothesis is that voters would be aware of the president or the prime minister actually leading the government in the constitutional operation and will reflect such perception in voting participation. Moreover, it is different from the hypothesis of the first independent variable regarding the level of effort of a party leader leading the party to run for president or parliament. The phenomenon concerned in this chapter is as follows. If there is a difference between the voter turnout rates of presidential and parliamentary elections given that these elections are conducted at different times, whose voter turnout rate will be higher? It is relevant to the inclination of constitutional operation toward presidential supremacy or quasi-parliamentarism. On this basis, for semi-presidentialism inclining toward presidential supremacy, political parties tend to have stronger capability to mobilize presidential elections, and voters would pay more attention to presidential elections than to parliamentary elections when these two elections are conducted at different times. In the case where there is broad mobilization and the voters pay close attention, the voter turnout rate for presidential elections would be higher than that for parliamentary elections under semi-presidentialism with presidential supremacy. On the contrary, in semi-presidentialism as a quasi-parliamentary country, a party leader largely leads their party to run for the majority in the parliament and also the position of the prime minister; hence, they will invest fewer resources in the presidential election. Moreover, voters may realize that the cabinet or parliament takes a major political role, and the president is usually no more than a figurehead even if they are elected directly by the citizens. Therefore, their voting participation is lower. The third independent variable in this chapter is the inspection of the relevance between the background and political career planning of political figures and the operation of semi-presidentialism. As stated earlier, a party leader may lead their party to run for president or prime minister. Under normal conditions, the career peak pursued by political figures is the position that holds supreme power in the constitutional regime. Particularly, in parliamentarism and semi-presidentialism inclining toward quasi-parliamentarism, the position of prime minister has no term limit; therefore, a party leader not only deems the prime minister post as the top position in their political career but also seeks reelection in normal

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circumstances, rather than using the position of the prime minister as a springboard to get promoted to the president post. Conversely, under semi-presidentialism with presidential supremacy, a party leader will run for the president post as the top position in their political career, and a political figure who is serving as the prime minister often becomes a popular candidate for the next president, while a political figure who is serving as president will never return to the position of the prime minister. The only exception is that a political figure reassumes the prime minister post because of institutional restriction on reappointment; therefore, they will run for the president post once again after the end of their premiership. A case in point is Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Hsu and Soong (2011) noted that Putin was not allowed to be reappointed consecutively after the expiration of his second presidency in 2008, and thus he served as the prime minister instead and held a concurrent position of the leader of the largest party in parliament, namely “United Russia.” From the perspective of Putin’s strong dominance over government affairs in his premiership and Dmitri Medvedev’s subordination and resistant ambivalence, Russia’s political system is of a higher rule by man. In other words, Putin’s political position determines which type of constitutional regime Russia takes. When Putin was elected president in 2012, Russia’s constitutional regime turned into presidentparliamentarism once again (Hsu and Soong 2011: 125). The case of Putin in Russia is not the normal state of a democratic country. In cases of normal or consolidated democracy, political elites rarely serve as the prime minister after the expiration of their presidency, and it is nearly impossible for them to be reelected as presidents. Nonetheless, it is common for political figures to continue to run for president after the end of their premiership in countries with president supremacy such as Taiwan. In addition, the political background of the prime minister can also be used as an auxiliary basis for the judgment on political power inclination. The prime hypothesis is that if the prime minister plays the role of an actual political leader, political elites will run for such position, and logically, “outsider” without political power would never serve at such positions. Especially, the prime minister is either appointed by the president or nominated by the parliament. An “outsider” may assume the office of president by means of election campaigns and thereby step into the political arena, but the prime minister must be consented by the parliament or appointed by the president, which generally means that the president is the actual political leader. Consequently, in terms of the

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political career development path of political elites toward the president or the prime minister and their political background, we should observe the following phenomena: Does a political elite serving as the prime minister run for president at the right time and take the premiership as a springboard for promotion to president? Or do they continue to seek the reappointment of their premiership? Does a political elite serving as the prime minister retire from their political career after leaving office? Or do they reassume the position of prime minister to avoid the institutional restriction on reappointment, and then run for president again? What is the probability and connotation of a political “layman” who is not elected directly to serve as prime minister?

By integrating the definitions and observation indicators of the aforementioned independent variables and the global distribution of semipresidentialism as well as its political, economic, and social performance, the discourse framework of this chapter can be drawn as follows (Fig. 3.1).

The Case Study of Taiwan After the fourth constitutional amendment in 1997, Taiwan gave the president the exclusive power to form a cabinet and also gave the parliament the power to censure a cabinet, and combined with the system design for dissolution of parliament. These institutional adjustments have essentially changed the triangular relationship between the president, the Executive Yuan, and the Legislative Yuan. Conventional wisdom generally believes that this is in line with the definition of semi-presidentialism. According to the aforementioned analytical framework, we will investigate the relevance of political participation and semi-presidential power distribution from two different perspectives of political elites and the masses.

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PoliƟcal engagement comparison between president and parliamentary elecƟons President or prime minister as the actual party leader

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Background and career development path of poliƟcal elites

Trajectory and power distribuƟon of semipresidenƟal operaƟon

Fig. 3.1 Analytical framework of semi-presidential operation in Taiwan

Political Elites: The Situations of the President of Taiwan or the President of the Executive Yuan as Party Leaders Conventional wisdom has accumulated much research regarding the influence of the president concurrently serving as a party leader on the operation of semi-presidentialism in Taiwan. For instance, Lee and Huang (2015) investigated the impact of a president concurrently serving as the party leader on legislative efficiency and the party–government relationship during the Chen Shui-Bian era; while Chen (2016) conducted a research on such topics during the Ma Ying-Jeou era. Shen and Urianghai (2016) also noted that whether a president concurrently serves as a party leader was a key indicator for judging the constitutional power scope of semi-presidentialism. A president holding a concurrent position of party leader is key to the development of a presidentialized party. According to the investigation conducted by Samuels and Shugart (2010), direct presidential elections provide favorable conditions for party presidentialization, and the specific implication of party presidentialization is to discuss the

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fact that the president becomes a comparative indicator for the center of party politics under semi-presidentialism. As per empirical data, from July 1997 to April 2018, Taiwan has been under the leadership of four presidents—Lee Teng-Hui (1996–2000), Chen Shui-Bian (2000–2008), Ma Ying-Jeou (2008–2016), and Tsai Ing-Wen (2016–present) in a total of six presidential tenures. Regarding the time distribution of a president concurrently serving as a party chairman, Lee Teng-Hui continuously held a concurrent position of the chairman of the Kuomingtang after the fourth constitutional amendment till March 2000 and the time proportion of his concurrent position as the party chairman was 94.12% (32/34; unit: month) since July 1997. Chen Shui-Bian played the role of the chairman of the Democratic Progress Party (DPP) twice during his presidential tenures, from July 2002 to December 2004 and from October 2007 to January 2008. Based on the unit of months, the time proportion of Chen Shui-Bian’s concurrent position as the party chairman was around 34.375% (33/96; unit: month). Ma Ying-Jeou concurrently served as the chairman of the Kuomingtang during his presidential tenure from October 2009 to December 2014, with a time proportion of around 67.71% (65/96; unit: month). Since May 2016, Tsai Ing-Wen has concurrently served as the chairwoman of the DPP, with a time proportion of 100% (23/23; unit: month) till April 2018. On the whole, the proportion of sitting presidents holding a concurrent position of party chairman was 61.45% in 153 months of a total of 249 months from July 1998 to April 2018. As per the aforementioned aggregate data, Taiwan has witnessed that the presidents had concurrently served as the chairman of the Kuomingtang and the DPP under the operation of semi-presidentialism in nearly the past 21 years. There are two implications during the party– government separation period: first, this situation is mainly concentrated in the lame-duck period before a president is going to leave office, for example, the last two months in Lee Tung-Hui’s presidency, the last four months of Chen Shui-Bian’s presidency, and the last 17 months of Ma Ying-Jeou’s presidency. Nevertheless, President Ma Ying-Jeou was an exceptional example. The Sunflower Movement of 2014 resulted in the early entry into the lame luck period; thus, there was up to one year and a half from the time President Ma handed over the position of party leader to the expiration of his presidency. Further, both Chen Shui-Bian and Ma Ying-Jeou made a commitment for party–government separation for

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the considerations of their presidential election during their first presidency. For this reason, they did not hold a concurrent position of party leader in form at the beginning of their first presidency, including the first 26 months of Chen Shui-Bian’s first presidency and the first 17 months of Ma Ying-Jeou’s first presidency. From this perspective, it is a common phenomenon that presidents concurrently serve as the actual leaders of their own parties. Apart from the fact that empirical data demonstrate the normality of presidents concurrently serving as party leaders, both the Kuomingtang and the DPP amended their respective party constitution, indicating the developmental trend of these two major parties synchronously positioning president as the party leader. In terms of the DPP, to implement the will for party–government synchronization, Chen Shui-Bian, through the unanimous acceptance of the DPP national congress, revised and enlarged Section 15(1) of the DPP constitution in 2002, i.e., any president of the DPP shall serve as the chairman of the DPP from the date of assuming office till the date of leaving office, and the tenure of party chairman is the tenure stipulated in the constitution. However, if any president is unwilling to hold the concurrent position of party chairman, a new party chairman shall be directly elected by the party members in accordance with the Section 15(1) of the DPP constitution. The Kuomingtang amended Section 17(3) of its party constitution as follows: “Any president from the Kuomingtan shall hold the concurrent position of the party chairman from the date of assuming the presidency and cease this concurrent position when the president leaves office, which is inapplicable for the relevant stipulation on the election and tenure in this section. When a new party chairman takes office, the tenure of the former party chairman is expired at the same time.” From the perspective of the development experience and party constitution of major parties, the fact that presidents concurrently serve as party leaders is a normal phenomenon of semi-presidentialism in Taiwan.

Mass Participation: Comparison of Voter Turnout With regard to the aspect of political participation among the masses, this chapter discussed and compared the voter turnouts for presidential and parliament elections when they are conducted at different times. The political participation of voters is, by and large, affected by electoral signification and a party’s mobilization tension. These are also reflected in

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the operation of constitutional regime. Voters hold different perceptions about the significance of a president or a parliament in a political system. Therefore, if voters believe that the presidency is more important than parliament composition and a party mobilizes more highly for presidential election than for parliamentary election, the voter turnout for the former will be more than that for the latter, and vice versa. Taiwan started the direct presidential election in 1996 and entered the constitutional framework of semi-presidentialism in 1997. Afterward, presidential and parliamentary elections were conducted at different times. Until 2012, the two elections were revised to be held simultaneously. During the period when both the elections were conducted at different times, a total of four presidential elections were held (in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008), with voter turnouts of 76.04, 82.69, 80.28, and 76.33%, respectively. There were also four parliamentary elections (in 1998, 2001, 2004, and 2008), with voter turnouts of 68.31, 66.31, 59.35, and 58.72%. Per the data of the four separate presidential and parliamentary elections, the voter turnout for the presidential elections was much higher than the Legislative Yuan elections. Due to Taiwan’s semi-presidentialism dominated by the president, the comparison of political participation of voters is in line with the hypothesis in this paper.

Political Elites: Background and Political Career Plan of the Presidents of the Executive Yuan In light of the third indicator, career planning of political elites, its analytical significance is that political elites’ cognition about political power will be reflected in their pursuit and planning for political positions. For instance, in parliamentary countries, political elites’ perception about the zenith of power is premiership and therefore they make all efforts to run for prime minister and then reappointment, which is their political career planning. For example, Angela Merkel has served as the Chancellor of Germany four times; hence, she will not run for president within her premiership or at the top of her political career. Because both parliamentarism and presidentialism have a single executive power, there is a clear trend in the career planning of political figures for competition of power. Nonetheless, under semi-presidentialism, the president and the prime minister are both likely to become the actual

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leader. Thus, the pursuit and career planning of political elites for presidency or premiership can also be considered one of the bases for the comparison of constitutional power scope. As the operation of semipresidentialism in Taiwan is inclined toward presidential dominance, presidency is also the top position pursed by political elites. Shen (2016) classified Taiwanese premiers into party elites and bureaucratic elites. This chapter adopted this classification and proved that prime ministers as “party elites” generally continued to run for president after leaving office, rather than seeking reappointment in the Executive Yuan. Apart from that, premiership can also be assumed by a bureaucratic elite selected by the president, indicating that the president plays the role of a leader in the dual executive system. The assumption of premiership by bureaucratic elites reduces the party color on one hand and highlights the attachment of its legitimacy to the president on the other hand, which shows that the dual executive system is a power structure with presidential dominance. Table 3.1 lists all the successive prime ministers since 1997 and their classification into party elites and bureaucratic elites as well as the data about whether prime ministers became presidential candidates or strove for the nomination for initial election in their respective parties after leaving office. Table 3.1 shows that numerous prime ministers with the background of party elites continued to run for president or party chairman after the expiration of their premiership, whereas prime ministers with the background of bureaucratic elites mostly retired from the political circle, and their assumption of premiership was appointed by the president, which is in concert with the hypothesis of the president as the actual executive leader.

Party Unity in Taiwan Relatively speaking, executive-initiated proposals in the period of unified government are more possible to pass than that in the period of divided government or minority government. However, unified government does not indicate that the parliament would pass all the bills the president prefers or supports. The president can face rebuff by the parliament which is controlled by the president’s party. In 2009, the Ma Ying-jeou administration signed a protocol agreement of beef imports with the U.S. counterpart. The controversy arose from the American beef with the use of ractopamine as an additive in feeds. In 2012, Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan, passed a bill to authorize government agencies to set

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Table 3.1 Background and follow-up political career development of the presidents of the Executive Yuan Tenure

Presidents of the Executive Yuan

President

1997/09–2000/05

Hsiao Wan-Chang Lee Teng-Hui

2000/05–2000/10

Tang Fei

2000/10–2002/02 2002/02–2005/02

Chang Chun-Hsiung You Si-Kun

Party elite

2005/02–2006/01

Hsieh Chang-ting

Party elite

2006/01–2007/05

Su Tseng-Chang

Party elite

2007/05–2008/05

Party elite

2008/05–2009/09

Chang Chun-Hsiung Liu Chao-Hsuan

2009/09–2012/02

Wu Den-Yih

2012/02–2013/02

Chen Chun

2013/02–2014/12

Chiang Yi-hua

2014/12–2016/01

Mao Chi-Kuo

2016/01–2016/05

Chang San-Cheng

2016/05–2017/09

Lin Chuan

2017/09–present

Lai Ching-Te

Chen Shui-Bian

Ma Ying-Jeou

Tsai Ing-wen

Type

Follow-up career development

Partial Bureaucratic elite Bureaucratic elite Party elite

Elected as the vice president

Bureaucratic elite Party elite Bureaucratic elite Bureaucratic elite Bureaucratic elite Bureaucratic elite Bureaucratic elite Party elite

Retired Retired Run for president Presidential candidate Run for president Retired Retired Become the party chairman Retired Retired Retired Retired Retired Current president of the Executive Yuan

safety standards for ractopamine in 10 ppb. During that time, the ruling party (Kuomintang) controlled 81 seats of the total 113 seats (71.7%) in the Legislative Yuan(parliament). The majority party in the parliament in Taiwan overturned the executive agreement and set a higher bar on beef products. Several legislators within the majority party faced immense pressure from their constituencies for the reason of food safety

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(Tsai and Chen 2012). Supporting the government’s position would possibly cause them to lose in the next election. The tenuous linkage between the presidents and majority members of the parliament has weakened the presidential influence in the legislative arena. The importation of U.S beer is not the only case of executive-legislative conflict during this period of unified government. On March 8, 2010, the Department of Health(DOH) proposed a bill to increase the premium rate and the minister of DOH, Yang Chih-Liang pledged to resign if the proposal was not carried out. The legislative Yuan controlled by the KMT rejected to pass the government-initiated bill and caused the minister to step down (Lin 2011: 421–422). The majority party of the Legislative Yuan had the upper hand to revise executive-initiated proposals and pass its preferred version of 13 bills during the period of unified government (Lin 2011). Furthermore, in the first term of President Ma Ying-jeou from 2008 to 2012, 52% of the executive-initiated proposals failed to pass in the Legislative Yuan and the majority party can dominate the contents of passed bills by 32% (Sheng 2014: 46, 53). The majority party in Taiwan’s parliament has its strong agenda-setting power and is a stumbling block to some bills introduced by the government. Four factors can account for party disunity or legislative rebels in Taiwan. First, semi-presidentialism in Taiwan lacks the mechanism of confidence vote in parliamentary systems. Voting out of step with the majority party in the parliament cannot endanger the survival of the cabinet. Separation of survival entices the parliament to follow its own course on certain legislation. Second, a large proportion of legislators in Taiwan is chosen by the single-member district (SMD) method. This type of electoral system can facilitate more personal reputation than party reputation on legislation. Third, the nomination of legislative candidates in Taiwan is based on primaries or polls. These two methods tend to be more decentralized since the party leaders cannot decide the nominees in the process of nomination. Research has shown that inclusive or decentralized nomination of candidates tends to weaken party discipline while exclusive or centralized nomination of candidates leads to strengthening party discipline (Rahat and Hazan 2001: 312–313). Most parties in Taiwan have adopted the primaries or polls to choose their own candidates, which can contribute to party disunity on legislation especially when the preferences

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of the selectorate are different from the preferences of the party.3 Fourth, the president in Taiwan does not have constitutional decree authority. The president’s unilateral power is limited when compared to that of other presidents in semi-presidential countries. The president in Taiwan can enact veto power but the parliament can override the president’s veto by a simple majority. It is a relatively low threshold compared to the mechanism in the United States. All in all, specific institutional features in Taiwan’s semi-presidentialism can induce party disunity or witness more legislative rebels even in the period of the unified government.

Conclusion This chapter aims to put forward a basic theory for judging the power logic of semi-presidentialism. The core issue is how to judge the power scope of semi-presidentialism. According to the three indicators proposed in this paper, we compared the party–government relationship of the president or prime minister and the perception and participation of political elites and masses about the system for the purpose of establishing a set of indicators to help us understand how to judge the possibility of semi-presidential power scope. Past research focused on the consistency between (1) the government, the Executive Yuan, and the Legislative Yuan and (2) the comparison of institutional and non-institutional power. The accumulative research helps us understand the institutional and noninstitutional factors for the inclination of the system operation toward the president or the parliament. However, in the aspect of political participation, little research was made on the power scope of constitutional operation. The comparison of the past systems and the investigation of the relationship between the government, the Executive Yuan, and the Legislative Yuan are objective conditions for analyzing the power scope of semipresidentialism. The system and the relationship between the government and the Executive Yuan certainly impacted the institutional operation, but there is still a possible difference between them. In other words, although the system provides strong power to the president, it is likely to incline to parliamentarism when the government and the Executive Yuan are 3 The major parties such as the Kumintang (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have utilized the method of primaries to avoid rebel candidates and party splits and gained more executive and legislative seats (Fell 2013).

