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Abstract
Research on presidentialism has long assumed that presidential impeachment is a rare event, made difficult by design in order to enhance government stability. However, the experience of Third Wave democracies suggests that more presidents have been targets of impeachment attempts than the literature might lead us to expect. In this article I seek to identify the factors that make directly elected presidents more or less vulnerable to impeachment attempts in Third Wave presidential democracies from 1974 to 2003. I find several factors that mobilize deputies against the president: presidential involvement in political scandal, strong presidential powers, and a hostile civil society. Presidents are more likely to fend off such efforts when their party commands a higher share of seats. I also find that popular protest against a president helps to prompt a congressional impeachment drive. Frequent efforts to resolve presidential crises via such legal procedures may explain in part why extra-constitutional means of conflict resolution have become a less attractive option in new democracies.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 Midwest Political Science Annual Meeting. I would like to thank Donna Bahry, Jody Baumgartner, David Conradt, Brad Lockerbie, and Nancy Spalding for comments on earlier drafts of the paper. I also thank two anonymous referees who reviewed this work for their suggestions.
Notes on contributor
Young Hun Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at East Carolina University. His research focuses on comparative political institutions, democratization, East European politics, and East Asian politics.
Notes
1 Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism”; Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy”; Marsteintredet and Berntzen, “Reducing the Perils of Presidentialism”; Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies.
2 Huntington, The Third Wave.
3 Allen, “Madagascar.” Another elected president, Rolandas Paksas in Lithuania, was in the midst of impeachment proceedings in 2003 and was formally impeached and removed from office in April 2004 (Norkus, “Carl Schmitt as a Resource for Democratic Consolidation Studies”).
4 Of course, it can also impose costs, for example, by reducing the president's willingness to cooperate on issues of policy or patronage.
5 Kada, “Impeachment as a Punishment for Corruption?”
6 Abente-Brun, “‘People Power’ in Paraguay.”
7 I use the term “presidential systems” as shorthand for “presidential and semi-presidential systems” throughout this article, unless otherwise noted.
8 See, for example, Allen, “Madagascar”; Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99)”; Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Impeachment and the Politics of Survival”; Kada, “Impeachment as a Punishment for Corruption?”; Kasuya, “Weak Institutions and Strong Movements.”
9 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment.
10 Helmke, “The Origins of Institutional Crises in Latin America,” 737.
11 For example, Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism”; Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy.”
12 For example, Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies.
13 See, for example, Allen, “Madagascar”; Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99)”; Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Survival and the Impeachment Process”; Kada, “Impeachment as a Punishment for Corruption?”; Kasuya, “Weak Institutions and Strong Movements.”
14 Kada, “Impeachment as a Punishment for Corruption?" After Collor's departure from office, the Brazilian Supreme Court found him not guilty of the charges in 1994.
15 Kasuya, “Weak Institutions and Strong Movements.”
16 Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock, “Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival”; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, “Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes”; Remmer, “The Political Impact of Economic Crisis in Latin America in the 1980s”; Wilkin, Haller, and Norpoth, “From Argentina to Zambia.”
17 Haggard and Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions.
18 Hochstetler, “Rethinking Presidentialism”; Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Crises and Democratic Accountability in Latin America.”
19 Baumgartner, “Introduction,” 7.
20 Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99)”; Fish, “Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies”; O'Donnell, “Delegative Democracy”; Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies; Valenzuela, “Latin American Presidencies Interrupted.”
21 See, e.g., Beliaev, “Presidential Powers and Consolidation of New Postcommunist Democracies”; Fish, “Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies”; Frye, “Presidents, Parliaments, and Democracy”; Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies.
22 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America.
23 Brunetti and Weder, “A Free Press is Bad News for Corruption”; Pellegrini and Gerlagh, “Causes of Corruption.”
24 Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Impeachment and the Politics of Survival.”
25 Kada, “Impeachment as a Punishment for Corruption?”
26 Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Impeachment and the Politics of Survival”; Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Survival and the Impeachment Process.”
27 Allen, “Madagascar.”
28 Kasuya, “Weak Institutions and Strong Movements.”
29 Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99).”
30 For example, Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Survival and the Impeachment Process.”
31 Kada, “Impeachment as a Punishment for Corruption?”
32 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America.
33 Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99).”
34 Baumgartner, “Introduction,” 7.
35 Fukuyama, Dressel, and Chang, “Facing the Perils of Presidentialism?”; Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Survival and the Impeachment Process.”
36 Kada, “Comparative Presidential Impeachment.”
37 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America, 197–201.
