Making Brazil Work

Checking the President in a Multiparty System

M. Melo, C. Pereira

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137310842
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftspolitik

This book offers the first conceptually rigorous analysis of the political and institutional underpinnings of Brazil's recent rise. Using Brazil as a case study in multiparty presidentialism, the authors argue that Brazil's success stems from the combination of a constitutionally strong president and a robust system of checks and balances.

Chapter 1

The Unexpected Success of Multiparty Presidential Regimes*

Introduction

The concept of a sustainable democracy in a multiparty presidential regime—that is, a stable democratic presidential regime in a milieu in which partisan fragmentation abounds—was once thought to be nearly impossible. Seemingly in unison, pundits and scholars “decreed” the unlikely survival of multiparty presidential democracies, at least until quite recently.

In the early 1990s, the critique of presidentialism advanced by Linz and others exercised broad influence, and scholars viewed the coexistence of presidentialism with multipartism as a particularly “difficult combination.” Experts expected multipartism to exacerbate the “perils of presidentialism” by increasing the probability of deadlock in executive–legislative relations, by promoting ideological polarization, and by making coalition-building among multiple parties difficult to achieve.¹ The best chances for the survival of presidential democracies, it was argued, lay in the adoption of a US-style two-party format.

Yet multiparty presidentialism appears to be here for good. In the period 1979–2006, Figueiredo et al. (2009) found only two countries with one party government (Costa Rica and Mexico), six countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Panama, Ecuador, and Colombia) with coalition governments all the time, and four with a mix of coalition and one-party government.² This institutional combination is not a peculiarity of new democracies in Latin America only. In Asia, for instance, the paradigmatic case is Indonesia, where a multiparty presidential regime has guaranteed political stability since the transition to democracy in 1999. A coalition of five congressional parties (along with the support of 18 unseated parties) has governed the country since 2004.³

This unanticipated outcome demands further research. How have presidents been solving—or at the very least managing—the “difficult combination”? We still know very little about the tools and institutional conditions that presidents employ in this process. That is, the association between multiparty presidentialism and sustainable democracy is now beyond dispute, yet we lack a comprehensive explanation for the political durability of this institutional arrangement.

Multiparty presidential regimes must be seen as special cases that function neither like parliamentary political systems nor like two-party presidential models. In other words, the literature does not fully grasp the operational nuances of coalition-based presidential regimes. Scholars have been misestimating the outcomes of these regimes because they have been using theoretical and analytical tools designed to analyze either European multiparty parliamentary regimes or the American two-party presidential system.

Until the 1980s, experts believed that parliamentary systems with two parties were superior to the alternatives, namely, presidentialism or multiparty parliamentary systems. The prevailing sentiment against coalition government, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, was encapsulated in Disraeli’s dictum that “England doesn’t love coalitions.”⁴ Over half a century’s worth of comparativists seemed to have shared this view. In fact, the comparative research on parties is intellectually rooted in the historical experience of Western Europe, where parliamentarism dominates (Janda 1993). That is, the study of political parties largely ignores the impact of the separation of powers not only on the number but also on the functioning of political parties. Samuels and Shugart (2010) argue that the nature of parties differs under separation of powers in three important aspects: first, presidentialism tends to hinder parties’ organizational development; second, the separation of powers also tends to generate nationalized parties; and third, mass partisanship too is weaker in presidential systems. Therefore, for these authors, “there is no necessary contradiction between nationalized and weak parties, whether organizationally or in the electorate: a party can be structured to aggregate votes throughout the national territory yet have low levels of membership” (p. 13). We claim, however, that this is no fatal obstacle to the functioning of multiparty presidentialism.

As well as stability, two-party parliamentary systems supposedly offered an array of desirable qualities associated with the responsible party model, including clarity of responsibility, decisiveness, and responsiveness to the demands of citizens.⁵ By contrast, comparativists and empirically oriented democratic theorists viewed multiparty governments as unstable, lacking transparency, and characterized by a game of blame shifting among coalition partners. They also argued that multipartism led to inefficient governments, paralysis, and an inability to reach effective authoritative decisions.