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reaching unanimity. Therefore, from a practical viewpoint, the perception of political elites and masses about the system and their imagination about power scope may change the institutional norms and the influence of the consistency between the government and the Executive Yuan. Studies on the party–government relationship as well as political perception and participation of political elites and masses are “practical” and empirical. This chapter takes Taiwan as an example to illustrate that despite the limited institutional power of the president and the inconsistency between the government and the Executive Yuan after elections, the perception of political elites and masses about the system can lead to the continuous inclination of the semi-presidential operation toward presidentialization. In addition, this chapter also concludes that institutional features in Taiwan’s semi-presidentialism such as the lack of confidence vote, electoral system, nomination, and decree power can induce party disunity or generate more legislative rebels even in the period of unified government.

References Chen, Hong-Ming. 2009. A Study of Party-Government Relations under Taiwan’s Semi-Presidential System: The Case of the DPP Government. Taiwanese Journal of Political Science 41: 1–55. Chen, Hong-Ming. 2016. The President Serves as the Chairperson of Political Party or Not Under Semi-Presidentialism: A Comparative Analysis of President Ma’s Two Terms. Taiwan Democracy Quarterly 13 (4): 1–42. Elgie, Robert. 2005. From Linz to Tsebelis: Three Waves of Presidential/Parliamentary Studies. Democratization 12 (1): 106–122. Elgie, Robert. 2007. What Is Semi-Presidentialism and Where Is It Found? In Semi-Presidentialism Outside Europe, ed. Robert Elgie and Sophia Moestrup, 1–13. New York: Routledge Press. Fell, Dafydd. 2013. Impact of Candidate Selection Systems on Election Results: Evidence from Taiwan Before and After the Change in Electoral Systems. The China Quarterly 123: 152–171. Hsu, Jing-Yun, and Jenn-Jaw Soong. 2011. Russia’s Democratic Choice and the Structural Changes of Power Elites. Soochow Journal of Political Science 29 (4): 116–174. Jih-Wen, Lin. 2000. Triangular Equilibrium Under Semi-Presidential Systems. In Political Institutions, ed. Lin Jih-wen, 135–175. Taipei: Academia Sinica.

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Lee, Feng-Yu., and Chien-Shih Huang. 2015. Presidents as Party Chairmen and the Passage of Government Bills: An Analysis of Chen Shui-bian’s Presidency. Taiwanese Journal of Political Science 64: 85–135. Lin, Jih-Wen. 2011. A Veto Player Theory of Policy Making in Semi-Presidential Regimes: The Case of Taiwan’s Ma Ying-jeou Presidency. Journal of East Asian Studies 11 (3): 407–435. Rahat, Gideon, and Reuven Y. Hazan. 2001. Candidate Selection Methods: An Analytical Framework. Party Politics 7 (3): 297–322. Samuels, David J., and Matthew S. Shugart. 2010. Presidents, Parties, Prime Ministers. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sartori, Giovanni. 1997. Comparative Constitutional Engineering, 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press. Skach, Cindy. 2005. Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shen, Yu-Chung. 2016. Party Elite or Bureaucratic Elite: Influences of Different Premiers on Legislation Under Taiwan’s Semi-Presidentialism. Taiwanese Journal of Political Science 69: 75–102. Shen, Yu-Chung, and Rocky Urianghai. 2016. The Constitutional Order and Power Transformation of Semi-Presidentialism: Case Study of Taiwan and Mongolia. Taiwan Democracy Quarterly 13 (1): 1–38. Sheng, Shing-Yuan. 2014. From Legislative Proposals to Legislative Output: Comparing the Influences of Legislative Process Between the Executive Yuan and Legislative Yuan. In The Executive and Legislative Relationships in Transition, ed. Siou-Duan Huang et al. Taipei: Wunan, pp. 23–60. Shugart, Matthew Soberg, and John M. Carey. 1992. Presidents and Assemblies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsai, Jung-Hsiang, and Hong-ming Chen. 2012. Unified Government and Constitutional Operation in President-Parliamentarism During the First Term of President Ma, Ying-Jeou in Taiwan. Soochow Journal of Political Science 30 (4): 121–176. Tsebelis, George. 2002. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wu, Yu-Shan. 2011. Semi-Presidentialism: Global Developments and Research Agenda. Taiwanese Journal of Political Science 47: 1–32.

CHAPTER 4

President and Congress in the Period of Unified Government in America Jung-Hsinag Tsai

Introduction In America, presidents with a legislative majority would be more able to have their legislative initiatives approved in Congress than presidents without a legislative majority. Especially, presidents with comfortable majorities are smoother than presidents with razor-thin majorities. A large majority party needs not be very concerned about losing its majority status in the next election and has freedom to allow some of its members to vote against the party to keep themselves elected (Smith and Gamm 2017: 165). A majority party with a narrow margin of control must marshal very high levels of party cohesion in order to carry legislation over unified minority party opposition (Lee 2018: 1466). Generally speaking, in systems with elected presidents, governing parties are more likely to suffer splits within their ranks and to experience less unified or legislative losses resulting from cross-voting than parliamentary systems (Carey

J.-H. Tsai (B) Department of Political Science, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7_4

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2007: 92). Presidentialism has two features. First, both the president, who controls the executive and is elected by the people and an elected legislature enjoy democratic legitimacy; second, both the president and the congress are elected for a fixed term, the president’s tenure in office is independent of the legislature, and the survival of the legislature is independent of the president (Linz 1994: 6). A pure presidential regime is a system of mutual independence (Stepan and Skach 1994: 120). The president and the congress are coequals in the transactional relationship in which each has independent source of authority and must cooperate to accomplish some task (Carroll and Shugart 2007: 53). Political parties are the indispensable instrument of cooperation to bring cohesion and unity, and hence effectiveness, to the government as a whole by linking the executive and legislative branches in a bond of common interest (Sundquist 1988: 614). Congressional majorities would accept the president as head of the political party to which the majorities adhere even though the president and congress are institutional rivalry (Sundquist 1988: 614). Unified government can produce greater quantities of significant legislation and is more responsive to the public mood than divided government and parties generate incentives to cooperation that help transcend some of the policymaking gaps created by the constitution (Coleman 1999). However, presidents could fail in their efforts to build coalitions with their copartisans in Congress. The legislators of the president’s party fail to support him about one-third of time from 1953 to 1996 (Edwards 2000: 62). Both the primary method for choosing congressional candidates undermines the ability of party leaders to control who runs under the party label and weakens their ability to toe the line and candidates do not depend on parties for fund-raising are the causes for legislative disunity in Congress (Edwards 2000: 64). This chapter aims to elucidate how different factors affect legislative unity in U.S. Congress and why the presidents in the period of unified government face intraparty divergences or even defections.

Legislative Defection in American Congress The thesis of conditional party government argues that when preferences of party members are homogenous, they are more willing to delegate their powers to party leaders and when preferences are diverse, they are more possible to vote independently or not to follow the instruction of party leaders (Aldrich and Rohde 2001: 275–276). Representatives will

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not generally accept substantial electoral risk or loss of election-related resources to support their party’s programs or interests (Aldrich and Rohde 2001: 283). Party leaders would not try to induce their members to change their votes if they believed their side would win without them, nor would they do so if they believed they would lose even with the votes they could plausibly pick up (Aldrich and Rohde 2000: 37). Certain committees such as the Rules Committee enjoyed considerable independence from party leaders when the majority party was heterogeneous and majority and minority party members’ preferences overlapped (Schickler and Pearson 2009: 458). Numerous examples indicate that the majority party in the House or the Senate can face serious rifts on certain legislation. First, in 2007, as the Democratic party controlled a majority in the House, Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi sponsored a funding bill for the war in Iraq and it only gathered 86 Democrats to support and failed to persuade 147 Democrats to be on board (Pearson and Schicker 2009: 167). Second, in 2010, 38 Democratic representatives failed to support the America’s affordable Healthcare Choices Act and the intraparty organization, the Blue Dogs controlled 54 seats to bargain with the party leaders and succeeded in bending the content of the bill to their wills in the House (Rubin 2017: 211–212). The Blue Dogs exerted more influence as a coalition in the majority party since the alliance adopted a rule that if two-thirds of their members support a policy, all the members were bound to support it (Pearson 2015: 50). In the Senate, 4 Democratic senators objected to part of the Healthcare bill and would not vote for cloture to stop filibuster on the bill itself if it were not changed (Sinclair 2017a: 186). The majority party cannot fully control the agenda-setting and has to make concessions with some dissidents in order to pass a bill. Third, 59 of the most conservative Republican representatives defected and voted nay with a majority of Democrats on the continuingappropriations bill in 2011, despite the fact that the Republican party held a comfortable majority in the House of 112th Congress (2011–2013) (Aldrich and Rohde 2017: 41–42). Fourth, in 2015, 40 Conservative Republicans (the Freedom Caucus) in the House defeated a 3-week continuing resolution to keep the Department of Homeland Security open, they tried to defeat a free trade bill, and they threatened to defeat a resolution of disapproval of the Iran nuclear agreement (Pearson 2017: 519). Fifth, in 2017, the Republican party with a majority in the House and Senate failed to pass the American Health Care Act since some Republican moderates and conservatives cannot agree with the items of

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the bill even after President Trump has endorsed the measure (Pika et al. 2018: 221). Defections from the majority party or strong divisions within the majority party are very common in the House and in the Senate. Legislative cartel theory asserts that majority parties make rules governing the structure and process of legislation, causing that the legislative process in general is in favor of majority-party interest and that the majority party’s central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel’s leadership (Cox and McCubbins 1993: 2). However, members of majority parties have incentives not to toe the party line especially when they have different preferences on the party’s policies. When leaders reward members for their loyalty, they may forgo opportunities to help their most electorally vulnerable members who are most likely to vote against the party because their constituents are less supportive of the party agenda (Pearson 2015: 3). In other words, party leaders can not satisfy all the members within the majority party. Some legislators have to save their own seats by keeping their distance from their party. In the Senate, normally it needs a majority to pass a bill but if one senator or a number of senators embark on a filibuster to delay or block a bill by endless talk, then it needs a three-fifths majority (60 votes) to stop the filibuster(called as cloture) (Wawro and Schickler 2006: 2). The rank-and-file members of both parties in the Senate have ample opportunity to bring their legislative proposals before the full body (Evans 2012: 80–81). Since it is rare for the Senate majority party to have sixty or more members, the Senate majority leadership often is unable to pass legislation without a degree of support from across the partisan aisle (Evans 2012: 81). Worst of all, senators from the majority party do not act in unison. In April 2003, Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist reached an agreement with House Republican leaders and the White House on tax cuts totaling $550 billion—but Senators Olympia Snowe (RME) and George Voinovich (R-OH) refused to support tax cuts at that level (Pearson 2008: 110). On the Senate floor, Majority Leader Frist promised Senators Snowe and Voinovich that the final amount for tax cuts would not exceed $350 billion (Pearson 2008: 111). The majority-party leader in the Senate has to make a concession to moderate senators within the party in order to pass the bill. The status of the majority party in the Senate cannot guarantee its legislative unity over important bills. During the period of unified government in 2003, 10 rebellious party colleagues voted against the Medicare bill proposed by the Republican party in the Senate (Brady

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and Volden 2006: 185). In 2017, three Republican senators voted no for the bill of repealing Obamacare, when that bill was passed in the House controlled by the Republican party (Pearson 2017: 523). The majority party in the Senate cannot toe all the members in line on controversial bills or proposals.

Personal Connection and Party Connection The electoral system of single-member district (SMD) can facilitate more personal reputation than party reputation (Carey and Shugart 1995). This electoral method can cultivate incumbent members of Congress to break ranks with the leadership of their parties. In U.S. Congress, senators and house representatives are chosen by single-member district methods. For congresspersons, reelection is their top priority since they are nominated by direct primary, they establish and maintain their own electoral coalitions independent of party and they are not involved in forming a cabinet in the presidential system (Mayhew 1974: 25–27). Representatives put a premium on their constituencies since they want to get nominated and reelected and the reelection goal is the prerequisite for their career in Congress (Fenno 1977: 889). There is a connection between what they do in office and their need to be reelected (Mayhew 1974: 37). The congressional record of voting of the legislator is strongly influenced by his own policy preferences and by his perception of preferences held by the constituency (Miller and Stokes 1963: 56). The incumbents are more possible to get reelected when they cast more moderate voting than supporting the extreme position of their party (Canes-Mrone et al. 2002). Ideologically extreme legislators or mavericks who vote for their own preferences are more acceptable by voters than voting too partisan in Congress (Carson et al. 2010). Electorally vulnerable or marginal legislators, for example, should be less likely to support legislation that is politically unpopular (Carson and Jenkins 2011: 28). The incumbents may worry about taking the wrong position on the controversial issues since it can cause them to lose by electoral margins (Bovitz and Carson 2006). Voters would punish incumbents for voting with their parties against their constituent preferences (Lebo et al. 2007: 478). The incumbents can follow the party’s lead only when it cannot run counter to the preference of constituencies. Losing their seats is more costly than being out of step with their party. Members of Congress are political entrepreneurs free to follow their own predispositions if doing so

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serves their interest or to defect if they decide another choice is more beneficial (Fleisher and Bond 2000b: 160). For the ultimate goal of reelection, legislators have to be responsive to their constituencies and even sometimes derail their party line on controversial bills.

Electoral Demand and Party Demand Not only can legislators face demands from their constituencies, but also they have to confront the pressure from their party. Where party leaders exercise strong influence over a legislator’s election, the demands to which the legislator must respond in order to pursue reelection and the demands from those who control the distribution of resources within the assembly are consistent (Carey 2007: 94). Where voters exercise relatively more control over legislators’ electoral prospects and party leaders less, legislators may face demands from their electoral principals that compete with those of party leaders (Carey 2007: 94). Parties, particularly the majority party, are important influences on the institution’s mode of operation and on the decisions of the representatives who serve in it (Rohde 1991: 2). Party votes and party unity have been increased in the House of Congress (Rohde 1991: 15). Party leaders such as the Speaker, the majority leader and the whip are the key persons for passing legislation. The Speaker presides over the chamber and applies the rules, the majority leader schedules legislation for floor consideration, and the whip conducts polls to determine how members stand on important legislation (Sinclair 1983: 2). The success of party leaders depends on their chances of building winning coalitions and on the extent that building winning coalitions on bills to satisfy their members’ expectations as to legislative outputs (Sinclair 1983: 3). Furthermore, one school of thought argues that parties in the House, especially the majority party are legislative cartels which usurp the power to make rules governing the structure of process of legislation (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005). The consequences are the legislative process is in favor of majority-party interests, members of the majority party have all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of the majority party, and the majority party’s central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel’s leadership (Cox and McCubbins 1993: 2). Another thesis, the theory of conditional party government offers a more moderate perspective of legislative behavior. On the one hand, legislators can vote by their personal views and reelection expectations

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and on the other hand, parties can exert a strong influence on legislators’ beliefs and actions (Aldrich and Rohde 2000: 33). Conditional party government depends on the degree to which the preferences of party members are homogeneous, especially within the majority party, and different between the parties (Aldrich and Rohde 2000: 33). Congressional parties look for two collective goals. First, legislators seeking to enact certain policies are advantaged if their party wins majority control of Congress, its committees, and scheduling mechanisms and second, legislators seeking reelection are advantaged if their party’s record for policy achievement is viewed favorably by the public (Smith 2007: 26). It is important for party leaders to find a middle ground between party policies and electoral goals. Legislators are more cohesive in supporting voting on the floor, especially for the election of the speaker and of committees, but they are more autonomous for other important organization matters such as the design of committee jurisdiction (Schickler and Rich 1997: 1342). Legislators are more possible to be sanctioned by their party when they publicly oppose the party’s presidential candidate (Schickler and Rich 1997: 1342). Party leaders in the majority party can punish members who fail to support the features of House structure that undergird the party’s logrolling abilities (Cox and McCubbins 1994: 224). In the Senate, the legislative process is different from that of the House. Even though the Constitution implies that only a majority of the U.S. Senate is required to pass legislation, the rules of the modern Senate concerning debate effectively means that supermajorities are generally necessary for passage (Wawro and Schickler 2004: 758). One or some senators can invoke a filibuster to delay any legislation by endless talk. The cloture which requires three-fifths of the Senators (60) for an end to debate is a countermeasure to filibuster. In other words, if the majority party can not gather 60 votes, the bill is not passed in the Senate. The requirement of a supermajority sets a high threshold, especially for the party with a bare majority and the minority party can make full use of this special rule to set a negative agenda. The power structure in the Senate is decentralized. The chairs of committees and subcommittees can call for shots on agenda-setting. Most legislative work occurs in committee, policy alternatives tend to be formulated in the committee of jurisdiction, the coalition-building process begins and often ends in committee, and committee recommendations usually emerge relatively unscathed from consideration (Evans 1991: 2). The chairs of all committees have the

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first-proposal power to control the base bill that is made open to amendment and roll-call votes in committee (Hartog and Monroe 2011: 17). A committee chair is responsible for his or her panel’s agenda and determines which bills are considered and which bills sink from view (Evans 1991: 3). However, since the Senate has the special rule such as filibuster, committee decision-making has to be sensitive to the policy preferences of interested senators who are not member of the committee and committee proponents of particular legislation have considerable incentive to try to anticipate other senators’ view and bargain with those with intense preferences before the committee reports the bill (Sinclair 2017b: 26). The majority leader in the Senate has special prerogatives. The majority leader can move a bill which is taken off of the calendar to consider, namely the right of first recognition (Sinclair 2017b: 27). The majority leader in the Senate also plays the role of a bridge connecting the president and the Senate party colleagues. Championing the president’s legislative program, promoting the president’s interests by holding press conferences and addressing the public through floor speeches, and making television appearances to argue for the president’s policies are regular fare (Smith 2005: 264). Senators as elected officials have to face both electoral demands and party demands concurrently. Senators represent large and more heterogeneous constituencies and if they are out of touch with their constituents, they would face the risk of electoral failure (Carson 2008: 28). Senators can face cross pressures when the preferences of their constituency and their political party are not on the same page. If they vote with the party too often on controversial or highly salient issues or are viewed as being too extreme relative to their state, they risk alienating their political base in the subsequent election; if they vote in line with their statewide constituency and against the party, they may lose favor with the party leadership (Carson 2008: 29). Most of the time, party leaders are able to secure their preferred outcomes on roll-call votes but some senators who are influenced by particular interest groups are willing to defect from their parties’ preferred positions (Roberts and Bell 2008: 53). For example, the Republican senator, Larry Craig from the Idaho state placed holds on every U.S. Air Force promotion in exchange of stationing several planes at a base in Idaho even when the Republican party controlled a majority in the Senate (Sinclair 2009: 8). Holds are threats to object to a unanimous consent agreement or a threat to filibuster (Sinclair 2009: 12). Individual lawmakers in the Senate can use holds and other dilatory

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tactics on hundred of items to promote their personal policy goals and the parochial interests of their constituents (Evans and Lipinski 2005: 228). Senators who seek for reelection have to satisfy their constituents as their top priority and possibly defect from the majority party on the bills which can undermine the opportunity of being reelected. As filibusters have become more common and more partisan, majorityparty leaders are increasingly frustrated when their agenda items are held up because they cannot attract sixty votes (Pearson 2008: 105). When the parties are more evenly matched, the majority party may struggle to balance its interest in disciplined voting to win legislative battles with the desire to allow its members to vote as their individual electoral needs dictate (Smith and Gamm 2017: 165). Party loyalty has been increasing in the Senate because of the increase in ideological homogeneity within both parties and because of the increase in electoral competition between the parties (Pearson 2008: 103). Senators are increasingly likely to vote with their parties and against members of the opposing party (Roger 2017: 318). For example, in 2013, the percentage of party loyalty of the Republican party in the Senate reaches to 95%, while the percentage of party loyalty of the Democratic Party in the Senate is 85% (Roger 2017: 318). Supporting the majority party does not mean that party leaders can be dominant on legislation. Senators in the majority party have some bargaining chips to amend the bills to suit their electoral needs.

