Presidential Power, Legislative Organization, and Party Behavior in Brazil

Abstract

Presidential regimes are considered to be prone to produce deadlocks. In the generally shared view, influenced by the work of Juan Linz, presidentialism lacks a built-in mechanism to induce cooperation between the executive and legislative branches of the government.l Representatives and the president have different constituencies, and their mandates are independent and fixed. Hence the chances that the legislative and the executive powers will have the same agenda are small. Because the failure of the government does not affect the legislators' political survival, representatives have few incentives to support the government. Minoritarian presidents, in particular, will necessarily face congressional opposition. Political parties are the only conceivable basis for executive-legislative cooperation. Ideally, the same disciplined party would control the presidency and a majority in the legislature. It follows that institutional engineering should focus on electoral formulas that reduce party fragmentation and increase party discipline. Brazil is viewed as an extreme example of the threats to governability represented by multiparty presidential systems. Constrained by the separation of powers, Brazilian presidents must obtain political support in a congress in which party fragmentation has reached one of the highest levels ever found in the world. In addition, the open list system prevents party leaders from exerting control over candidacies and, consequently, over party members' voting decisions within the congress.2 With this framework, it is usually inferred that parties will not be disciplined and that presidents will face systematic resistance to their legislative proposals.3 This inference is not true. Relying on data on legislative proposals and roll call votes, we show that since the enactment of the 1988 constitution Brazilian presidents have had a considerable degree of success in enacting their legislative agenda. Presidents introduced most of the bills enacted in this period, and the rate of approval of the bills introduced by the executive is high. Presidents have counted on reliable support from the political parties included in the presidential coalition. The average level of discipline of the presidential coalition is 85.6 percent. This support is sufficient to make a presidential defeat in a roll call vote rare. In other words, presidents form governments, and the parties included in the governmental coalition provide political support for the president. Institutional variables-the legislative powers of the president and the centralized organization of the legislative work-explain these unexpected findings. The exten