According to this argument, strong presidents should only exacerbate this situation. Powerful executives should be more likely to unilaterally impose their preferences on the legislature. In doing so, they trigger institutional crises. This would be a fortiori worrisome when they face fragmented legislatures and enjoy only weak partisan support. Thus, experts on constitutional design considered strong presidents to be the black beasts of multiparty political systems.⁶

In the 1980s, comparativists partly corrected the bias in normative views of institutional design. Experts have learned to appreciate some aspects of multipartism, including the imperatives for political compromise, tolerance, and inclusiveness implied by these political systems. Research on presidentialism followed the lead of comparative politics—from open criticism of multipartism to a more moderate, if not mixed view of the “perils of presidentialism.” Scholars chiefly viewed presidentialism to be unstable where party systems were fragmented and executives enjoyed extensive constitutional powers. While this more nuanced view of presidentialism appeared in Shugart and Carey’s seminal work, recent scholarship has argued that the formation of governments under presidentialism and parliamentarism shares the same underlying institutional logic.⁷

Recent developments in Latin America and Asia have not only lent support to the general argument that coalition government is both viable and functional, but also to the more controversial claim that strong presidents under multipartism may be a precondition for effective government. Chile and Brazil have emerged as the successful models for governance in the Latin American region. And both countries are multiparty presidential democracies whose presidents are among the strongest in the region. By contrast, countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Mexico, where chief executives enjoy scant constitutional powers, have performed rather poorly. What can explain this variation?

In Venezuela and Bolivia, presidents have attempted to concentrate power and have created instability in the process.⁸ In Mexico, by contrast, successive governments have suffered from deadlock as a result of divided government. Ironically, the pundits and academics of the 1980s and 1990s predicted that today’s top performers would be the least likely to establish good governance. By contrast, countries that used to have what was once considered an ideal combination of weak presidentialism and strong partisan support—the case of Venezuela is paradigmatic—have not performed well. In Venezuela, party-system fragmentation has occurred following the decline of party identification and withering of linkages between parties and citizens.⁹

Interestingly, countries extolled for their social, political, and economic outcomes also proved to be pioneers in the introduction of proportional representation (PR) in the region: Costa Rica (1913), Uruguay (1918), Chile (1925), and Brazil (1933). These are also the countries with the longest experience with multipartism in Latin America. The late adopters of PR in the Latin American region—Argentina (1963) and Mexico (1963)¹⁰—have seen the emergence of hegemonic parties and zero-sum politics, pathologies germane to divided governments.

The impact of RP in Brazil was noted by Afonso Arinos, a constitutional scholar and parliamentarian, who argued in the 1940s that the distribution of portfolio to coalition members in Brazil made the system similar to European democracies and concluding that: “we have adopted a system that is perhaps unique in the world a presidentialism with proportional representation . . . politically our chief executive is closer to those of European parliamentarism than to the president of the United States.” He also claimed that this change had weakened significantly the powers of the president: How can we call a tyrant, the one who could wield power as long as he can maintain a coalition as in European parliamentarism?”¹¹ In other words, the emergence of coalitional politics undermined presidential power and precluded the formation of divided governments.

What explains the unanticipated success of multiparty presidentialism? Three factors help explain why this constitutional arrangement is both feasible and functional: The powers of presidents, the existence of tradable coalition goods (i.e., cabinet posts, patronage, pork barrel policies, etc.) used by the executive to attract the support of legislators in Congress, and the strength of institutional checks on the executive’s discretion. Good governance is conditional on the delegation of extensive powers to both presidents and autonomous institutions that place checks on the executive. Where presidents concentrate powers unilaterally (i.e., without the consent of congress), usurpation is at work—not delegation. This distinction helps unpack the overstretched concept of “strong presidents.” The term is problematic because it implies the democratic delegation of constitutional powers, on the one hand, and the unilateral abuse of power, on the other. Some contributors to this debate unwittingly overlook presidential abuses, instead focusing their arguments on how delegation powers help presidents overcome bargaining problems. The concentration of power may emerge as a result of presidents’ influence over constitutional decisions in key constitutional moments or “paraconstitutional initiatives.”¹²

Competitive authoritarian regimes—that is, “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents” (Levitsky and Way 2010: 5)—have replaced full blown authoritarian regimes as the most common form of nondemocratic government. As Mainwaring (2012: 963) has argued, the survival of competitive authoritarian regimes depends vitally not only on the leadership’s capacity to maintain support but more fundamentally on the dismantling of democratic checks and balances also. The crucial question that has been underresearched is what is the relationship between coalitional presidentialism and checks and balances? Do checks on the executive influence the functioning of multiparty presidentialism? Our answer to this question is positive. That is, we claim that checks and balances are endogenous to political competition and is key to understanding this system of government.