Unilateral Power: Decree Power and Veto Power Decree Power The president in the United States has the power of unilateral action such as decree power. The president’s authority to issue executive orders comes from three sources such as the constitutional stipulation, congressional delegation, and executive prerogatives. First, Article II of the Constitution stipulates the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed which contains both limits on presidential behavior (requiring presidents to faithfully carry out the will of Congress as expressed in statutes and an implied affirmative grant, permitting some discretion in the performance of executive and implementation duties) (Mayer 2001: 40). Second, Congress can routinely delegated substantial discretionary authority to the executive branch to flesh out the details of policy and implementation (Mayer 2001: 44). Third, decree power can act on behalf

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of the United States in the absence of law or in defiance of it (Mayer 2001: 50). Presidents have used executive orders to reorganize executive branch agencies, alter administrative and regulatory processes, shape legislative interpretation and implementation, and make policy within the bounds of their constitutional or statutory authority (Mayer and Price 2002: 372). The president simply sets new policy and leaves it up to Congress and the courts to respond and if they choose not to retaliate, either by passing a law or ruling against the president, then the president’s order stands (Howell 2003: 14). The president can act alone to enact his legislative agendas rather than depending upon Congress (Howell 2003: 14). Executive orders have become useful tools for the president seeking to shepherd legislation through Congress, establish policies with a minimum of congressional involvement and to keep policy implementation more firmly under presidential direction (Wigton 1996: 473). When the partisan composition of Congress is less favorable to the president, presidents will use more executive orders to substitute for legislative actions (Krause and Cohen 1997: 471–472). Presidents may decide to legislate by executive order when they have failed to move desired bills through Congress or presidents may also use executive orders to preempt legislation or undercut Congress in other way (Fleishman and Aufses 1976: 6; Mayer 1999: 452). However, Deering, and Maltzaman (1999) argue that presidents do use executive orders to circumvent a hostile Congress, but when Congress is likely to overturn them, presidents do not enact their authority unilaterally. Decree power is a preemptive action and its success depends on the response of Congress. Presidents can also issue decree orders to reward their supporters in some constituencies (Cooper 2014: 66). If the executive can deliver such services as attractive jobs and contracts to important allies of legislators, within certain limits legislators may choose to sell their policy support (Cain et al. 1987: 16). Some research indicates that presidents would make policy as pork barrel to target some states where they receive less support from previous presidential elections (Taylor 2007). Decree power can be used to make policy without the consent of Congress and to garner support for presidential reelection.

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Veto Power According to Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the president has the veto power to disapprove any bill passed from both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The veto would be overrided only when the two-thirds of the House and Senate approve it again. If not, the veto sustains and the bill fails to pass. When president and Congress disagree, the president has a strong incentive to use the veto if Congress presses its objectives too vigorously and Congress will anticipate vetoes and modify the content of legislation to head them off (Cameron 2000: 9). Congress can pass laws deliberately designed to provoke a presidential veto and the purpose of provoking a veto is symbolic to show important constituencies that Congress favors something and the president against it (Gilmour 2002: 201). If Congress passes bills the president strongly opposes, the president would enact his veto power to return bills to be reconsidered in Congress (Gilmour 2002: 201). For example, members of Congress can be particularly interested in passing legislation for their constituency, but the president would consider more collective goods to veto some of the passed bills for reelection (Woolley 1991: 282). The enactment of veto power demonstrates that the president and congress are co-equal branches in legislation. Veto power can be used as a threat to shape the legislation without being actually used. When the president can threaten to veto legislation without actually having to exercise the veto itself, the president can save resources and by threatening, he provides Congress with information about his intention, expecting that Congress will send him legislation he would sign rather than would veto (Deem and Arnold 2002: 31). For example, the president would use signing statements as a veto threat to inform Congress his stances on legislation and expect Congress to pass a bill or not to pass a bill (Kelly and Marshall 2009). Cameron (2000: 9) argues that the president may veto a bill in order to extract policy concessions in a repassed version of the vetoed bill and Congress may alter and repass the bill, groping for a version the president will accept or that can beat his veto. The president can substantially enact a veto to urge Congress to pass a bill he prefers. The threshold of overriding a veto needs a supermajority so that it is highly possible for the president’s veto to block the legislation he dislikes. The president can also use veto power to shape legislation in Congress. The more the president uses veto power, the fewer the pork-barrel bills are and when the

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president prefers spending in some districts over others, then he would forgo to enact a veto (McCarty 2000). From 1789 through 1992, there were 1448 regular vetoes, of which only 104 (7%) were overridden and also there were 1067 pocket vetoes (McCarty and Poole 1995: 283). The success rate of presidential vetoes is highly 93%, which demonstrates the pivot role the president plays on legislation. Historically, presidents enacted their veto power frequently even when they were in the period of unified government. The Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt vetoed 635 pieces of legislation in his presidency and in 1935, he vetoed 32 public bills (Copeland 1983: 698). From 1945 to 1953, Democratic President Harry Truman totally vetoed 250 bills even though the democratic party held a majority in Congress (Spitzer 1988: 72). President Roosevelt and President Truman leveled with the Congress controlled by their party to send the message that they are the chief legislator. When the president’s party controls the Congress, the frequency of presidential vetoes is less likely than when the president’s party loses control of either or both branches in Congress (Rohde and Simon 1985: 402). During unified government, if the president vetoes the bill, it is much easier for him to appeal to party ties and establish a one-third plus one blocking coalition to prevent both branches in Congress from overriding the bill (Rohde and Simon 1985: 405). During divided government, if the president threatens to veto legislation, opposition members know they cannot muster the two-thirds vote needed to override the president’s veto and they would make at least some alterations (Sinclair 2006: 246). Veto power is a strong negative power for the president to shape legislation in Congress. That the president decides to sign or veto a bill depends upon substantive and strategic considerations. Substantive concerns include the extent to which a bill satisfies the original request, the feasibility or suitability of a program not requested, the relationship of the legislative action to existing law, and the constitutionality of the legislation (Ringelstein 1985: 44). Strategic considerations include timing (a bill vetoed early in a session has time to be passed again in a form more acceptable to the President—a threat of a veto late in the session can force congressional concessions), and whether or not the members of Congress are open to compromise or are adamantly against the President and are prepared to attempt an override (Ringelstein 1985: 44). The president in United States can use vetoes and veto threats to wrest policy concessions from Congress.

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Unified Government Party majority in Congress does not guarantee the president can have a working majority. President Jimmy Carter enjoyed a comfortable majority in the Senate and House of Congress. President Carter ordered the Office of Management and Budget to remove the budget of several planned dam and irrigation projects in the West, which infuriated western democratic lawmakers and undid the projects to the budget since these public works projects were favorable to their elections (Davis 1992: 48). In 1994, Democrats in the House of Congress were unwilling to go along with their own party leaders or with President Bill Clinton’s health care reform because of electoral pressure from their constituents (Sinclair 2005: 250–251). On the same token, President Clinton in the period of unified government from 1993 to 1994 faced rifts in passing the NAFTA bill and the majority leader, party whip, and Democrats from the states of the rust belt opposed that bill in Congress even though it was finally passed by the cross-party legislative coalition (Sinclair 2006: 241). President George W. Bush had to fight a seesaw battle with his Republican majority in Congress. Some Republican representatives in Congress proposed the massive transportation reauthorization bill to boost their reelection chances but President Bush opposed that bill and would veto it for the cause of fiscal discipline and finally the majority leaders of the Republican party postponed the bill for the next Congress (Sinclair 2006: 240). Majority control of Congress does not guarantee that the president can pass any bill he prefers. The U.S. president cannot count on members of his party to support his policy preference (Fleisher and Bond 2000b: 155). Table 4.1 demonstrates presidential victories on roll-call votes about conflictual bills during the period of unified government from 1953 to 1980. In the House, President Eisenhower received the lowest support, 64.9% and the mean percentage is 71.9%. In the Senate, President Carter garnered the lowest support, 73.5% and the mean percentage is 75.9%. Another study reports that in the period of unified government from 1953 to 1996, only 42% of presidential initiatives became law (Edwards and Barrett 2000: 128). The presidency and both branches controlled by the same party do not guarantee to work in tandem on legislation. Party leaders from the president’s party are not always so strongly committed to supporting the president and leaders in Congress are constrained by institutional interest and loyalty (Bond and Fleisher 1990: 124). For example,

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Table 4.1 Presidential victories on roll-call votes of conflictual issues

President

Year

House (%)

Senate (%)

Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson Jimmy E. Carter Mean

1953–1955

64.9

74.9

1961–1963

78.2

80.2

1964–1968

78.0

75.2

1977–1980

66.6

73.5

71.9

75.9

House (%)

Senate (%)

Source Bond and Fleisher (1990: 72–73)

Table 4.2 House support and senate support for the president’s position

President

Year

Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson Jimmy E. Carter Bill J. Clinton

1953–1955

63.5

74.5

1961–1963

78.0

71.0

1964–1968

74.0

64.0

1977–1980

63.0

68.0

1993–1995

75.0

83.0

Source Bond and Fleisher (1990: 169, 172)

leaders’ need to schedule legislation for floor consideration in a fashion that is consistent with the time demands of party members may be in conflict with the scheduling needs of the president (Bond and Fleisher 1990: 124). Some members in the majority party have different ideological orientations outside their party mainstreams and these members are often cross-pressured on presidential roll calls because party pushes them in one direction while ideology pulls in the other direction (Fleisher and Bond 1996: 731). Tensions arise between the congressional party leadership and the president because at times party leaders in Congress need to meet demands that are inconsistent with presidential needs and institutional loyalty often leads congressional leaders to view themselves as the president’s peers, not his servants (Fleisher and Bond 2000b: 161). Table 4.2 presents the percentage of House support and Senate support for the president’s position during the period of unified government

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from 1953 to 1995. The lowest percentage of the president’s support in the House is 63.0% during the presidency of Jimmy E. Carter. In the Senate, President Johnson garnered the lowest percentage, 64.0% of legislative support. Edwards (2000: 61) discovers that 53% of presidential initiatives of significant legislation became law in the period of unified government from 1953 to 1996. Presidents even with a unified control of two branches in Congress fail almost half of the time. Fleisher et al. (2008: 203) find that majority party control makes the success rate of the president on legislation to be 76% from 1953 to 2001. In other words, Congress still can defend its autonomy by refusing to legislate or amend on presidential initiatives at times. Lawmakers within political parties tend to vote in unison, there are strong forces that can pull individual members of Congress away from their parties (Green and Bee 2017: 42).

Party Leaders and Party Unity in Congress The primary obstacle to party cohesion in support of the president is the lack of consensus among his party’s members on policies (Edwards 1989: 47). Party members who represent the diversity of constituencies can have different views on policies the president expects to deliver on (Edwards 1989: 47). Institutional arrangements that allow congressional leaders to lose on a major policy vote without having to issue an immediate call for elections also leave members of Congress less inclined to follow party directives that are legislators in parliamentary democracies (Herrnson 1998: 109). The biggest challenge for majority leaders is to devise ways to get independent-minded members who represent different constituencies to act in concert on legislation and the decentralizing features of Congress do not make meeting this challenge an easy task (Herrnson 1998: 125). Some members of the majority party in Congress can bump heads with their party leaders because of policy stances, constituency pressures, ideological disagreements, or other decentralizing features of Congress (Herrnson 1998: 128–129). Majority-party members of the House expect their leadership to advance members’ goals of reelection, policy and influence by fostering the collective action prerequisite to lawmaking, but to do so without imposing unacceptable constraints on member’s pursuit of their goals through individualist strategies (Sinclair 1995: 302). The candidate-centered electoral context within which they seek reelection necessitated considerable autonomy to tailor reelection strategies to their individual constituencies (Sinclair 1995: 302). For

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example, some Democrats in the House in 1994 were unwilling to go along with their own party leaders or with the president over the health reform bill and in the end the bill was never even brought to the House floor (Sinclair 2005: 250–251). In Senate, the feature of the decision-making process is individualism and senators create their own campaign organizations, raise their own money, and set their own campaign strategies (Smith 2005: 259). Party leaders in the Senate have to face more uncertainly on legislation since senators are more independent or more constituency-oriented. In 2005, some majority-party-members blocked the motion which Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed to end the minority’s ability to filibuster judicial nominees (Pearson 2008: 111). According to a study of legislative behavior in the Senate, senators seeking reelection may feel pressure to moderate their voting behavior in an attempt to avoid alienating voters, especially if they represent a fairly heterogeneous constituency (Carson 2008: 33). Senators would alter their party line voting in response to changing constituency preferences and when confronted with a choice between pleasing constituents and pleasing their parties, senators put reelection considerations ahead of their parties’ wishes and do what their constituents want (Stratmann 2000: 672; Roberts and Bell 2008: 56).

President and Congress Neustadt (1990: 29) pinpoints that American Constitution is supposed to have created a government of separated powers, but rather it creates a government of separated institutions sharing powers. Because the power to make national policy in the United States is shared between Congress and the president, conflict is expected and even intended (Fleisher and Bond 2000a: 2). President-congressional ties are often frayed, even hostile and nearly all presidents have suffered from erosion of legislative support during their tenure in office since World War II (Davidson 2013: 87). One study shows that 27% of legislative outcomes is the scenario of new law moving from president’s preference, 35% for the scenario of no new law, and 38% for new law moving toward president’s preference (Beckmann 2010: 130). In other words, presidents can only pass their preferred bills or push their agenda by 38% of legislative outcomes. The president must work with decentralized political party organizations that often exercise little control over recruitment of candidates who run under their party label, mete out weak discipline, and hold less leverage

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over members (Thurber 2013: 8). Senators and House representatives often freely pursue their own interests without fear of discipline from the president and the president allows legislators to seek benefits for their own constituents and to serve specialized interests (Thurber 2013: 8). Congressional parties have the potential to overcome constituency-based fragmentation, but creating party unity is a struggle and party leaders cannot command their members’ votes (Pika et al. 2018: 229). Presidents would propose their legislative programs for the performance of their leadership (Rudalevige 2002). But members of Congress can and do prepare proposal on their own initiative or in response to those offered by the president and few major policy proposals are likely to pass both houses unchanged (Jones 2005: 221). The exercise of prerogatives by the president and Congress often puts the two branches on a collision course, requiring an accommodation that is satisfactory to both (Fisher 1993: 11). Members of the president’s party tend to benefit politically from presidential successes, while members of the opposing party receive few political benefits and may suffer costs and these political incentives are likely to drive the parties in Congress farther apart on presidential initiatives than they would be in the absence of presidential leadership (Lee 2008). Furthermore, party leaders do not always support the president’s position on between one-fourth to one-third of votes (Fleisher and Bond 2000b: 183). The Constitution establishes a relationship of mutual dependence between the president and Congress and, in terms of policymaking, puts the president in the weaker position (Sinclair 2006: 234). Under certain political circumstances, it is more difficult for party leaders to cooperate with the president of their own party. If endorsing the president fundamentally conflicts with some members’ electoral goals, party leaders are likely to put their members first.

Conclusion American presidentialism features that Congress passes the laws and the president executes the laws and they have to check and balance with each other by sharing legislative powers. The relationship between the president and Congress can turn sour, even when both are controlled by the same party. Legislative stalemate can occur even in the presence of a congressional majority that favors a policy change. Electoral systems help to facilitate personal reputation of legislators in Congress. Reelection goals encourage legislators to be more responsive to their constituencies

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than to their party. Presidents in the U.S. are the chief legislator. They have constitutional prerogatives such as decree power and veto power to shape legislation. However, Congress can pass laws to supersede decree orders or override the president’s vetoes. Balance of power between the president and Congress is a fluid process. Party majority in Congress does not assure the president to get all of his preferred bills passed. Some members of the president’s party have their own will and can choose not to toe the party line. Party leaders of the majority party can face cross pressures from the president and party members. The cost of opposing the president can be more minimal than the cost of losing support of the party members. In American presidential system, Congress lacks the mechanism of confidence vote like that in parliamentary systems and its survival is independent of the president since Congress cannot be dissolved by the president. By comparison, party unity in U.S. Congress can be lower than that in parliamentary systems. When some members of the majority party have preferences different from the president’s, the president will suffer more defeats on legislation. Under unified governments, some presidents can have a more fragile basis from which to set the agenda and pursue their own independent policy proposals than others.

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CHAPTER 5

Political Institutions, Democratization, and Incumbent Party Cohesion Under Unified and Partial Unified Governments in Mexico Yen-Pin Su and Fabricio A. Fonseca

Introduction Executive-legislative relations in Mexico have changed dramatically over the past decades. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its predecessors, the National Revolution Party (PNR, 1929–1938) and the Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM, 1938–1946), have dominated Mexican politics for 71 years. Because the PRI controlled the presidency and held majorities of both chambers of the Congress from 1929 to 1997, executive-legislative relations during the PRI regime had been extremely stable. After the 1997 legislative election, the PRI failed to secure the

Y.-P. Su (B) Department of Political Science, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan F. A. Fonseca Graduate Institute of Latin American Studies, Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7_5

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majority in the chamber of deputies for the first time since 1929. PRI’s long time “loyal opposition,” the National Action Party (PAN), won the 2000 presidential election, which was the first party turnover in Mexico since 1929. After the Vicente Fox administration, Felipe Calderón of the PAN defeated the candidate for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with a narrow margin of 0.58% in the 2006 presidential election. Under the Fox and Calderón administrations, executive-legislative conflicts increased remarkably because the PAN failed to control the majorities of both chambers of the Congress. In 2012, Enrique Peña-Nieto of the PRI won the presidential election and managed to maintain a narrow majority (251 seats out of 500) in the Chamber of Deputies by allying with the Green Party (PVEM) and the New Alliance Party (PANAL). In the 2015 midterm election, the PRI-PVEM-PANAL coalition won 260 seats, securing the majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Executive-legislative relations under the Peña-Nieto administration (2012–2018) were less confrontational than the previous two PAN administrations. However, compared to the PRI regime before 1997, the PRI’s legislative behavior under the Peña-Nieto administration presented some characteristics that allow us to think about a changing nature in executive-legislative relations (López Leyva 2015: 78–80). In 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO hereafter) and his National Regeneration Movement Party (MORENA) swept the general elections and formed the first unified government since 1997. The brief political history mentioned above indicates that Mexico has experienced different unified governments before and after the 2000 party turnover. Did the incumbent party1 under the unified government exhibit different levels of party cohesion in the legislature before and after 2000? If so, what explains the variation in incumbent party cohesion? This chapter aims to examine incumbent party cohesion in the Chamber of Deputies under the Zedillo administration (1994–2000), the Peña-Nieto administration (2012–2018), and the first year of the AMLO administration (2018–2019). We select these cases for comparison for three reasons. First, unlike the PRI administrations before 1994, the Zedillo and PeñaNieto administrations are not typical unified governments. The first half of the Zedillo government was a unified government, while the second

1 In this paper, an incumbent party refers to the party that holds the presidency.

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half was a “partial unified government,”2 where the PRI controlled only one chamber of the Congress (the Senate). In contrast, the PeñaNieto administration was a partial unified government throughout the six-year term, which controlled only the Chamber of Deputies. Second, the Zedillo administration was the last PRI government before democratization in 2000, while the Peña-Nieto administration was the first PRI government after 2000. It is interesting to examine what drives different levels of party cohesion before and after democratization. Third, the AMLO administration is a unified government, but our data show that the level of the MORENA’s cohesion (2018–2019) is lower than that of the PRI’s cohesion under Peña-Nieto’s partial unified government. Therefore, it is interesting to address the puzzle that a unified government has a lower party cohesion than a partial unified government.3 Because the PRI has dominated both the executive and legislative branches for a long time, many previous studies of executive-legislative relations in Mexico focus on the relationship between the president and the PRI legislators under the unified government setting. Some studies argue that the authoritarian orientation within Mexican political culture shaped the unbalanced relationship between the executive and legislative branches (González Casanova 1982: 32–35; Meyer Cosío 1996: 21). Other scholars focus on the impact of political institutions, arguing that centralized constitutional power for the presidency and the ban on reelection for political posts contribute to the dominant role of the executive in its relations with the legislature (Casar 2002; Weldon 1997, 2002). The similarity of these studies is that they show that the PRI had been a highly cohesive party. We follow previous studies that emphasize the importance of institutional factors for understanding Mexico’s executive-legislative relations. However, we contend that the factors of centralized constitutional power for the presidency and the ban on reelection better explain executivelegislative relations before 1997, the last year that the PRI secured unified

2 The term “partial unified government” is borrowed from Bolton (2015) and is used to describe the situation in which the incumbent party controls only one chamber of legislature in a government consisting of an executive branch and a bicameral legislature. 3 We do not examine unified PRI governments before 1994 because they were considered authoritarian regimes with no free or competitive elections by important databases of classification of political regimes such as Polity IV Project (Marshall et al. 2017) and the Varieties of Democracy Project (Coppedge et al. 2019).