38 Pérez-Liñán also includes a third dependent variable, on presidential interruptions/removal, including resignations. He finds that interruptions can occur by various means, without legislative action, and may thus result from different sources of presidential vulnerability. For more studies that focus on the presidential falls by impeachment or parliamentary vote, resignation, or by force, see, for example, Hochstetler, “Rethinking Presidentialism,” and Kim and Bahry, “Interrupted Presidencies in Third Wave Democracies.”
39 Pérez-Liñán notes that impeachment provisions can include different numbers of veto players; but that this has less effect than the threshold for an impeachment vote in the legislature. As he reports, the number of veto players does not vary much; and the most important part of the process is when the trial is authorized (when there is a vote to impeach) (Pérez-Liñán Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America, 142).
40 Ibid., 142–3.
41 Baumgartner, “Introduction”; Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America.
42 For example, Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99).”
43 The literature suggests that the newer and fragile Third Wave presidential democracies are most prone to political instability and crises (Jones, Electoral Laws and the Survival of Presidential Democracies; Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy”; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, “Latin American Democratization since 1978”; Valenzuela, “Latin American Presidencies Interrupted”). Besides, the popularity of presidential systems has been noteworthy in the Third Wave: about 75% of the new democracies from 1974 to 2003 have presidential systems, while only one-quarter of incipient democracies adopted parliamentarianism. Thus, the decision to restrict the sample to Third Wave democracies instead of all democracies since World War II appears reasonable. And the end year (2003) was determined by the availability of relevant data, particularly of impeachment attempts, presidential scandal, and protest.
44 Polity IV Project, “Polity IV Dataset.”
45 Polity IV Project, “Polity IV Dataset Codebook,” 34–5. There are three countries of minor democratic transition: Peru (1993–2000), Ghana (1997–2003), and Tanzania (2000–2003). Dropping these countries from the analysis did not change the results reported below.
46 Cheibub and Gandhi, “Classifying Political Regimes”; Cheibub, Przeworski, and Saiegh, “Government Coalitions and Legislative Success”; Lijphart, “Introduction”; Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering.
47 Elgie, Semi-presidentialism in Europe, 13.
48 There is also another reason for excluding successors/appointees. Several countries have had multiple presidents appointed for short periods of time. Argentina, for example, had three presidents designated between the departure of Fernando De La Rua on 21 December 2001 and the appointment of Eduardo Duhalde by parliament on 2 January 2002 (see rulers.org).
49 Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Castles, 70.
50 Power and Gasiorowski, “Institutional Design and Democratic Consolidation in the Third World.”
51 A “call” (step 1 on the ordinal scale) includes, but is not limited to, a political party (parties) or a group of politicians/legislators in parliament announcing explicitly that they will seek to impeach a president, usually by (i) presenting a public and explicit statement of their intention or posing a threat to impeach, (ii) consulting and discussing with other political parties or factions to initiate constitutional impeachment proceedings, (iii) taking a preliminary decision among themselves to begin impeachment proceedings, and/or (iv) requesting to hold a session in parliament for the specific purpose. I exclude speculation by a third party or rumours that a group of legislators are likely to pursue impeachment (e.g., Argentina in 1984). Likewise, reports saying “legislators may/might try impeachment” or “legislators are considering impeachment,” but without indication of the source, do not qualify for the first step of impeachment attempts (e.g., Argentina in 1988, the Philippines in 1998, and Zambia in 1995). Finally, I do not include impeachment calls by a single deputy or a party not represented in parliament. An attempt to get impeachment on the agenda (step 2 on the scale) means that legislators take formal steps towards impeachment proceedings against a president, such as gathering signatures of legislators and/or submitting an initiative to a relevant parliamentary committee or a whole parliamentary session paving the way for the vote of impeachment. A parliamentary vote (step 3 on the scale) means that legislators (either in lower house or in a joint session with the upper house) officially cast a vote to decide whether or not to impeach the president but the vote fails. Step 4 on the scale means that parliament passes an impeachment vote authorizing a trial. However, it should be noted that a passing vote (step 4) does not guarantee an eventual removal of the president from the office. In some cases, an impeachment trial/investigation may fail to convict, or some other event may mean that the president avoids removal by impeachment (e.g., Fujimori in 1992).
52 Since the impact of independent variables may be fairly immediate, I treat impeachment attempts in the first six months of the year as products of independent variables in the preceding year; and impeachment attempts in the latter six months as products of independent variables in the current year (Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock, “Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival”; Kim and Bahry, “Interrupted Presidencies in Third Wave Democracies”).