Given the unanticipated success of multiparty presidential systems across Latin America, this book looks particularly at what is making them work. We proceed as follows. First we explain the functioning of multiparty coalition formations in the Latin American region. Second, we explore analytically the issue of strong presidents and the role of political competition in creating an incentive structure conducive to the emergence of strong checks on executives. In countries with strong political competition and power alternation, there will be stronger checks on the executives as a result of the autonomy delegated to accountability institutions and to the judiciary. Finally we devote special attention to the case of Brazil, whose success has seemingly disproved virtually all skeptics.

The Multiparty Game under Presidentialism

It is only recently that scholars have begun to examine the relevance of coalitions in multiparty presidential regimes. This newer research has addressed topics such as coalition voting discipline, the relationship between coalition type and legislative success, the flexibility that executive appointment powers provide presidents,¹³ the impact of cabinet formation on presidential survival in times of crisis, and the relationship between presidential policy-making strategies and cabinet formation,¹⁴ the ‘presidentialization’ of political parties, and the exacerbation of coordination and delegation problems as a consequence of the constitutional structure that separates executive and legislative origin and survival.¹⁵ However, none of this research has analyzed how or why coalition-based multiparty presidential regimes may lead to sustainable democracy, much less which political and institutional conditions are necessary to achieve this outcome.

Three interconnected conditions help coalition-based multiparty presidential regimes to succeed. First, the president must be constitutionally strong and be able to exercise discretion over tradable coalition goods with coalition partners. Second, a set of institutionalized and effective checks must be in place in order to constrain the president’s actions. In particular, some multiparty presidencies have avoided serious policy-making stalemates by developing relatively complex and flexible interbranch systems of exchange. They utilize a variety of currencies, including cabinet posts, pork, and policy concessions, to elicit cooperation from legislators. These goods do not enter presidential strategies independent of one another, nor do they produce independent effects on legislative support; that is, they are non–mutually exclusive.¹⁶ Consequently, the availability of multiple goods is necessary for generating sustainable legislative support and stable democracy in a fragmented environment.

While the tools used to evaluate two-party presidentialism are incongruent with the peculiarities of multiparty presidentialism, so too are those used to analyze parliamentary political arrangements. Multiparty presidencies lack, for instance, certain bargaining threats and deadlock solutions that are typically embedded in parliamentary regimes, including the formal ongoing need for majority confidence from the legislature, the prospect of reforming government or calling early elections, and greater clarity of electoral accountability. Thus, arguing that multiparty presidential regimes function as parliamentary ones is also misleading.

In multiparty presidential systems, even constitutionally strong executives may operate as perpetual formateurs, cobbling together voting coalitions with each important initiative. In such institutional environments executives may assemble heterogeneous governing majorities using ideologically diverse political parties. Executives must also use particularistic benefits, like pork barrel policies, conjointly with political transfers, such as cabinet posts, presidential bureaucratic appointments,¹⁷ and policy concessions in a complex manner to produce the necessary voting majorities.

In particular, partisan loyalty, political ideology, and agenda-setting powers do not necessarily determine legislative voting in the vast majority of multiparty presidential regimes; rather, it is the provision of those coalition goods that is most influential. The strategic provision of coalition goods (vote buying) is particularly important in situation in which the executive faces uncertainty regarding legislators’ voting behavior especially on statutory policymaking. Saiegh (2011: 35) claims “whenever additional votes are needed, a strategic chief executive should buy enough votes to ensure that all (none) of the cross-pressured legislators who like (dislike) her proposal find themselves in a position to unilaterally change the outcome.” In this environment, the electoral rules usually provide incentives for legislators to respond strongly to particularistic monetary and political transfers. Therefore, the degree of political support in multiparty presidential regimes and, in turn, the stability of democracy, frequently rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 The Unexpected Success of Multiparty Presidential Regimes
• Chapter 2 Strong President, Robust Democracy
• Chapter 3 The Politics of Coalition Management
• Chapter 4 Checks and Balances, Political Competition, and Public Goods in the Brazilian States
• Chapter 5 Coalition Governments and Independent Regulatory Agencies in the Brazilian States
• Chapter 6 Keeping a Watchful Eye: Brazil’s Budgetary and Audit Institutions
• Chapter 7 Conclusions—The Half-Full and Half-Empty Glass of Brazilian Democracy
• Post-scriptum—in light of June 2013 mass protests
• Notes
• References
• Index