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government after 1929. However, because these two institutional factors have been time-invariant institutional features in the Mexican political system from 1929 to 2018, it is not proper to use these two institutional factors to explain variation in recent executive-legislative relations in Mexico. In other words, these two institutional factors can be seen only as a background, and further scrutiny is required for understanding the changing patterns of incumbent party cohesion. Based on the insights of new institutionalism, we argue that the level of centralization of the candidate nomination procedure and the strength of the party leadership are two key factors for explaining incumbent party cohesion.4 Based on historical evidence about how incumbent party legislators vote for executive-sponsored bills, we find that the PRI’s legislative behavior under the Zedillo and Peña-Nieto administrations was highly cohesive because the candidate nomination procedure was highly centralized. In contrast, the MORENA party’s cohesion is lower in the first year of the AMLO administration because this party has a less centralized candidate nomination procedure.5 Moreover, we find that the rate of PRI legislator abstention in the legislative vote varied from time to time under the Peña-Nieto administration. Specifically, the abstention rate of the incumbent party’s legislators was higher under the second half of the Peña-Nieto administration than that under the first half of the PeñaNieto administration. We argue that it is because the party leadership was weaker and was frequently challenged by copartisans in the second half of the Peña-Nieto administration. This chapter will proceed as follows. The second section briefly discusses how new institutionalism provides a useful analytical perspective for understanding executive-legislative relations in Mexico. In the third section, we discuss how centralized constitutional power for the presidency and the ban on reelection provide a basic institutional environment for legislative behavior. The fourth section provides analyses about the impact of the candidate nomination procedure and party leadership 4 While the constitutional rule for a vote of confidence is an important institutional factor that needs to be considered when studying incumbent party cohesion, in the Mexican Constitution, there is no stipulation for votes of censure or votes of no confidence. 5 In spite of being lower than previous PRI unified or partial unified governments in Mexico, MORENA party cohesion is still remarkably high compared to many unified governments in other countries, including some of the cases presented in this edited book.

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on the level of incumbent party cohesion in the Chamber of Deputies. We also discuss how democratization and a renewed emphasis on federalism amplify the effects of a less centralized nomination procedure on reducing party support for certain executive-sponsored bills. The fifth section concludes.

Perspectives of New Institutionalism for Studying Legislative Behavior To understand legislative behavior of the president’s party in Mexico, we adopt analytical perspectives from two theories of new institutionalism: historical institutionalism and rational-choice institutionalism. First, historical institutionalism underscores the importance of institutions in understanding political actors’ behavior. Historical institutionalism suggests that, once an institution is established, its historical legacies shape the long-term behavioral patterns of the political actors (Steinmo et al. 1992). Most importantly, as time passes, an institution is likely to follow certain “path dependence” and produce a “reproduction mechanism” to sustain its survival (Pierson 2004). According to historical institutionalism, institutions tend to not change unless an exogenous shock causes serious conflicts between different political forces and produces a “critical juncture” for institutional change (Collier and Collier 1991; Peters et al. 2005). Second, rational-choice institutionalism assumes that actors are rational and tend to maximize their interests. For this institutional theory, institutions are a political arena with a series of rules and incentives for actors to interact with each other (Peters 2012: 48). In other words, institutions provide opportunities and constraints that shape the rational behavior of the actors (Shepsle 1989, 2006). Moreover, political actors might struggle to pursue their interests by keeping or changing the institutions (North 1990). As we will discuss in the following sections, centralized constitutional powers for the presidency, a party-centered electoral system, and a centralized candidate nomination procedure are three key institutional factors that shape executive-legislative relations in Mexico. Before 1997, these institutions followed a path dependency, as suggested by historical institutionalism, to shape long-term executive-legislative elections in Mexico. Rational choice institutionalism also helps explain legislative behavior. Centralized constitutional powers for the presidency, a party-centered

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electoral system, and a centralized candidate nomination procedure provide incentives to shape the behavior of the president and the legislators of the incumbent party. Mexican presidents have used these institutions as a strategic tool to influence legislative behavior by controlling the career path of the legislators. In order to secure their political survival, the incumbent party’s legislative voting on the floor under unified governments had shown an extremely high level of cohesion, mainly because these legislators’ strategic choices were largely constrained by these institutions. However, while the factors of centralized constitutional powers for the presidency and a party-centered electoral system remain intact in Mexico, different parties have changed their candidate nomination procedure over time. The PRI’s defeat in the 1997 legislative election constitutes a “critical juncture” for the change of centralized candidate nomination. Since 1997, the trend of making the candidate nomination procedure less centralized has become a norm for many major parties in Mexico. It is expected that a less centralized candidate nomination procedure provides incumbent party legislators with more opportunities to strategically deviate from the party’s direction when necessary. Therefore, a less centralized candidate nomination procedure might reduce the level of party cohesion. In addition to the level of centralization of the candidate nomination procedure, we argue that the strength of party leadership is also a crucial factor for understanding incumbent party cohesion in Mexico. A strong party leader is more able to use the “carrot and stick” approach to influence legislators. Therefore, under strong party leadership, incumbent party legislators are more likely to follow the direction of the party, or otherwise they might risk losing opportunities to advance their political career. In contrast, a weaker party leadership exerts less influence on legislator behavior. Weaker party leadership might be more likely to be challenged by copartisans with different interests and opinions, and thus it could undermine party cohesion. Under weak party leadership, some legislators of the incumbent party might not directly vote against the party’s direction on the floor, but they might use other ways to express their discontent, such as taking abstention in the vote. Accordingly, we generate two testable hypotheses for our analysis. Our first hypothesis suggests that, when the incumbent party’s candidate nomination procedure becomes less centralized, the party’s legislators

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tend to be less cohesive. Second, we hypothesize that, when the incumbent party’s leader is not strong, the party’s legislators tend to be less cohesive. We test our two hypotheses using evidence about the interactions between the president and his copartisans in the Chamber of Deputies under the Zedillo administration (1994–2000), the PeñaNieto administration (2012–2018), and the first year of the AMLO administration (2018–2019).

Institutional Settings for Executive-Legislative Relations in Mexico Centralized Constitutional Power of the Presidency The Constitution of Mexico grants the president legislative power, including the power to make legislative proposals, to veto proposals made by the Congress, and to issue presidential decrees. More importantly, Article 89 of the Constitution stipulates a wide-range of constitutional powers, including appointing, and removing important government officials and military officers. Among the various political posts, the power to appoint the Secretary of the Interior (Secretario/a de Gobernación) is considered the most important because, under the PRI authoritarian regime from 1929 to the late 1980s, the Secretariat of the Interior managed the intelligence agencies and took charge of the administration of parties and elections.6 Interestingly, although Mexican presidents’ constitutional power seems highly centralized, it is not particularly strong compared to other Latin American countries (Shugart and Haggard 2001). According to Doyle and Elgie’s (2016) measure of constitutional presidential power across the globe, Mexican presidential power is ranked 14th among the 18 Latin American countries.7 Although the Mexican president’s power might not be strong based on the constitutional parchment, the Mexican presidency 6 Among the thirteen presidential elections from 1928 to 2000, eight presidential candidates from the PRI had been Secretary of the Interior. 7 The country order from the highest constitutional presidential power score to the

lowest in Latin America is: Chile (0.570), Ecuador (0.560), Brazil (0.486), Panama (0.452), Peru (0.420), Argentina (0.407), Nicaragua (0.403), Dominican Republic (0.400), Venezuela (0.391), Colombia (0.381), Uruguay (0.377), El Salvador (0.373), Honduras (0.343), Mexico (0.343), Bolivia (0.319), Costa Rica (0.284), Guatemala (0.283), and Paraguay (0.272). See http://presidential-power.com/?page_id=2151.

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in practice is by no means a weak institutional actor (Carpizo 1978). In our view, what makes the Mexican president a powerful institutional actor is the combination of centralized presidential power, the ban on reelection for all elected officials, and a highly centralized system of candidate nomination. Party-Centered Electoral System and the Ban on Reelection Mexico has a bicameral Congress, and the country has adopted seven different electoral systems for electing Congress members since 1929 (Weldon 2001: 447). One similarity of these different electoral systems is that they are all highly party-centered. There are two crucial factors that make the Mexican electoral system for Congress members so partycentered. First, before 2015, all candidates for senator or deputy required official nomination from a party. In other words, the electoral laws have long prohibited the participation of independent candidates in congressional elections. Second, the Constitution stipulates a ban on immediate reelection of senators and deputies (Nacif 2002: 258–261). Before 1964, Mexico adopted a single-member district system (SMD) for electing members of the Chamber of Deputies. From 1964 to 1976, Mexico adopted a “party deputy” electoral system, introducing the idea of proportional representation (PR) to grant seats for smaller parties who failed to gain any seats in the SMD system. From 1979 to 1985, senators and deputies were elected through mixed-member electoral systems, in which voters cast one vote for the SMD system and the other vote for the PR system. In 1998, Mexico adopted another reformed electoral system. For the Chamber of Deputies, 300 deputies are elected based on the SMD system, and 200 deputies are elected based on a closed-list PR system in five multi-member districts (with 40 seats for each district). To elect federal deputies, a Mexican voter casts only one vote for an SMD candidate in his or her electoral district. The SMD votes for a party are summed at the national level, and the total votes will determine: (1) whether this party passed the eligibility threshold (2% of vote since 1997) for gaining seats from the PR tier; and (2) the number of seats gained from the PR tier with other requirements being considered. In short, under the current Mexican mixed-member electoral system, a voter makes a voting decision for SMD candidates only and has no say over the party list.

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In general, an SMD system tends to provide stronger incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal vote compared to candidates under a PR system (Preece 2014: 156). However, this is not the case for the Mexican electoral system. The Mexican electoral system is highly partycentered because the Constitution used to ban reelection for all elected officials. The origin of the ban on reelection can be traced to 1910, when the important political figure Francisco Madero used the slogan “Effective suffrage—no reelection!” and successfully mobilized different political forces to oust the dictator Porfirio Díaz and start the Mexican Revolution. Later, the principle of no reelection became an important principle enshrined in the 1917 Constitution, but it was only applied to the presidency. Before 2018, mayors and legislators (at both the federal and the local levels) were not allowed to run for immediate reelections; in other words, they can only run for reelection after sitting out one term. In 1927, former president Plutarco Elías Calles allied with a number of Congress members to amend the Constitution to permit non-immediate presidential reelection. However, the Congress again passed a constitutional amendment in 1933 to forbid presidential reelection (Colomer 2001: 155). Also in 1933, consecutive reelection for Congress members and state legislators was prohibited. As Weldon argues (Weldon 2004b: 574–575), the purpose behind the reform is that the prohibition on reelection would undermine the connections between local political bosses and their supported federal legislators, so that the legislators’ loyalties could be redirected to the party leader (see also Weldon 2003). Unlike the presidency and the governorship, in which a person can serve only one term in his or her life, the Constitution allows nonimmediate reelection for legislators. Although all federal legislators are term-limited to a single term, they are eligible to run for the same office again after sitting out one term.8 Still, the constitutional ban on reelection for all elected officials has become an inseparable part of Mexican political culture since then. Although Mexico has experienced six electoral reforms from 1978 to 1996, the no-reelection rule had been implemented for decades (Casar 2002: 142). Cosío Vellegas (1978; cited from

8 Lujambio’s (1996; cited from Álvarez 2013: 299) study shows that only 9% of 4227 PRI federal legislators (1933–1995) have been reelected, and 11% of 455 PAN federal legislators have been reelected. This definition of “been reelected” suggests one of two situations: 1) moving from one chamber to the other; and 2) being reelected for the same office after the one-term sit-out period.

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Weldon 1997: 248) argues that this rule largely explains why the Mexican Congress had been so subordinate to the president.

Centralized System of Candidate Nomination In addition to the ban on reelection, the other important factor that makes the Mexican presidency a powerful institutional actor is the highly centralized system of candidate nomination. The PNR adopted relatively open (but often rigged) primaries for selecting candidates in its early years, but later in 1937 the PRM introduced the method of closed conventions (Weldon 2004a: 134–135). Between 1946 and 1951, the PRI held closed primaries, but beginning from 1951, the federal electoral laws abolished primaries as a way for parties to select candidates (Medina 1978: 20–25; cited from Weldon 2004a, 135). There are two formal organization mechanisms for candidate selection within the PRI, including the political council and closed national convention. However, the National Executive Committee (CEN) has the authority for determining the candidate selection method. More importantly, it is the president who had the power to designate the head of the CEN (Casar 2002: 140–141).9 From 1937 to 2000, the Mexican presidents were the de facto leader of the PRI (Weldon 2004b, 575), and they were able to dominate the candidate selection procedure for most elective posts for the PRI, including senators, deputies, and state governors. The PRI presidents did not personally select all the candidates for elective offices. In many occasions, the president “acted as an arbiter among various interests within the party when nominations were decided for federal deputies” (Langston 2001: 490; see also Bailey 1988). Historically, many political actors within the PRI have a certain influence on the candidate selection procedure. For instance, the traditional sectors within the PRI’s corporatist structure used to be offered a quota of candidates for elective offices at national and local levels (Bailey and Gómez 1990: 299).

9 During the maximato period (1928–1935), Mexican presidents were not fully able to control the party. The PNR (the predecessor of PRI during 1929–1938) was informally led by former president Calles, who overpowered the three presidents during the maximato period (Weldon 1997: 232).

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Mexican governors have great control power over nomination for the SMD candidates for the Chamber of Deputies, and, at times, the governors will negotiate with the national-level party leader to place allies for the candidates on the PR list (Langston 2010: 241). In contrast, the governors do not have a strong influence on the candidate selection for senators. Many of the PRI senatorial candidates “were chosen directly and imposed on the party by the executive and the national party leadership, taking into account information and preferences ‘sent up’ to the CEN and the PRI’s three presidential candidates from the state-level PRI organizations and sectors” (Langston 2006: 400).

Explaining the Dynamics of Incumbent Party Cohesion Under Unified and Partial Unified Governments in Mexico Party Cohesion of the PRI Before 1994 What are the consequences of the ban on reelection for federal deputies and senators? When the legislators face strong cross pressures from their constituencies and their party, they tend to cultivate a personal vote. Therefore, when the electoral system allows for reelection, many candidates tend to pursue a personal vote (Carey and Shugart 1995). However, when the constitution bans reelection, like in the case of Mexico, the incentive structure for the legislators could be fundamentally different. As Álvarez (2013: 299) points out, when politicians have no incentives for reelection, they break the linkages with the constituencies right after they are elected. The main reason is about political accountability. Facing no chance to be reelected, politicians are almost not accountable to the voters. In Mexico, an important indicator that reflects the impacts of the ban on reelection is the number of pork-barrel bills passed in the Congress. Weldon’s (2002: 405) study demonstrates that the number of pork-barrel bills that targeted the interests of local constituencies dropped dramatically after reelection was constitutionally forbidden in 1933. Furthermore, the combination of the ban on reelection and a centralized candidate nomination system has large impacts on incumbent party

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legislative behavior in Mexico.10 Because PRI party leaders used to designate jobs in non-elective offices for legislators after their terms end, PRI legislators were more likely to be office-seekers (Álvarez 2013: 299). After the legislators’ terms end, the CEN or the president might appoint them to bureaucratic posts at different tiers of the party, namely, party’s national organization, local branches, party organization in the legislature, and party organization in the administration (Casar 2002: 137). For other politicians, they might be nominated to run for other kinds of elective office after the end of their term. Therefore, many PRI legislators tended to maintain good relations with powerful party officials for enhancing the chances of political survival (Caballero-Sosa 2013: 179–181). Some other legislators would try to attract the attention of the party leaders by proposing numerous legislative proposals (Béjar Algazi 2012: 622). Therefore, the ban on reelection combined with a centralized nomination system makes it easier for party leaders to maintain party discipline (Langston 2008: 148). Weldon (2004a, 135) argues that the practice of dedazo, an informal practice of power to determine the next candidate for presidential successor, also contributes to greater party cohesion. Most PRI deputies that served in the first three-year term of a six-year presidential term tended to have greater incentives to follow the party line on the floor because they anticipated that such compliant behavior would be rewarded by the CEN. In contrast, many PRI deputies that served in the second three-year term of a presidential term had a different incentive structure because the president “could not credibly pledge to reward legislative loyalty because he would be out of office (in retirement or exile) just three months after the legislative term ended” (Weldon 2004a, 135). In order to maintain high party discipline, the outgoing president used dedazo to ask the successor to keep the outgoing president’s promises to advance the loyal PRI legislators’ careers (ibid.). Most PRI legislators had to be highly disciplined in their votes on the floor, or otherwise they would risk their political career after their terms end. Throughout the unified government experience from 1937 to 1994, the PRI had been highly cohesive in the Congress due to the president’s strong influence over the Congress. For instance, during the Cárdenas administration (1934–1940), over 97% of executive-sponsored bills were 10 Langston (2008: 146) adds that the national party organization’s control over public campaign financing also matters for the high levels of party discipline in votes in the Chamber of Deputies.

