Abstract
Research on executive-legislative relations in presidential systems have emphasized how presidents use cabinet appointments to form and manage government coalitions in the absence of majority legislative support. Yet not all coalitions are similar, as some are larger and, consequently, more prone to agency and coordination problems than others. But what shapes presidents’ decision to include more parties in their coalitions? While several hypotheses exist in the literature, few have been tested in a systematic fashion, none focusing on why surplus coalitions form. This article intends to fill this gap by examining an original time-series cross-sectional dataset comprising 168 unique coalitions in all 18 Latin American presidential countries since 1979. In particular, I find that highly fragmented party systems and presidents with great legislative powers are more likely to generate oversized government coalitions. An additional analysis, with monthly data from Brazilian cabinets between 1989 and 2010, also shows that supermajority rules and bicameralism dynamics play a role in the occurrence of surplus coalitions, but party discipline and presidential approval do not.
Highlights
Research on executive-legislative relations in presidential systems have emphasized how presidents use cabinet appointments to form and manage government coalitions in the absence of majority legislative support
As this series is smaller and does not include other countries, I dealt with temporal dependence between observations primarily through robust standard errors with clusters for the years, which measure the correlation between observational errors for the same year and fixed effects for the presidents
As the observations used in the majority of predictors vary on a monthly basis, some do not make sense when assessed in the current month: it is to be expected, for example, that variables like presidential popularity are only assimilated by the parties in the months following their occurrence
Summary
Ivana Deheza (Bolivia); Felipe Botero (Colombia); Evelyn Villareal Fernandez and Jorge Cullel (Costa Rica); Alvaro Artiga and Nivaria Ortega (El Salvador); Eduardo Dargent and Paula Chirinos (Peru); and Rosario Espinal (Dominican Republic). 6 The percentages of seats held by each party in each country were obtained from the Political Database of the Americas at Georgetown University and the Observatório del Poder Legislativo em América Latina at the University of Salamanca. 'Electoral cycle' is equal to the time in years remaining for the mandate divided by the total period of the presidential mandate and serves to measure the effect of the electoral cycle on coalition size This result depends on the president's popularity since the decision to abandon the coalition is based on the usefulness of moving to the opposition (MARTINEZ-GALLARDO, 2012). I do not directly consider the voting behaviour of congressional members, though I do test the effect of a proxy variable which indicates control over the formation of electoral lists (MARTINEZ-GALLARDO, 2012), varying from 0 (no control) to 02 (complete control) This strategy provides better guarantees that the findings reported are not due to omission of direct data on party discipline. This strategy allowed me to examine the effect of variables that do not vary within these groups but do help explain differences between them
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