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passed by the Chamber of Deputies. From 1940 to 1964, the passage rates of executive-sponsored bills in the Chamber of Deputies ranged from 95 to 100% (Weldon 2004a, 137; see also Weldon and Molinar Horcasitas 2009). Weldon (2002: 400) shows that, between 1947 and 1977, presidential budgets received committee amendments only 4 times of 30; moreover, these budgets were amended only twice of 31 occasions on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies (Weldon 2002: 403). During the de la Madrid administration (1982–1988), 337 of the 343 proposals initiated by the executive branch were passed by the Chamber of Deputies (Casar 2002: 126). The high passage rate of executivesponsored legislative initiatives remained during the Salinas administration (1988–1994), when 164 out of the 169 executive-sponsored proposals were approved by the Chamber of Deputies (Casar 2002: 128). Because roll-call vote data for the Mexican Congress are not available for years before 1998, we cannot accurately gauge the exact level of party cohesion of the PRI. Still, the historical evidence about the initiation and passage of presidential bills suggests that the PRI’s legislative behavior had been highly cohesive and that executive-legislative relations had been extremely stable before 1994.

Democratization and the Changing Trend of the Candidate Nomination Procedure In 1993, Mexico, the United States, and Canada ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) seized towns and cities in Chiapas, protesting the signing of NAFTA and calling for greater democratization and inclusion of indigenous rights. The Zapatistas movement inspired pro-democracy forces and pressured the Zedillo government to implement deeper political reforms (Gilbreth and Otero 2001). In 1996, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) was transformed to be an independent body for the administration of electoral matters, which aims to ensure that future elections are clean and fair. In 1997, the PRI lost the majority in the Chamber of Deputies for the first time since 1929. It was also the first time that the PRI government changed from a unified government to a partial unified government.11

11 The PRI still held the majority in the Senate from 1997 to 2000.

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Table 5.1 The distribution of seats by political parties in the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico (1991–2018) 1991 1994 1997 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015 2018 PAN PRI PRD PT PVEM PPS PARM PFCRN Convergencia/MC PANAL ASDC MORENA PES PSN PAS Independents

89 321 41

119 300 71 10

120 239 126 7 8

206 211 50 8 17

152 225 96 5 17

206 104 126 16 19

143 237 71 13 21

114 213 103 15 28

109 203 61

3

5

16 9 4

6 9

17 10

25 11

28

35 8

259 29

1

8

47

78 47 11 28 11

11 15 23

3 2

Source Data from the 1991 election to the 2015 election are from Instituto Nacional Electoral (2019); data for the 2018 election are from Cámara de Diputados (2019)

Table 5.1 shows the distribution of seats for each party from 1991 to 2018. It shows a clear pattern that the PRI has not been able to secure a majority in the Chamber of Deputies by itself since 1997.12 In 2006, the PRI became a second largest party for the first time since 1929, but it returned to be the largest party in the Congress from 2009 to 2018. In 2018, the sudden rise of the MORENA shook the Mexican party system. The total seats of the three traditional parties (PRI, PAN, and PRD) were reduced by 64%, while the MORENA increased 224 seats, about 6.4 times more than the seats that it had in 2015. The MORENA swept the 2018 general elections and led the first unified government since 1997. Figure 5.1 shows the evolution of the effective number of legislative parties (ENLP) based on seat data for the Chamber of Deputies

12 From 2012 to 2018, the PRI secured a majority in the Chamber of Deputies not by itself, but in a coalition with other parties.

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Fig. 5.1 Evolution of the effective number of legislative parties in the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico (1991–2018) (Source Calculated by the authors)

in Mexico from 1991 to 2018.13 As can be seen, the Mexican party system has become increasingly fragmented over time. The ENLP in the Chamber of Deputies in the 2015 election is 4.09, the highest since 1991. However, because of the strong rise of the MORENA, the ENLP dropped to 3.2 in the 2018 election. Although the PRI nomination procedures were largely controlled by its national leaders, there was a noticeable transformation for the procedures beginning in the late 1990s. Specifically, as the elections became increasingly competitive, the PRI governors, who used to be crucial vote mobilizers for the presidential candidates, had more informal political

13 We used the formula for effective number of parties developed by Laakso and Taagepera (1979), which is the inverse of the sum of squares of each party’s seat share in an election.

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weight to ask the president to nominate congressional candidates that were their favored allies with local political experiences (Langston 2008: 149–150; 2010). Starting from 1994, former president Zedillo repeatedly asserted that he would distance himself from involvement in party matters; in particular, he participated less in the candidate nomination procedure for gubernatorial elections (Weldon 2002: 382). After the 1997 electoral defeat, Zedillo decided to give up exercising dedazo. Moreover, Zedillo introduced primary elections for selecting gubernatorial candidates in 13 of 17 gubernatorial elections held between 1998 and 1999 (Casar 2002: 139). The arrival of a new generation of high-ranking officials commonly known as tecnócratas, most of them trained in universities in the United States and Western Europe, caused numerous frictions with those party leaders who thought of themselves as more traditional and true career politicians, but who were negatively depicted by public opinion as “dinosaurs” (Zeledón Flores 1999: 40–44). Presidential candidates Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo came from this group of tecnócratas, and their visions about the future of the PRI were not always met with enthusiasm by the different sectors and corporations that were historically considered the backbone of the party. Given that the PRI controlled most state governorships in the country, its party leadership also supported moves toward a deeper federalism. Specifically, in the hope of increasing its electoral competitiveness, the PRI supported the Vicente Fox administration’s policy of grating more autonomy for state governments. These changes led to the involvement of more actors in the party’s candidate selection procedure, giving more power of the selection to state governors and other key leaders (Olmeda 2009: 106). The existence of an autonomous and strong IFE also moved all the parties to find more open ways to select their candidates. Nonetheless, Wuhs (2006) argues that no major parties in Mexico implemented internal organization reform that could undermine the strong party discipline. For instance, the CEN of the PRI is still the main authority for selecting PRI deputy candidates for the PR and SMD systems. After 2001, the PRI adopted the methods of district-level primaries and district-level party conventions to select its candidates (Cady 2012: 38–41). However, the CEN of the PRI relied on an instrument known as convocatoria for determining the election of the convention delegates and the voting

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procedures for the local primaries and conventions (Wuhs 2006: 43–45). As a result, different convocatorias were used to adapt different local conditions for selecting a “candidate of unity” (Langston 2001: 494– 495), who would run unopposed during the primaries. In short, the highly centralized of candidate nomination procedure within the PRI had not changed much. Incumbent Party Cohesion Under the Unified Governments After 1994 As mentioned in the previous section, after Zedillo assumed power, he intentionally tried to distance himself from the affairs of the PRI. This informal change had some influence on the relationship between the president and his copartisans in the legislature. From 1994 to 1997, two important executive-sponsored bills were not fully supported by PRI legislators. Specifically, Zedillo’s social security reform proposal had been largely modified by the Congress, and the proposal about privatization of the state-owned petroleum company’s petrochemical plants were cancelled (Casar 2002: 128–129; Weldon 2002: 382). Still, the overall rate of passage for executive-sponsored bills from 1994 to 1997 is close to 100%: 55 of 56 bills were passed by the Chamber (Casar 2002: 128). In spring 1995, while all opposition Congress members voted against a legislative bill of a 50% increase in the valueadded tax, only one PRI deputy and one PRI senator voted against this bill (Weldon 1997: 246). During the 57th Congress (1997–2000), the first time the PRI lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies, the executive sponsored 43 bills. Due to the availability of legislative data, starting from 1998, from the 31 proposals that Zedillo sent to the Chamber of Deputies for its consideration and passage during that time, only two were never discussed or approved within the committees that they were referred to and did not make it to the floor. One of them was the controversial reform of the energy sector, allowing private participation in the traditional state monopolies PEMEX and CFE. This conflict was also framed under the intraparty fight between the tecnócratas and the traditional politicians, with the latter receiving strong support from the PEMEX labor union representatives affiliated to the PRI (SinEmbargo 2013). The other proposal was not a controversial one, dealing with the mint of a commemorative coin. Nonetheless, because it was sent a few months before the

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2000 legislative elections, it is possible to infer that legislators lost interest, given that many of them were already thinking about their next jobs. Overall, during the Zedillo administration, the rate of passage for executive-sponsored bills dropped from 98% (1994–1997) to 86% (1997– 2000) (Casar 2002: 128). This evidence shows how partial unified government made a difference in impacting Mexico’s executive-legislative relations. However, this evidence does not reveal information about party cohesion. Had the PRI become less cohesive under partial unified government? Below we use available roll-call vote data to examine the changing patterns of incumbent party cohesion of the two PRI partial unified governments (1997–2000 and 2012–2018) and the first year of the incumbent party cohesion under the MORENA government. To measure the level of party cohesion, we use two indicators. First, we calculate party cohesion scores based on official roll-call vote data in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, which were made available from 1998. We follow Weldon’s (2004a, 151) formula to calculate incumbent party cohesion scores for the last two years of the Zedillo administration, the six-year term of Peña-Nieto administration, and the first year of the AMLO administration. The cohesion score measures the largest percentage of party-members voting in the same direction in a vote on a legislative proposal, and in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, there are three possible directions—for, against, or abstaining.14 A higher cohesion score indicates a higher level of party cohesion. Theoretically, in a vote for a legislative proposal, the lowest cohesion score for a party is 33.33%, suggesting that 33% of party-members voted for, 33% of party-members voted against, and 33% of party-members abstained. The highest cohesion score for a party is 100%, suggesting that all party-members voted in the same direction, which could be for, against, or abstaining. The second indicator that we use is the abstention rate of incumbent party legislators in the vote for executive-sponsored bills. While it is difficult to figure out the exact or true reasons for a deputy to abstain during a roll-call vote (Cantú et al. 2014: 36), we believe that the abstention rate captures “low-cost signals deputies use to express dissent” (González 2010: 127). Specifically, a highly cohesive party is expected to be able to mobilize as many legislators of the party as possible to vote along the party direction on the floor. Therefore, an abstention might be seen as a 14 In Mexico, an abstention during roll-call votes indicates that a legislator abstains from the vote when his/her party had a clear position of preference on a legislative proposal.

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way of defection from the party (Kerevel and Knott 2018: 207). In this sense, we expect that a higher abstention rate indicates a lower level of party cohesion. In Table 5.2, we compared the average incumbent party cohesion scores and average abstention rates in four periods of three different administrations under partial unified government and unified government. As can be seen, the average party cohesion score exceeds 99% for the second half of the Zedillo administration and the six years of the PeñaNieto administration. During the 62nd Congress (2012–2015), with the comeback of the PRI to the presidential office and the attainment of the majority in the Chamber of Deputies together with its allies, PVEM and PANAL, the executive sponsored a total of 50 proposals. From those, one of them was voted on the floor in the following Congress, and two proposals did not pass the committee stage. The proposals that did not make it to the floor were related to controversial issues that had also been rejected in the past, one in the energy sector creating the Mexican Petroleum Fund for Stabilization and Development, and the other related to a change in the public debt legislation (SIL 2019). The remaining 47 executive-sponsored bills were approved with high levels of party cohesion from the PRI legislators. It is somewhat surprising to see that the level of party cohesion was high during the years of the Peña-Nieto administration for most of the executive-sponsored bills. If our theory is correct, the less centralized candidate nomination procedure of the PRI after 2000 should have produced a lower level of party cohesion. Although this evidence is surprising, it does not directly contradict our hypothesis. As we have mentioned in the previous section, the change in the candidate nomination procedure of the PRI was not substantive. In other words, the PRI still maintained a centralized form of candidate nomination procedure despite the introduction of democratic mechanisms. In short, while the candidate nomination procedure of the PRI had become seemingly less centralized, the procedure was still controlled by high-ranking party elites. Therefore, under the Peña-Nieto administration, incumbent party legislators still exhibit a high level of cohesion in legislative votes. Another possible explanation is that the PRI had learned its lesson from the 2006 elections, when internal divisions led the party and its candidate (Roberto Madrazo) to third place, after the PAN (Felipe Calderón) and the PRD (AMLO). Therefore, almost all PRI legislators were committed to party unity and stood behind the Peña-Nieto administration (Béjar

8.27%

15.53%

Partial Unified Government (PRI controlled the majority in the Chamber of Deputies) 99.98% (35 bills)b

Peña-Nieto administration—PRI (II) (September 2015–August 2018)

8.42%

97.52% (5 bills)

Unified Government

AMLO administration— MORENA (December 2018–August 2019)

Notes a President Zedillo sent 31 proposals starting from 1998. Two of them never made it to the floor; one of them was first sent to the floor, but, because the bill was modified by the opposition parties, the PRI voted to reject it. Another bill was sent to the floor in 2005, when Zedillo was no longer president b During the second half of the Peña-Nieto administration, 35 bills were voted on and passed in total. 34 bills came from the 38 proposals sent by the executive during the 63rd Congress, and another bill had been sent before the end of the 62nd Congress Source Calculated by the authors with data from SIL (2019)

99.38% (27 bills)a

9.14%

Average Incumbent Party Cohesion Score in a Vote for Executive-Sponsored Bills Average Abstention Rate of Incumbent Party Legislators in a Vote for Executive-Sponsored Bills

Partial Unified Government (PRI controlled the majority in the Chamber of Deputies) 99.80% (47 bills)

Partial Unified Government (PRI controlled the majority in the Senate)

Government form

Peña-Nieto administration—PRI (I) (December 2012–August 2015)

Zedillo administration—PRI (October 1998–April 2000)

Administration

Table 5.2 Incumbent party cohesion in a vote for executive-sponsored bills in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies (1998–2019)

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Algazi 2013: 35). Nonetheless, we still need to consider other elements to illustrate the changing nature of executive-legislative relations. Table 5.2 shows that the abstention rates of incumbent party legislators in the Zedillo (1998–2000) and Peña-Nieto (2012–2015) periods are about 8–9%. In contrast, it is noticeable that the abstention of PRI deputies during roll-call votes on executive-sponsored bills increased notably during the 63rd Congress, reaching an average of 15.53%. In spite of the high levels of party unity during roll-call votes, it is interesting to note such an unusual rate of abstention that is an indicator of a changing relationship between the president and his PRI copartisans. We argue that the strength of the party leadership matters for explaining the variation in the abstention rates. During the first half of the Peña-Nieto administration, under the leadership of César Camacho and after the PRI’s comeback to the presidency, cooperation between factions of the party was cordial and smooth, since most of them recognized the political skills and long political career of Camacho and the need for party unity. However, starting in 2015, using his position as president of Mexico, Peña-Nieto attempted to influence the election of the new chairperson of the PRI, supporting his close ally Enrique Ochoa, who finally ran unopposed. Because he was not considered a true “priísta” by more traditionalist party members, the arrival of Ochoa to the PRI chairmanship was highly criticized, at a time when the Peña’s approval rating was very low. The weak party leadership made the legislators more likely to express their discontent about the party. Instead of voting against the party direction on the floor, many PRI deputies chose to abstain in the vote. The selection of José Antonio Meade (not a member of the party) as the presidential candidate in 2018 and the inability of Ochoa to gather enough support within the PRI for Meade’s campaign led to the replacement of Ochoa by René Juárez as president of the PRI (Murillo 2018). Juárez was considered a conciliatory figure, but that was not enough to avoid a further rupture in the party and its decline during the 2018 elections. In the presidential elections of July 2018, the PRI was relegated to third place, after the MORENA and the PAN, having its worst performance in history. In short, the discussion above suggests that the high abstention rate of incumbent legislators was largely due to the fact that the party leader in the second half of the Peña-Nieto administration was not strong, and the leadership was frequently challenged by copartisans. The legislators did not necessarily vote against the party direction during the roll-call vote,

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but they might abstain from the vote to protest. This evidence shows a different aspect of party cohesion, and it provides some evidence to support our hypothesis that a weaker party leadership might reduce the level of party cohesion. In addition, there are some interesting features regarding the passage of president’s proposed bills for the second half of the Peña-Nieto administration. During the 63rd Congress, the executive sponsored 38 bills, and four of them were not approved or discussed in the committees that they were referred to. In spite of an increased party cohesion in roll-call votes between 2015 and 2018, when compared to the other periods of partial unified government under the PRI, this time the rate of unpassed executive-sponsored legislation exceeded 10%. Among the four proposals that were not approved, three were related to legalization of same-sex marriage and gay rights (e.g., adoption). Facing the pressure from churchrelated and conservative groups (AFP 2016), PRI congressional leaders claimed that these issues were not priority for national legislature, and that the legalization of these issues should be under the state government authority (AnimalPolítico 2016). Some civil society organizations had criticized Peña-Nieto for not making efforts influencing Congress to advance the bills (Álvarez Campero 2016; Martínez Carmona 2017). In short, this evidence shows the changing nature in executive-legislative relations under partial unified governments in Mexico. Candidate Nomination Procedure and Party Cohesion of the MORENA The 2018 presidential and legislative elections gave control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress to a coalition led by the MORENA, a party from the center-left formed only six years earlier under the leadership of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. For the first time in more than twenty years, Mexico has a unified government, and most importantly, it is the first Mexican unified government not controlled by the PRI. One important feature for MORENA legislators in the 64th Congress is their diverse political background. Many politicians affiliated with other parties defected from their parties to join the MORENA for various reasons, and one possible reason might be related to the lifting of the ban on reelection. After the 2018 general elections, mayors and legislators (both federal and state) will be allowed to run for immediate reelection

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Table 5.3 Former members of different parties who were elected deputy under the MORENA in the 2018 legislative elections

Former affiliation PRD PRI MC PVEM PAN PT PES PNS Total

137

Deputies 68 20 8 6 5 4 3 1 115

Source Calculated by the authors from SIL (2019)

for those who represent the same party.15 In other words, the mayors and legislators who switch to a different party after 2018 are ineligible for running immediate reelections (Político 2017). This rule might provide certain incentives for many politicians to switch their party affiliation to the MORENA, therefore seeing higher chances of being reelected in the coming future. From the 259 deputies from the MORENA, 115 were members of a different party in the past. From those, 59% used to be PRD members, and 17% were former PRI members (Table 5.3). Some current MORENA members even had political background from center-right parties, like the PAN and PES. Paradoxically, Table 5.2 shows that the levels of party cohesion during AMLO’s first year in office were lower than those seen under the PRI’s partial unified governments. Why are the incumbent party legislators under the MORENA unified government less cohesive than those under the PRI partial unified government? In the first place, the diverse ideological backgrounds of the MORENA legislators might be one reason for the lack of cohesion in the legislative vote. However, we argue that what really matters is the party’s less centralized candidate selection rules. After losing the presidential elections in 2006 and 2012, AMLO criticized the PRD decision to join the “Pacto por México” and moved to create a new party that presented as a “real alternative” for those people dissatisfied with the government. However, sensing the need to have a presence in all the national territory, the newly established MORENA 15 The ban on reelection continues to apply to presidential elections and gubernatorial elections.

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tried to attract as many people as possible to be party members, and thus numerous politicians of other parties with few chances to secure a nomination defected from their parties and joined the MORENA (Espinoza and Navarrete 2016: 100–102). The candidate selection procedure of the MORENA presented traditional and new features. For the SMD candidates, the party organized district-level party conventions, with party-members voting for precandidates who were previously screened and approved by the party’s CEN and its National Elections Commission (CNE) (MORENA 2017). Regarding the candidates for the closed-list PR deputies, the party innovated its methods, introducing a draw system with candidates being chosen randomly from a large list of three thousand party members, ten per district, approved by district-level conventions, together with the CEN and CNE (Zavala 2017). In short, the MORENA’s candidate selection procedure is generally less centralized than the PRI’s candidate selection procedure, and such an institutional feature might be an important factor that leads to the MORENA’s low level of party cohesion.

Conclusion The theories of historical institutionalism and rational-choice institutionalism offer valuable analytical tools to approach the evolution of executive-legislative relations in Mexico. The ban on reelection and the centralized candidate nomination procedure have been perceived as key elements in Mexican legislator behavior, showing very high levels of party cohesion during roll-call votes. The economic difficulties that produced important ruptures within the dominant party during the late 1980s and 1990s were seen as the start of a process of political liberalization in the country. The inauguration of a partial unified government in 1997 was followed by the arrival of an opposition party to the presidency in 2000, for the first time since 1929. The introduction of district-level primaries and district-level party conventions within the PRI, combined with a move toward a stronger federalism, opened the door for new actors to influence the selection of candidates. Many deputies and senators had to reconcile their multiple loyalties, finding ways to maintain party discipline while securing future positions for the consolidation of their own careers. In spite of the introduction of more democratic mechanisms, the central party leadership was able to maintain a high degree of influence in the candidate

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nomination procedures through the instrument known as convocatoria. For this reason, when the PRI returned to power in 2012, the party still had high levels of cohesion. Nonetheless, there were other signs that executive-legislative relations had changed after the PRI’s comeback under President Enrique Peña-Nieto. High rates of abstention during roll-call votes of executive-sponsored bills considered strategic or the refusal to discuss or approve executivesponsored proposals within committees can be seen as evidence of the difficulties that Peña-Nieto had in his relations with the Chamber of Deputies. This was particularly the case during the 63rd Congress (2015– 2018), when, among other episodes, the PRI leadership in Congress refused to endorse the proposal sent by the executive related to samesex marriage and extension of rights for the LGBT community, arguing that it was not in the party’s priorities. The high abstention rate for those years could also lead us to think about the relationship between the president and the party chairman as an important variable when studying executive-legislative relations under unified governments. Candidate selection procedure can also be identified as a key variable to explain the lower party cohesion during the first year of the MORENA government. Having introduced more open rules for the selection of candidates with a draw system, and having welcomed defectors from other parties into its ranks, the new party has had difficulties securing levels of discipline. At the country level, the lift of ban on reelection beginning from 2018 is also an important feature for legislators to occasionally move away from toeing the party line, and has encouraged legislative individualism. Nonetheless, Mexico’s unique historical trajectories also lead us to think about the possible continuation of high levels of party unity in the future, which could provide interesting implications for the political development in presidential democracies.

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CHAPTER 6

Consensual Decision-Making and No Rebels: Presidentialism in Indonesia Patrick Ziegenhain

Introduction Only two political systems in Southeast Asia can be characterized as presidential systems: Indonesia and the Philippines. Both of these systems are not embedded in full-fledged democratic systems, but rather in political orders that can be characterized as defective democracies. In the most recent Democracy Index of Freedom House (Freedom House 2019) both countries are rather as partly free. Nevertheless, Indonesia is together with the Philippines still the most democratic country among the ten ASEAN member states. In this article, I will analyze various features of presidentialism in Indonesia. Within the framework of this volume the focus lies more specifically on executive-legislative relations, i.e., the relations of the elected Indonesian president with the national parliament, the Dewan

P. Ziegenhain (B) Department of International Relations, President University, Cikarang, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7_6

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Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR, literally the People’s Representative Council). All authors in this volume were requested to delineate causal factors that are crucial for support for presidential bills among members of the president’s party in the legislature. This is not an easy task, however, since (as will be explained later in greater detail) the specific Indonesian form of presidentialism and the de facto practice of executive-legislative relations make it impossible to single out the voting behavior of the president’s party members. In addition, it is more useful to distinguish between parties that support the president (the so-called government coalition) and those parties that prefer to not support the president and stay in opposition. It is indispensable to start this chapter with a thorough analysis of the Indonesia’s current institutional environment and the major aspects of executive-legislative relations, both not only from a legal and constitutional perspective but also based on experiences of the daily practice in the last 20 years. This leads to an examination of coalition-building of all Indonesian presidents after the begin of the democratization process in 1999: First, the short-lived presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid (October 1999–May 2001), his successor Megawati Sukarnoputri (June 2001–September 2004), then the two terms of the directly elected Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (first term: October 2004–September 2009, second term: October 2009–September 2014) and finally current President Joko Widodo, who is often nicknamed Jokowi (first term October 2014–September 2019, second term October 2019–now). In the following paragraphs I will describe and analyze basic pattern of support for the president from members of the president’s party or more general from the president’s coalition. I will hereby discuss the reasons and consequences for the forming of oversized coalitions. Then, I will explain why there are so few “legislative rebels” among the members of the president’s party/coalition and how the dynamics within the political parties are managed in Indonesia. In a final step, I will then focus on the question if the following four factors shape the level of support within the president’s party/coalition: confidence vote, electoral system, candidate nomination, and decree-making powers of the president. There is a sufficient amount of recent academic literature on presidentialism in Indonesia. One direction in the publications was the results of the constitutional amendment process and its consequences for executivelegislative relations (Horowitz 2013; Ziegenhain 2008). Others focused on the powers and competencies of the Indonesian presidents in general

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(Kawamura 2010, 2013a, b; Yudhini 2009) or about executive-legislative relations (Sherlock 2015; Hanan 2013; Kawamura 2011; Manan 2017). A large number of publications discussed the negative effects of multiparty coalitions and large coalition-building (Asrinaldi 2013; Efriza 2018; Chen 2014; Hamudy and Rifki 2019; Hanan 2016; Mietzner 2016) or powersharing arrangements and the alleged lack of opposition/accountability in Indonesia (Slater 2018). Several researchers analyzed the coalitionbuilding practices of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (Aspinall et al. 2015; Sulistiyanto 2004) and Jokowi (Mietzner 2015). Additionally, other research concentrated on the impact of the party systems on presidentialism (Kawamura 2013a, b; Fionna and Tomsa 2017; Gyene 2019; Slater 2004; Ufen 2017). There are also some relevant academic publications which draw comparative conclusions forms of different forms of presidentialism in Southeast Asia (Case 2011; Ziegenhain 2015; Bünte and Thompson 2018). In terms of methodology, this chapter is mainly based on a systematic review of academic literature in English and Indonesian language. In addition, the author relied on a series of interviews with Indonesian legislators, members of the government, journalists, civil society activists, and local/international scholars. Quantitative data, for example, about voting decisions of parties or politicians in the DPR, cannot be used since voting processes are not systematically recorded.

Institutional Environment and Executive-Legislative Relations Indonesia has a quite unique political system. This refers to many elements such as the widely decentralized government in a formally unitary system or the second chamber DPD (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, House of Regional Representatives), in which all 33 provinces are represented with 4 elected persons, who are mostly party representatives but during the election shall have no party affiliation. But also the form of government is very special. Most observers and nearly all Indonesian academics/politicians think that the country has a presidential system since 1957, when thenPresident Sukarno re-reinforced the 1945 Constitution. However, under the original Indonesian constitution, the president was not elected directly by the people, but by the MPR (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, People’s Consultative Assembly), which was composed mostly by the

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members of the national parliament DPR plus some hundred representatives of the regions and the social groups. After taking over power in 1965/66 authoritarian President Suharto used this regulation to consolidate its power, by carefully selecting these representatives and by manipulating the parliamentary elections. Seven times in a row he was “chosen” by the MPR as the sole candidate for the presidency and then “elected” as president by acclamation in 1971, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, and in March 1999. With the begin of the Era Reformasi (reform era) after the resignation of Suharto in May 1998 a feature of the 1945 Constitution, which was for a long time a pure formality was discovered: the accountability report of the President toward the MPR. During the Suharto regime the subordinate MPR did not make use of this instrument, but in the reform era the now democratically elected and critical MPR did make use of that in late 1999 when it refused to accept the accountability report of Suharto’s successor BJ Habibie. The latter was forced to resign and the MPR elected in an open and democratic vote Abdurrahman Wahid as his successor. By analyzing the constitutional regulations and the practice, the features of the Indonesian political system until the 2000 are clearly parliamentarian: the head of government (named president in Indonesia) was not elected by the people directly, but by an elected parliament (called MPR in Indonesia) and was responsible to that parliament. If the head of government loses the trust of the parliamentary majority, he/she can be forced to resign by a vote of no confidence (as happened to Abdurrahman Wahid in 2001). All these features are clearly elements of a parliamentary form of government. Numerous Indonesian scholars voiced their concerns (e.g., Isra 2002; Indrayana 2002) over an alleged superiority of parliament. As a consequence, in the ongoing constitutional reform process at that time, the constitution was amended in order to change it to a presidential system. A direct election of the president was introduced (and the first time implemented in the year 2004), the presidential accountability report toward MPR was abolished and the only way to remove an acting president was only possible by an impeachment for criminal reasons. At the same time, several provisions were introduced to democratize the Indonesian political system. This also refers to the president and the legislature. After decades of authoritarian rule by a president who was not effectively held in check by other state agencies, the constitutional amendments between 1999 and 2002 counter-actively placed much emphasis on horizontal accountability.

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In the course of these institutional reforms, the “balance of power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches was carefully designed and implemented so as to prevent the re-establishment of an authoritarian regime” (Kawamura 2010: 1). Many observers rate the effective powers of the Indonesian president after the constitutional reform process as rather small (Al-Arif 2015: 253). Compared to the classical example of a presidential system, that of the United States of America, the Indonesian president has no direct veto power over legislation. Article 20, section 2 of the revised Indonesian constitution determines that every bill must be discussed collectively by the national parliament and the president in order to reach joint approval (persetujuan bersama). Therefore, and this stands again in contrast to many other presidential democracies, the Indonesian president and cabinet ministers actively participate in deliberations on bills with the national parliament. In place of veto power, the Indonesian president may intervene directly in the deliberation process by denying a bill before it is brought to parliament. If there is no joint approval, then the legislation process is stuck. On the other hand, when a bill is passed by parliament, it is clear that it had the prior president’s approval. Consequently, the Indonesian president does not have a direct veto on parliamentary legislation, but rather an indirect one during the deliberations (Ziegenhain 2015: 191). While this practice enables the president to prevent the parliament from passing an unwanted law, the time for consideration, deliberation and negotiation of a draft bill can be quite long and time-consuming (Kawamura 2010: 38). In many cases, a bill “disappeared” silently and without much notice from the general public because parliament and government could not agree on some provisions in their closed-door meetings.

Basic Patterns of Support for the President from Members of the President’s Party/Coalition All Indonesian presidents in the reform era since 1999 did not have a majority of their own party in the parliament. Not least due to the proportional election system, the specific party system and the voting preferences of the Indonesian electorate, all Indonesian presidents did not have a majority of members of their own party within the DPR. The following table shows the seats and the percentage of seats of the respective presidents’ parties.

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Table 6.1 The seats and the percentage of seats of the respective presidents’ parties

1999–2001 2001–2004 2004–2009 2009–2014 2014–2019 2019–

President

Party

Seats of the president’s party in DPR/total seats of DPR

Percentage of seats of the president’s party in DPR (%)

Abdurrahman Wahid Megawati Sukarnoputri Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Joko Widodo Joko Widodo

PKB

51/462a

11.04

PDI-P

153/462

33.12

PD

55/550

10.00

PD

148/560

26.43

PDI-P PDI-P

109/560 128/575

19.46 22.26

a In the 1999 parliamentary elections only 462 seats were contested by political parties, whereas

another 38 seats were reserved (as a temporary compromise regulation in the democratization process) for unelected representatives of the Armed Forces and the National Police

Table 6.1 shows that the presidents’ party controlled between 10 and 33.1% of the parliamentary seats. The so-far highest support of their own party enjoyed Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001–2004) and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in his second term (2009–2014), whereas the same president enjoyed the weakest support in his first term (2004–2009) followed by Abdurrahman Wahid (1999–2001). A president without a majority in parliament is according to scholarly literature on comparative politics and “conventional wisdom based on the experience of other legislatures internationally … a formula for legislative deadlock and possible political instability” (Sherlock 2007: 16). Every president in democratic Indonesia was thus forced to build a coalition of many parties to have a majority in the parliament and to avoid gridlock situations between the executive and legislative branches that are so characteristic of presidential systems in other countries. The coalitions that are formed in Indonesia’s democracy are, however, not loose agreements among party leaders, but resemble more the rather strict governmentsupporting coalitions in parliamentary systems of government (Asrinaldi 2013: 70). In 1999, Indonesia’s first democratically elected president, Abdurrahman Wahid whose own party only controlled about 11% of the

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parliament’s seats was able to build a broad coalition of supporting parties. However, he soon got into conflict with several of these political parties after dismissing their leading politicians as ministers, by not involving them into political decision-making and by “practising a highly erratic and self-centered decision-making process” (Mietzner 2016: 212). That was no problem in the authoritarian regime of President Suharto, but became a major issue during Indonesia’s democratization process. Wahid’s coalition broke apart and an impeachment for alleged corruption practically turned into a vote of no confidence (Ziegenhain 2008: 145). All political parties including the military/police faction but except for Wahid’s own party supported the removal of the president and the installation of his Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri as new president. The latter ran a broad coalitional cabinet that included nearly all political parties without much conflict, thereby delivering political stability during her term until 2004. The winner of the 2004 elections, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) followed the example of his two predecessors and formed a multiparty coalition government, a so-called “rainbow coalition” (Diamond 2009). As a lesson learned from the fall of Abdurrahman Wahid, SBY draw the conclusion that any Indonesian president needed to sustain a large multiparty coalition in parliament in order to stay in power and to protect himself from oppositional attempts at his removal. His first cabinet (2004–2009) included members of seven parties holding 402 (73%) of the 550 seats in the DPR, while the second (2009–2014) contained members of six parties representing 421 (75%) of the 560 seats. SBY used the usual instruments of coalitional presidentialism in order to build and sustain his coalition. Most importantly, he offered ministries and positions as head of government agencies to leading politicians of all major political parties represented in DPR. These parties, received “access not only to the levers of policymaking but also to the state resources and patronage that come with government office” (Sukma 2010: 67). Similarly, SBY made use of this presidential prerogatives on the budget and the legislation process to keep his allies parties in check and at the same time to tie them to his government. The sheer amount of political parties represented in SBY’s cabinet meant that Yudhoyono did not face any serious threats throughout his decade in power (Mietzner 2016: 214) but also led to a lack of policy direction and decisiveness. For the sake of including parties in his coalition, SBY sometimes had to appoint ministers who adopted stances that

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contravened the president’s own policy preferences. A case in point was his minister of religion, Suryadharma Ali, whose intolerant views toward religious minorities did not mirror the viewpoint of SBY (Aspinall et al. 2015: 8). The fact that SBY preferred inclusion over confrontation corresponded to his personal and political character. In contrast to other presidents in presidential systems such as the Philippines or South Korea who attempted to implement their agendas but then got frustrated by the powers of their respective legislatures, SBY embraced his reduction to a moderating role very early on in his presidency (Aspinall et al. 2015: 14) and continued to rely on the traditional means of coalitional presidentialism rather than on coercion or the aggressive use of other presidential powers to enforce compliance among his coalition partners (Mietzner 2016: 214). Current President Joko Widodo applied a different approach when he faced after his victory in the presidential elections of 2014 a hostile majority in the legislature. After a highly polarized election campaign Joko Widodo’s Indonesia Hebat Coalition (Koalisi Indonesia Hebat, which consisted of his own party PDI-P, plus PKB, Nasdem, and Hanura) had no majority within the DPR. What made matters worse for the president was that the opposition parties also formed a coalition in the DPR, the so-called Red-and-White Coalition (Koalisi Merah Putih) and threatened to obstruct all policies of the newly elected president. In this situation, Joko Widodo applied a trick from the authoritarian times of former President Suharto. According to Indonesian law the Minister of Justice and Human Rights (who is appointed by the president) can decide which specific faction is the legal representative of a political party. Within the Indonesian political parties factions are usually not based around ideological differences, but these factions are, “by and large, clientelistic alliances that are only kept together by a common desire to improve their access to patronage resources” (Fionna and Tomsa 2017: 21f.). Within one and a half years, Joko Widodo was able to support proJokowi forces (factions) within three opposition parties (PPP, PAN, and Golkar) to claim the party leadership. In September 2014, the pro-Jokowi faction around Romahurmuziy in PPP sacked Suryadharma (who wanted the party to remain in opposition) and Jokowi’s Minister of Justice, Yasonna Laoly, immediately recognized Romahurmuziy’s camp as the lawful representative of PPP (Mietzner 2016: 221). Another party switched sides in late 2015 when

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within PAN Zulkifli Hasan (pro-Jokowi) was able to outmaneuver Hatta Radjasa who wanted to stay in opposition. Similarly, Jokowi was able to install his follower Setya Novanto as new Golkar chairman by removing Aburizal Bakrie. With the government-influenced switching of these three parties, Joko Widodo was able to increase his government coalition from 37% at the beginning of his presidency in October 2014 into a 69% majority by early 2016. Only by creating this supporting coalition in parliament, Jokowi was able to firmly establish its power and to stabilize his government. In essence, Jokowi had coerced three opposition party into supporting his government by methods which are not the traditional instruments of coalitional presidentialism (positions, rewards, patronage) but rather by coercive measures such as the crudest tool of government influence on parties namely that of withholding legal recognition for unwanted party leaders and installing his own loyalists (Mietzner 2016: 221). The coalition-building after the 2019 reelection of President Joko Widodo went significantly different. In the time after the election in April 2019 but before the official inauguration ceremony in October 2019, Joko Widodo was able to lure most political parties, which did not support him in the presidential campaign, into his camp with the traditional means of offering positions and access to power. The biggest coup was the inclusion of Gerindra, the party of his direct opponent in the presidential race, Prabowo Subianto. Altogether, President Joko Widodo was able to include 8 out of 9 parties represented in the national parliament in his government coalition. Only the Islamic PKS (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, Prosperous Justice Party) with 50 out of 575 seats remained in the opposition, meaning that the presidential coalition currently consists of 91.3% of the legislators. Such oversized coalitions are a typical feature of Indonesian democracy since 1999. A lot of academic research has been undertaken to analyze the reasons behind them. Most authors agree that the political parties form a sort of cartel (Slater 2004), in which they share access to state powers and resources. In addition, oversized coalition also refer to the centrality of patronage in Indonesian politics, with parties eager to participate in presidential cabinets primarily to gain access to funds that ministries provide, rather than to seek for opportunities to draft or implement public policies (Aspinall et al. 2015: 7). The leadership style of all Indonesian presidents since 2001 can thus be described as “accommodative with transactional tendencies” (Efriza 2018: 2).

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Legislative Rebels of Members of the President’s Party/Coalition Over Presidential Supporting Bills or Government-Initiated Bills It is impossible to identify rebels among the president’s party or coalition due to specific features of Indonesian executive-legislative relations. One central reason is that, as already explained before, the legislation process between the Indonesian executive and legislative is consensus-oriented. It avoids a direct and public confrontation between government and parliament. Instead, an intensive search for compromises takes place behind closed doors in the negotiations between the two branches of government. Both sides can prevent legislation that they do not prefer, so that neither branch dominates the legislative process. Consequently, legislation (and also the national budget) is not a clear parliamentary prerogative since legislative outcomes have to be negotiated with government representatives. The government can thereby delay or even stall legislation that a parliamentary majority supports (Ziegenhain 2015: 191). On one hand, the parliament members can effectively obstruct any presidential legal initiative by not agreeing to a compromise and keep on discussing until the end of the legislative term. The rule of consensus decisionmaking in a fragmented multiparty system results in long deliberations and manifold possibilities to amend or to delay bills. In practice, the president or his ministers approach the party and faction leaders and lobby for their proposals. If they can agree on a deal, the rank-and-file members of the parliamentary factions will follow the decisions of the party/faction leadership. The other reason why it is impossible to identify rebels among the president’s party or coalition is that political decision-making in Indonesia is not based on voting of individual legislators, but generally based on musyawarah (deliberation) and mufakat (compromise), which are prescribed, for instance, in the DPR’s Standing Orders. Debating until a compromise is reached that everybody can accept characterizes the Indonesian way of making decisions in parliament. In accordance with this third principle of Indonesia’s state philosophy, Pancasila, majority votes are practically never held in the parliament’s committees. If certain political parties from the opposition do not support an agreed proposal, they will walk out and not take part in the decision-making process. This procedure, however, occurred very rarely in Indonesian democracy. It happened, for example, on 12 February 2018 when two factions (Nasdem

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and PPP) left the DPR’s plenary session during the final approval of the revision of the law on the status of the legislatures (Putri 2018). Previously, on 21 July 2017, four factions (PKS Gerindra, Demokrat dan PAN) left the decision-making in the plenary session on the reform of the election law (Antara 2017). The specific Indonesian manner of decision-making is contrary to democratic accountability of individual legislators. It makes it very difficult for the general public to identify and discern the political attitude of single legislators or factions. Reaching a consensus can often involve dubious backroom dealings, horse-trading, and other non-transparent ways of decision-making prone to corruption. As Bill Case noted, committee chairmen and key committee members often use informal politics to exert influence. For example, they conduct frequently closed lobbying sessions and private meetings in the salons of Jakarta hotels (Case 2011: 26). As no minutes of committee sessions are published, Stephen Sherlock (2007: 16) observed that the initial views of members can seldom be determined, nor can the methods by which dissenters are “persuaded” in these meetings to join in consensus (Case 2011: 26). While it is also quite normal in other established democracies that crucial parliamentary decisions and compromises are made behind back doors and not in the plenary sessions, the procedural opaqueness of decision-making in the parliamentary committees in Indonesia stands out.

Discussion of the Effects of the Four Explanatory Variables on Legislative Support or Defection One of the major hypotheses of this edited volume is that there are variations in support for presidential bills among members of the presidential party/coalition for the following four reasons: 1. Confidence vote—in countries with a confidence vote, legislators are more likely to toe the party line than they are in countries with no confidence vote. 2. Electoral system—the more the electoral system allows for a personal vote, the less likely it is that members of the president’s party will support the president’s bills.

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3. Candidate nomination—the more centralized the candidate selection process, the more likely it is that members of the president’s party will support the president’s bills. 4. Unilateral power—if the president has decree power, members of the president’s party are more likely to support the president’s bills. This is because the president can use that power to deliver goods to members of his/her party to encourage their support. Concerning reason 1, it has to be stated that the Indonesian political system does not have a confidence vote. The president is elected for a five years term and the only possibility for the parliament to stop a president from fulfilling these five years is to initiate an impeachment in accordance with Article 7A of the Indonesian constitution. Such an impeachment, however, cannot be started for political but only for criminal reasons. The president should not be removed from office unless proven by the Constitutional Court to have breached the law through either treason, bribery, corruption, other grave criminal offence, or moral turpitude (Yudhini 2009: 280). So far, since the amended constitution has been passed in 2002, no impeachment process has been seriously discussed or even started. The aforementioned case of President Abdurrahman Wahid in 2001 can be rated as a vote of no confidence or a politically motivated impeachment, but the circumstances were quite different in 2001 as they are now nearly 20 years later. Reason 2, the electoral system refers to the alleged greater autonomy of legislators if they are elected in a direct vote on their constituencies and not on a party list. The Indonesian electoral system is not a majority (or first-past-the-post) one based on one-member districts but a proportional multi-member district election system. Accordingly, every constituency votes several members for parliament on the basis of party-lists. The proportional election system was changed in 2003 from a closedparty list to an open-party list. The reason for this was that the closed-list system was often criticized as it placed a great deal of power in the hands of the party leadership, who determine the rankings on the lists, particularly since “it makes MPs answerable to the party but not to the electors” (Sherlock 2009: 4). Therefore, the idea behind the introduction of the open-list system (as demanded by civil society actors) was to give voters the opportunity to choose a certain candidate from the party list and thus the chance to change the order of the party list, which was determined by the political party. The motivation for this “reform—common

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in Europe, but unique in the Asia-Pacific—was to give voters more influence over which candidates from a given party list would be elected, thus in theory strengthening the link between voters and politicians” (Reilly 2006: 106). However, there were some noticeable side effects of the open-party list regulation. Candidates were now in competition not only with those from rival parties, but at least in the same intensity also with candidates from their own ranks. Due to the proportional election system, it is often quite clear that one of the bigger parties will get one or two seats in a multi-member constituency. The crucial question is therefore often not which parties get seats but what party candidates will get the most votes in order to secure one or two seats. Thus, the main negative effects of the open-party list system were the reduction of party cohesion due to heightened intraparty competition and the increased election costs including vote-buying. In practice, the Indonesian electoral system is not a decisive variable to determine the autonomy of the legislators vis-à-vis the president. The only way to enter parliament is via the political parties, since independent candidates are not allowed to run in national legislative elections. In so far, the dependency of individual legislators toward their respective parties is relatively high with a party-based proportional election system being in place Indonesia. Criteria 3 refers to the candidate nomination process and how big is the influence of the national level on the local party chapters. In Indonesia, the DPR candidates are officially nominated by a local party council, but de facto is it an open secret that the party leadership regularly interferes in nomination processes in order to prevent unfavorable candidates or to promote certain other candidates. The nomination process must be seen as part of the patronage policies which play a very important role in Indonesian politics. The influence of the national party leadership on the candidate nomination process makes it more probable that the members of the president’s party will be rather following the party line than more independent candidate. However, the above-mentioned open-party list element weakens the influence of the national party leadership on individual legislators. The last criteria are the decree-making powers of the Indonesian president. Compared to other presidential systems of government such constitutional powers are very limited in Indonesia. During the constitutional amendment process of the original 1945 Constitution the

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previously sweeping decree-making powers of the Indonesian presidential were trimmed down significantly or abolished completely as part of the democratization process. In the case of a “compelling emergency,” the president has according to Article 22 (1) the constitutional right to issue a government regulation in lieu of a law (Peraturan Pemerintah Pengganti Undang-Undang, abbreviated as Perpu). Such a regulation must, however, receive the ex-post consent of the DPR. A practical example was President Joko Widodo’s decision to issue a Perpu of parliament (at that time ruled by an opposition majority) to abolish local direct elections in August 2015. In September 2019 many civil society figures demanded from Jokowi to also issue a Perpu to stop the parliament decision to reduce the powers of the Anti-Corruption Commission KPK (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi), but at that time the president refused to do so. As shown above, the decree-making power of Indonesian presidents are very limited. Therefore, the Indonesian case cannot support the thesis that the members of the president’s party are more likely to support the president’s bills when there are presidential decree-making powers.

Conclusion Indonesia’s form of presidentialism is unique. It is the result of a combination of path dependency, historical and cultural conditions, but also of compromises between the political parties during the amendment process of the Constitution between 1999 and 2002. The country combines presidentialism with multi-partyism caused by a proportional election system, which aims to guarantee broad representation in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state. Since 2002 all Indonesian presidents attempted to stabilize their rule and to implement their policies by attempting to form coalitions within the DPR, since none of the presidents had a majority of the seats with his/her own party alone. This coalition-making was usually done by the classical instruments such as patronage or access to power, which nearly all Indonesian parties were soon willing to accept. After 2001 a clearcut opposition has largely failed to emerge among the parties represented in parliament (Slater 2018: 42). The only exception happened after the 2014 elections when President Jokowi interfered into the affairs of opposition parties and made them switch into his government coalition. As a result, the presidential coalitions were always oversized, what led to political stability. Indonesia is regarded as the sturdiest democracy in Southeast

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Asia (Bünte and Thompson 2018: 252), but democratic quality is rather stagnating or even declining. The political system run by grand coalitions is not useful for innovation and political reforms, since decisions are often on the basis of the smallest common denominator. The grand coalitions also prevent accountability since it is not clearly recognizable which actor is responsible for certain policies. The whole Indonesian system of government, but particularly the legislation process is based on consensus, not only between the executive and the legislative branches, but also between the party factions in parliament. Consensus mechanisms such as the abstinence of open voting but also the above-mentioned oversized presidential coalitions leave not much space for individual actions of legislators. In so far, it is nearly impossible to delineate causal factors that are crucial for support for presidential bills among members of the president’s party in the legislature. Due to the described specific Indonesian form of presidentialism, there are no “legislative rebels” and the proposed four variables do have little significance to the legislative support or defection of members of the president’s party/coalition.

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Mietzner, Marcus. 2015. Reinventing Asian Populism: Jokowi’s Rise, Democracy, and Political. Contestation in Indonesia. Policy Studies No. 72, Honolulu: East–West Center. Mietzner, Marcus. 2016. Coercing Loyalty: Coalitional Presidentialism and Party Politics in Jokowi’s Indonesia. Contemporary Southeast Asia 38 (2): 209–232. Putri, Parastiti Kharisma. 2018. 2 Fraksi Walk Out, Revisi UU MD3 Tetap Disahkan DPR, February 12. https://news.detik.com/berita/3863546/2-fra ksi-walk-out-revisi-uu-md3-tetap-disahkan-dpr. Accessed 24 Feb 2020. Reilly, Benjamin. 2006. Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sherlock, Stephen. 2007. The Indonesian Parliament After Two Elections: What Has Really Changed? CDI Policy Papers on Political Governance. Canberra: Centre for Democratic Institutions. Sherlock, Stephen. 2009. Indonesia’s 2009 Elections: The New Electoral System and the Competing Parties. CDI Policy Papers on Political Governance. Canberra: Centre for Democratic Institutions. Sherlock, Stephen. 2015. A Balancing Act: Relations Between State Institutions Under Yudhoyono. In The Yudhoyono Presidency: Indonesia’s Decade of Stability and Stagnation, ed. Edward Aspinall, Marcus Mietzner, and Dirk Tomsa, 93–113. ISEAS: Singapore. Slater, Dan. 2004. Indonesia’s Accountability Trap: Party Cartels and Presidential Power After Democratic Transition. Indonesia 78: 61–92. Slater, Dan. 2018. Party Cartelization, Indonesian–Style: Presidential Power– sharing and the Contingency of Democratic Opposition. Journal of East Asian Studies 18: 23–46. Sukma, Rizal. 2010. Indonesia’s 2009 Elections: Defective System, Resilient Democracy. In Problems of Democratization in Indonesia: Elections, Institutions and Society, ed. Marcus Mietzner and Edward Aspinall. ISEAS: Singapore. Sulistiyanto, Priyambudi. 2004. The 2004 General Elections and the Virtues of Indonesian Presidentialism. Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 19 (2): 4–24. Ufen, Andreas. 2017. Party Presidentialization in post–Suharto Indonesia. Contemporary Politics 24 (3): 306–324. Yudhini, Etsi. 2009. Indonesia’s Presidentialism: Moderating Strong Presidents, Enhancing Representation. In Making Presidentialism Work, ed. IDEA, 267– 287. Mexico City. Ziegenhain, Patrick. 2008. The Indonesian Parliament and Democratization. Singapore: ISEAS. Ziegenhain, Patrick. 2015. Institutional Engineering and Political Accountability in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Singapore: ISEAS.

CHAPTER 7

Presidents, Unified Government, and Legislative Control: What Have We Learned? Jung-Hsinag Tsai

Introduction Unified government is a blessing to the president. The president’s party in the legislature is more likely to support the president’s proposals than the oppoisiton. Unified government is more possible to pass significant legislation than divided government (Coleman 1999). Under unified government, presidents and their copartisans in the legislature dominate the legislative agenda, ideally reaching cooperative arrangements for dividing up scarce floor time (Alemán and Calvo 2010: 512). The majority party can serve as a bridge for government to work effectively and unified government can adopt and carry out coherent and timely policies (Sundquist 1988: 629). However, this thesis can hold water only when the majority party is coherent or homogenous. If the majority

J.-H. Tsai (B) Department of Political Science, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7_7

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party is disintegrated or divided on policy positions, the president would face considerable difficulties on passing legislation. It is possible that the majority of the legislature might represent a different political choice from that of the voters supporting a president (Linz 1994: 7). In United States, as the president and members of Congress are independently elected and have different constituencies, there is no assurance that their legislative preferences will be identical, even if they are party colleagues (Sinclair 2003: 42). When the president and legislative party leadership disagree and pull in opposite directions, party unity should suffer in governing parties (Carey 2007: 95). Presidents in presidentialism tend to focus more on collective goods at broad national constituencies but members of parliament are more prone to be responsive to local interests (Shugart 1999). Since the executive is elected independent of the legislature, legislators can represent narrow interests without sacrificing the connection between voters and the executive (Shugart and Haggard 2001: 84). Getting reelected is the top priority of any legislators. At most, presidents have been able to influence, not control, congressional parties in United States (Epstein 1986: 87). Party majority in the legislature is no guarantee of presidential success on legislation. The separation of survival between the president and congress means that such cross-branch coordination is neither encouraged nor guaranteed, even given preference overlap between the president and his legislative majority (Samuels 2007: 706). In presidentialism, even if the executive has a copartisan legislative majority, party discipline, and the executive’s role as party leader are distinct concepts since the legislative party could be disciplined yet be under the leadership of a factional leader opposed to the president, or the president could hold a de jure or de facto leadership role in the party, but be unable to discipline the legislative caucus (Carroll and Shugart 2007: 67). Under presidentialism, on one hand, the government and the legislature are independent and so political parties have no reason to impose discipline on their members: their survival in office does not depend on the result of the any particular vote in the legislature; on the other hand, individual members of congress have no incentive to accept the discipline of political parties in order to avoid the fall of the government and risk losing their mandates in early elections (Cheibub 2007: 118). First, when on a given issue a deputy’s preferences differ from those of the party majority and when his constituency interests diverge from the party position, it is more possible to defect from the

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party majority (Ames 2002: 194–195). Second, deputies who are electorally less vulnerable, less subject to partisan tides are better able to go their own way (Ames 2002: 195). Legislators sometimes risk the wrath of party leaders by staking out independent positions on legislative votes (Carey 2003: 201). Electoral demands and electoral margins of legislators can weaken the cohesiveness of legislative voting. Semi-presidentialism has three features: the president is elected by universal suffrage, the president possesses quite considerable powers and a prime minister and ministers who possess executive and governmental power and can stay in office only if the parliament does not show its opposition to them (Duverger 1980: 166). Shugart and Carey (1992) have classified semi-presidentialism into two subtypes. Premier-presidentialism follows suit of Duverger’s definition and president-parliamentarism has the additional features such as the president appoints and dismisses cabinet ministers and the president has the power to dissolve parliament or legislative powers, or both (Shugart and Carey 1992: 23–24). Conventional wisdom in the study of semi-presidentialism argues that when the president is the leader of his party and that party has a majority party in the parliament, the president is in the dominant position (Duverger 1980: 182; Linz 1994: 53; Stepan and Suleiman 1995: 400). Semipresidential regime can only work as presidential when the president has the support of a party or a solid party coalition with a majority in parliament (Linz 1997: 10). When the president controls a majority of the parliament, it is highly possible to nominate a party member to be the prime minister. Under premier-presidential systems, the president selects the prime minister who heads the cabinet, but authority to dismiss the cabinet rests exclusively with the assembly majority and this feature restricts the president’s real choice of prime-ministerial candidate to someone he expects to be able to command parliamentary support (Shugart 2005: 333). In president-parliamentary systems, both the president and the assembly majority have the power to dismiss the cabinet so that the relationship between the president and the assembly is more transactional, which is similar to presidentialism (Shugart 2005: 334). Seen in this vein, whether the president can get his preferred legislation enacted in the assembly depends whether majority-party control is tight or loose and whether the president can call the shots in his party or the president faces serious challenges from factions within the party. Where parties are hierarchically organized, party unity is strong and where parties are decentralized, individual legislators or factions can make party

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unity relatively loose (Morgenstern 2004: 26–27). Under certain circumstances, the parliamentary majority can be divided by rivalry factions (Protsyk 2005: 148–149). When the majority party is factionalized, the president can face more legislative hurdles to pass a bill in the legislature (Passarelli 2019). For example, in France, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing clashed with Jacques Chriac, the majority-party leader in National Assembly, despite that the president’s party was part of the majority coalition (Lazardeux 2009: 293). When the majority party is neither disciplined nor ideologically coherent, the relationship between the president and assembly can be incongruous and even conficting. In premier-presidential systems, the separate origin of executive and legislative authority, combined with the president’s role as a veto player is like to reduce party discipline since the presidential veto serves to undercut the usual parliamentary-style link between legislative campaigns and policy output and to encourage legislators to cheat more on the party label (Shugart and Haggard 2001: 84).1 In president-parliamentary systems, the legislature sets the agenda if it moves in the final stage of policymaking and can revise the proposals presented by the other actors and on the contrary, the president is the agenda setter if he can discipline the legislators in his party and the legislature is not entitled to amend an executive proposal (Lin 2011: 408). In separated systems that accord substantial legislative powers to presidents, legislators have fewer incentives to value collective party goods and/or provide legislative support for the executive–because voting against the president and/or losing a particular vote in the legislature does not necessarily weaken the party or the individual legislator’s chances of nomination or reelection (Owens 2003: 23). Put together, the relationship between the president and parliament in semi-presidentialism can be shifting, depending on the autonomy of the parliament and the relationship between the president and his own majority party. By comparison, party unity is higher in parliamentarism than in presidentialism (Carey 2007; Bowler et al. 1999). Semi-presidential regimes working as parliamentarism would witness higher party unity than semi-presidential regimes operating as presidentialism would experience lower party unity, other things being 1 In presidential countries, such as Argentina, the president in the period of unified government would enact a veto on some landmark legislation in which disagreement exists between the president and the majority party in the congress (Palanza and Sin 2014: 780).

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equal. On a continuun of party unity which is highest to lowest, semipresidentialism regimes can be located in between parliamentary regimes and presidential regimes. In parliamentary systems, confidence vote is an institutional mechanism for the prime minister and cabinet to attach the vote on a specific policy or program to an up or down vote on the government (Huber 1996a: 269). Confidence vote can be a credible threat to wavering legislators. If the confidence vote fails, the prime minister can dissolve the parliament and start with an election. In order to avoid a new election, dissidents in the majority party would toe the party line and vote as a team. Certain semi-presidential countries such as Finland, France, Ireland and Portugal, have the mechanism of confidence vote as that in parliamentary countries (Huber 1996a: 271). For example, in France, Article 49-3 of the Fifth Republic Constitution stipulates that the prime minister may engage the responsibility of the government before the National Assembly on the vote of a bill and the bill is considered as passed unless a motion of censure is adopted within the next 24 h. This is a special design to rationalize the parliament and to prioritize the government over legislation (Huber 1996b). The vote of confidence procedure makes members of the ruling coalition cheaper to include in policy coalitions than they would be otherwise and the confidence procedure creates a link between voting on a bill and voting on the ruling coalition (Diermeier and Feddersen 1998: 612). All presidential regimes lack the feature of confidence vote. The inability of presidents to force their agendas through their legislatures is common in presidential systems (Ames 2002: 191). By comparison, party unity can be much higher in semi-presidential systems with the vote of confidence than that in semi-presidential systems and presidential systems without the vote of confidence. Electoral systems can significantly affect party discipline in the legislature. When candidates obtain personal preference votes in large districts, they have the maximum incentives to offer voters other than hewing to a party line (Samuels and Shugart 2003: 45–46). As legislators are elected via a closed-list formula in a relatively large district, they have an incentive to cultivate a party vote and to be more responsive to party leaders (Samuels and Shugart 2003: 45). Electoral systems such as single-member districts systems with open endorsement and proportional representation systems with the seat-allocation procedure to factional lists can cultivate more personal reputation of legislators (Archer and Shugart 1997: 183; Carey and Shugart 1995). In single-member districts systems, it

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is necessary to court the median voter in order to win plurality so that when the opinions of the local median voter are different from that of the national median voter, legislators may step out of the party line on legislative voting (Depauw and Martin 2009: 107). Legislators who have strong personal reputation are more independent of their parties since personal reputation helps to build an independent electoral support base, to generate individual attitudes and approach to decision-making and to allow for more career options oustide the party (Tavits 2009: 796). Cross-pressured legislators can cause the majority party to be uncertain on garnering legislative support especially when partisanship is weakly associated with constituency interests (Saiegh 2011: 23). Some legislators would put more weight on meeting the need of their constituency when considering which way to vote in the legislature and they may refuse to support party position on certain legislative votes. How political parties choose their candidates can affect party unity or voting in the legislature. Nomination procedures may help promote party discipline through the construction of relatively homogeneous ideological blocs and by putting in place procedures which can help limit defections by punishing defectors (Bowler 2000: 177). When candidates are selected exclusively by a national party selectorate, with no procedure that allows for territorial and/or functional representation, the nomination is centralized (Hazan 2002: 114). If party leaders control candidate selection, recalcitrant members cannot have the best of both worlds: deviation from the party line but continued use of the party’s name in future elections (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997: 422). As the candidates are selected exclusively by party local selectorates, the nomination is relatively decentralized (Hazan 2002: 114). Centralized nomination can bring about more party unity than decentralized nomination. A primary source of leaders’ powers to discipline legislators stems from their control of candidate nominations (Morgenstern 2004: 85). As a party leader can single-handed nominate the party candidates, they are more possible to follow the party line after being elected (Itzkovitch-Malka and Hazan 2017: 455–456). Since the central party exercises strong control over candidate nomination, the sitting members of parliament will have an incentive to support the central party’s positions in order to maximize their chances for reselection (Cross 2008: 613). Where nomination is a function of national party leaders’ preferences, deputies would target legislation at national issues that can contribute to the party’s reputation for handling national problems and help to create a party brand

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name, enact the party’s platform, or reinforce the party’s ideological reputation (Crisp et al. 2004: 830). If candidates are chosen by inclusive selectorates such as voters, they are exposed to dual pressures from the party and the selectorates and are more possible to deflect the party discipline, other things being equal (Itzkovitch-Malka and Hazan 2017: 455). When candidates are chosen in a decentralized process, legislators will have incentive to be responsive to local interests and concerns that may be at odds with the position of the central party office (Cross 2008: 613). Different methods of candidate selection can have a lasting influence over the voting behavior of legislators in the legislature. Legislators who are more responsive to personal reputations would keep their parties weak but they would grant the president decree power to enact national policies or to support them with pork-barrel legislation (Shugart 1998). The lower the cohesion and discipline of pro-presidential parties, the likelier it is that the president will need to trade favors for legislative votes on a member-by-member, issue (Remington 2006: 7). The presidents who enact decree power can be delivering on specified policies to drive cohesion of the majority party. Decree orders can also be used for the president to prompt the parliament to pass legislation that the president can sign (Remington 2014: 117). The president’s legislative power can galvanize a government-supporting majority and cement party discipline in the parliament (Chaisty 2005: 315). The president controls resources that are highly valued by legislators in exchange for legislative votes (Carey 2003: 204). In multiparty presidentialism, the president can use the executive toolbox such as ministerial posts (coalition goods) and pork to cobble together legislative majority in the congress (Raile et al. 2011). Speeding up or holding back of disbursements over pork is used for the president to cooperate with some deputies and to prevent some deputies from defection in the congress (Ames 2002: 197). The president utilizes pork as a political currency to exchange for votes on policy reforms in the congress (Alston and Mueller 2005). The president with unilateral power can woo and strengthen legislative support of the majority party. The combination of presidentialism and mulitpartism can be difficult to operate since it produces immobilizing executive/legislative deadlock, ideological polarization, and few interparty coalitions (Mainwaring 1993). However, much evidence to the contrary of this thesis has existed. According to a global study of presidentialism, when the president’s party does not control a majority of seats, coalitions occur more than

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half of the time and they are more likely to occur when the legislature is more fractionalized (Cheibub et al. 2004: 576). The parties in the governmental coalition provide legislative support for the president because the president with extensive legislative powers, and considerable resources can control the legislative agenda and affect a legislator’s capacity to pursue particularistic policies (Figueiredo and Limongi 2000: 151–152). The president in Brazil uses his budget power to reward and punish legislators to ensure party discipline in the coalition cabinet (Pereira and Mueller 2004). The parties in the governmental coalition provide legislative support for the president because the president with extensive legislative powers, and considerable resources can control the legislative agenda and affect a legislator’s capacity to pursue particularistic policies (Figueiredo and Limongi 2000: 151–152). By the same token, in Ukraine presidents have used coalitions to augment their legislative power and they have had access to a broad range of incentives and penalties that they have used to cajole and at times intimidate parties and individual deputies (Chaisty and Chernykh 2015: 194). Coalition size can also play an important role in the relationship between the president and congress. The larger the coalition size is, the more it will offset some costs of defections, while the smaller the coalition size is, the more it ensues legislative conflict in the coalition (Hiroi and Rennó 2014: 364). Strong presidential power and the management of coalition government can tip the scale of the effects from electoral system, nomination and reelection, which tends to weaken party discipline.

Case Studies France Four institutional features such as confidence vote, electoral system, candidate nomination and decree power can affect the degree of party discipline in France. First, Article 49-3 of the constitution (confidence vote) has been a potent weapon for the prime minister to piece together support from the majority party or coalition. However, Lecomte and Rozenberg find that the 49-3 as a last resort sometimes can backfire and cause some party rebels to fight back in the next round. Second, the candidate-centered electoral system for National Assembly has facilitated some members of the majority party to break ranks and vote against the government-initiated bills or choose not to vote. Third, the method

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of decentralized nomination in which local party members or voters are the selectorate for candidates tends to bring about more party splits in the majority party. Fourth, the prime minister can enact decree power to avoid legislative block from dissenters in the majority party and porkbarrel spending contained in the decree orders can grease the wheel of some pivotal members or bring wavering legislators to hew to the party line. Other than four institutional factors, Lecomte and Rozenberg assert that three contextual factors such as the popular support for the president, the ideological cohesiveness of the majority and the majority micromanagement can affect the president’s ability to steer the legislative agenda. In France, majority presidents have experienced defections of partisan members who have different preferences or stances in conflict with theirs. Lecomte and Rozenberg conclude that the French system can be located in the middle of the ranking established in the framework of the introduction chapter. Taiwan In Taiwan, some lawmakers have been willing to buck the authority of the majority party during the period of unified government. Four factors are the pull for party disunity. First, Taiwan lacks the design of confidence vote as that of parliamentary system. The government in Taiwan cannot tie the fate of a bill to the survival of cabinet. Not following the party line to vote is an act for some lawmakers to satisfy their constituents and secure the possibility of reelection. Second, most of the legislators in Taiwan are elected through single-member district (SMD) systems. This type of electoral system can induce more personal reputation than party reputation. Legislators need to be responsive to constituents and put more weight on local interests than party interests or national interests. Third, the nomination of legislative candidates for big parties in Taiwan is based on decentralized methods such as primaries and polls. Since party leaders cannot control the nomination, the legislators are more possible to defy the party line when it runs counter to the preferences of their local selectorate. Fourth, the president in Taiwan lacks constitutional decree authority and cannot provide selective incentives by unilateral actions. These four factors contribute to party disunity in Taiwan even in the period of unified government.

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United States Governing parties in presidentialism are more likely to suffer splits within their ranks (Carey 2007: 92). In presidentialism, the survival of the legislature is independent of the president. The relationship between the president and Congress in United States is never without tensions, even when both are controlled by the same party and the party is ideologically homogeneous. Several examples demonstrate that the majority party in the House or the Senate faces serious rifts on certain legislation. Dissensions or strong divisions within the majority party are very common in the House and in the Senate. In U.S. Congress, senators and house representatives are chosen by single-member district methods. This kind of electoral method can cultivate incumbent members of Congress to break ranks with the leadership of their parties in order to be responsive for the preference of their constituencies. Being out of step with their party is less costly than losing their seats. Reelection is the top priority of any congressperson. Party majority in Congress does not guarantee the president to shepherd the legislation. The majority party can have its own will by refusing to legislate or amend on presidential initiatives. In some controversial cases, it is difficult for party leaders to be on the same page with the president of their own party. If supporting the president poses more risk of losing legislative seats, party leaders in the majority are more likely to put their members first. The success or failure to command a legislative majority depends on the president’s ability to bargain with party leaders and with wavering legislators in the majority party. Mexico For Mexico, Su and Fonseca assess different levels of party cohesion in the Zedillo administration (1994–2000), the Peña-Nieto administration (2012–2018), and the first year of the AMLO administration (2018– 2019). They argue that different candidate nomination methods and the strength of the party leadership are the crucial factors for explaining the variation of party cohesion in Mexico. First, centralized candidate nomination increases the level of party cohesion in the Mexican congress while decentralized candidate nomination reduces the level of party cohesion. Second, under strong party leadership, incumbent party legislators are more likely to follow the direction of the party instead of losing opportunities to advance their political career while under weak party leadership,

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some legislators of the incumbent party might become mavericks to defy the party line as the case in the first year of the AMLO administration. Methodologically, Su and Fonseca have operationalized the Incumbent Party Cohesion Score in a vote for executive-sponsored bills and the Abstention Rate of Incumbent Party Legislators in a vote for executivesponsored bills for detecting party cohesion in different presidential administrations in Mexico. Coupling the percentage of positive voting with the percentage of negative exiting can effectively gauge the connect or disconnect between party preferences and legislators’ preferences. The findings of Su and Fonseca in Mexico confirm that important factors such as candidate nomination and the strength of the party leadership can significantly shape different degrees of party discipline. Mexico as a presidential regime with separated powers exhibits conditional party cohesion, depending on the strict or loose control of candidate nomination and party leadership. Indonesia Indonesia is a presidential system but works as a parliamentary system because of constitutional articles and coalition governments. According to Article 20 of the Indonesian Constitution, every bill must be discussed collectively by the national parliament and the president in order to reach joint approval. It is a design of mutual veto for the president and parliament. Ziegenhain observes that the Indonesian president can intervene directly in the deliberation process by denying a bill before it is brought to parliament. The president possesses a powerful agenda-setting power on the introduction of legislation (Shugart and Carey 1992: 151). Ziegenhain also indicates that the parliament members in Indonesia can effectively obstruct any presidential legal initiative by not agreeing to a compromise and keep on discussing until the end of the legislative term. In terms of executive-legislative relations, the president and parliament are balanced. However, the arrangement of coalition government can tip the balance of power toward the president. Against the backdrop of being a minority status, presidents such as Susilo Bambang Yudhoyon and Joko Widodo in Indonesia managed to form a multiparty coalition in order to smoothly push forward their preferred policies or legislation in the parliament. Ziegenhain pinpoints that the president or his ministers would approach the party and faction leaders and lobby for their proposals and

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if they can agree on a deal, the rank-and-file members of the parliamentary factions will follow the decisions of the party/faction leadership. The Indonesian case is a deviant case to the analytic framework of this book. The institutional features such as non-existence of confidence vote, an open-party list electoral system, and limited decree power of the president tend to facilitate loose party discipline or to cultivate legislators for personal reputation in the parliament. However, the positive effect of forming a coalition government which can cobble together a legislative majority for the minority president to maintain party unity trumps the other institutional influences of weakening party cohesion.

Conclusion Under unified conditions, some presidents have had a more fragile basis from which to set the agenda and pursue their own independent policy proposals. This conclusion draws from insights presented by these case studies, while undertaking the causes of legislative defection or loyalty. In our cases, two semi-presidential countries, Taiwan and France demonstrate party disunity or incoherence in the period of unified government. Institutional features such as confidence vote, electoral system, candidate nomination, and decree power contribute to various degrees of party disunity. Mexico and U.S. illustrate moderate levels of majority party support. Some legislators would choose to be out of step with the majority party in exchange for currying voter support in their districts. Electoral system and candidate nomination are the driving force for party disunity in both countries. This volume takes stock the question of why different presidents in presidentialism and semi-presidentialism face party splits in the period of unified government. The main advantage of this book is to generalizing the determinants of legislative unity or disunity and presenting supporting evidence in comparative perspective. These works of different chapters provide a valuable comparative framework and have shown us how different institutional arrangements affect party unity of the majority party and under which conditions party disunity appears in semipresidentialism and presidentialism. This book has provided a research agenda and hopefully we can analyze more country cases to explicate the possible difficulties which the president with a majority party in the legislature faces.

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Index

C Candidate nomination, 5, 19, 118– 120, 122, 124, 125, 130, 131, 133, 138, 139, 146, 156, 157, 168, 170, 172–174 Centralized nomination, 87, 119, 126, 168 Coalition government, 5, 21–23, 151, 170, 173, 174 Cohesion, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19–21, 38, 42, 53–55, 57, 60, 62, 63, 92, 117, 118, 120, 132, 133, 137, 139, 169 Confidence vote, 5, 12–14, 19, 42, 45, 62, 87, 89, 108, 146, 155, 156, 167, 170, 171, 174 Congress, 2–4, 7–12, 17–19, 21, 35, 50, 83, 91–93, 95–97, 99–108, 115–117, 121–128, 131, 133–136, 139, 164, 166, 169, 170, 172 Consensual decision-making, 145

D Decentralized government, 147 Decentralized nomination, 21, 87, 168, 171 Decree power, 4, 12, 18, 21, 23, 51, 52, 89, 99, 100, 108, 156, 169–171, 174 E Electoral demand, 98, 165 Electoral system, 5, 12, 15–17, 20, 21, 23, 34, 45–47, 49, 54, 62, 68, 70, 72, 87, 89, 95, 107, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 146, 155–157, 167, 170, 171, 174 Elites, 16, 17, 20, 74, 76, 79, 80, 84–86, 88, 89, 133 Executive Yuan, 69, 77, 80, 84–86, 88, 89 F Filibuster, 93, 94, 97–99, 106

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J.-H. Tsai (ed.), Presidents, Unified Government and Legislative Control, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67525-7

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INDEX

France, 2, 14, 24, 32, 33, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48, 49, 53, 56, 59, 62, 63, 72, 167, 170, 171, 174 G Government bills, 32, 35–42, 55–57, 61 Government initiated bills, 9, 154, 170 H Historical institutionalism, 119, 138 House, 3, 5, 9, 10, 93–97, 101, 103–107, 145, 147, 172 I Indonesia, 23, 24, 145–148, 150–152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 173 L Legislative cartel theory, 94 Legislative Yuan, 69, 70, 80, 84–88 M Masses, 67, 74, 80, 83, 88, 89 Mexico, 23, 24, 115–123, 125–130, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139, 172–174 N National Assembly, 2, 14, 31–40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 53–55, 57, 62, 166, 167, 170 New institutionalism, 68, 118, 119 Nomination, 7, 16, 17, 19–21, 46, 48, 51, 85, 87, 89, 122, 124, 125, 129, 138, 157, 166, 168, 170, 171

P Package votes, 34, 60 Party cohesion, 8, 17, 23, 35, 57, 91, 105, 116–120, 126, 127, 132–134, 136–139, 157, 172–174 Party connection, 95 Party demand, 96, 98 Party discipline, 14, 16, 20, 21, 57, 60, 87, 126, 130, 138, 164, 166–170, 173, 174 Party-government, 5, 6, 21–23, 92, 96, 97 Party indiscipline, 22 Party-list systems, 157 Party unity, 7, 10, 15–17, 19–22, 85, 96, 105, 107, 108, 133, 135, 139, 164–168, 174 Personal connection, 95 Political participation, 80, 83, 84, 88 Presidentialism, 10, 22, 24, 67–71, 76, 77, 84, 92, 107, 145–147, 151–153, 158, 159, 164–166, 169, 172, 174 Presidential supporting bills, 154 Prime minister, 12–14, 16, 17, 22, 33–35, 40, 42, 44, 45, 51–53, 58, 61, 63, 69–80, 84, 85, 88, 165, 167, 170, 171 R Rational-choice institutionalism, 119, 138 Reelection, 7, 12, 15, 23, 38, 39, 43, 48, 55, 78, 95–97, 99–101, 103, 105–107, 117, 118, 122–126, 136–139, 153, 166, 170–172 S Semi-presidentialism, 22, 24, 67–85, 87–89, 165–167, 174

INDEX

Senate, 3, 32, 33, 41, 53, 93–95, 97–99, 101, 103–106, 117, 127, 134, 172 Single-member district systems (SMD), 15, 17, 87, 95, 122, 123, 125, 130, 138, 171 T Taiwan, 24, 68–73, 76, 77, 79–89, 171, 174 The strength of the party leadership, 118, 135, 172, 173 U Unified government, 1–11, 13, 19, 22, 23, 33, 36, 38, 53, 63, 72,

181

85, 87–89, 92, 94, 102–105, 108, 115–118, 120, 125–128, 132–134, 136–139, 163, 166, 171, 174 Unilateral presidential power, 5, 17 United States (U.S.), 2, 3, 6–11, 15, 16, 19, 24, 35, 85, 88, 92, 95, 97–103, 106, 108, 127, 130, 149, 164, 172, 174

V Veto player theory, 68, 70, 73, 166 Veto power, 11, 73, 88, 99, 101, 102, 108, 149