53 In order to deal with serial correlation within countries, I also used random effects ordered probit models (Afonso, Gomes, and Rother, “Ordered Response Models for Sovereign Debt Ratings”). The results are consistent with those reported in .
54 Pérez-Liñán (Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America, 199), relying on the Latin American Weekly Report (LAWR) as his main source, developed two variables to tap impeachment efforts: (i) at least one congressional house openly debated the possibility of presidential impeachment/declaration of incapacity and (ii) the congress authorized an impeachment trial. Thus, his dependent variables do not necessarily include earlier steps of impeachment attempts such as a call by some deputies to impeach the president and deputies' attempts to get the required number of votes/signatures to put the question on the parliamentary agenda. For countries we both cover, my cases of impeachment attempts overlap with all but two of those included in Pérez-Liñán's book. The exceptions are Paraguay (2001–2002) and Peru (1991). I exclude the Paraguayan case because then President González Macchi was not popularly elected. As for Peru 1991, there were no reports in LexisNexis in that year of an impeachment vote. There was a report about a resolution in the Senate noting that President Fujimori's comments about Congress were “an affront to the National Parliament and morally disqualify its author” (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “Peru President Upbraids Congress for Repealing Decrees”), but the report did not indicate that deputies explicitly voted to impeach the president. To be consistent in coding, I did not count this as an impeachment attempt.
55 Keesing's Record of World Events (Citation2006). There are three new democracies without constitutional provisions for legislative impeachment or declaration of incapacity, and they are excluded from the analysis: Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, and Mozambique. Also the Honduran Constitution dropped an impeachment clause in 2003, and Honduras for that year is not included in the analysis.
56 If charges were made public but retracted they are counted as a zero. If charges continued over more than one year I code a “1” for each year they continued. Scandals involving presidents' personal lives, such as extramarital affairs, children born out of wedlock, or bitter divorce proceedings, are not counted.
57 Since presidents may be embroiled in more than one scandal in a given year, I also created a count variable to tap the number of scandals. If the president was accused of several types of infraction at the same time (e.g., embezzling state funds, concealing them illegally in domestic accounts, and then depositing them overseas [money-laundering]), then it was counted as a single scandal. If the president was accused of one such set of activities, and then later (after a month or more) was accused of something else, then these are counted as separate scandals. Using this count variable in place of the dummy did not, however, change any of the results reported below.
58 World Bank, “World Development Indicators.” Since the World Bank Indicators do not provide economic data for Taiwan, I refer to the World Economic Outlook Databases from the International Monetary Fund (IMF, “World Economic Outlook Databases”).
59 Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom, “Economic Performance and Survival in New Democracies.”
60 Raw inflation values range from −13.057 to 11749.640. Since negative values and zero cannot be logged and the logs of numbers between one and zero are highly skewed, I take the natural logarithm of the absolute value of raw inflation values, and then add one. Next I assign a negative sign to originally negative inflation values. I also transform inflation following Gasiorowski's (“Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change”) formula: add 15 to all of the values to make them greater than 1 and then take their natural logs. His formula did not change the results in the analysis.
61 Siaroff, “Comparative Presidencies.”
62 Cf. Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies.
63 Ibid.
64 Cf. Gasiorowski, “Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change.”
65 Banks' anti-government demonstrations are coded as “any peaceful public gathering of at least 100 people for the primary purpose of displaying or voicing their opposition to government policies or authority, excluding demonstrations of a distinctly anti-foreign nature.” General strikes are “any strike of 1,000 or more industrial or service workers that involves more than one employer and that is aimed at national government policies or authority” (Banks, “Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive”).
66 Out of all protests against presidents, about 23% occurred before any congressional action was initiated on impeachment.
67 Since the dependent variable follows the six-month cutoff rule, I apply the same rule to the protest timing variables to reduce the risk of incorrect inferences.
68 Freedom House, “Freedom of the Press Historical Data.”
69 The data for press freedom start from 1980, thus the years 1974–1979 are dropped when press freedom is included in the analysis.
70 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America, 144.
71 Blaustein and Flanz, Constitutions of the Countries of the World Online.
72 About 66% of democratic country years in the sample require a supermajority of three-fifths or more votes, 24% a simple majority, and 10% less than a simple majority.
73 Many countries do not have a separate provision for legislative declaration of incapacity. And of the countries that do, the threshold for incapacity declaration is typically as stringent as or more stringent than those for impeachment. Ecuador is one of two exceptions, where the threshold for an impeachment vote is 66.66%, while that for declaration of incapacity is 50%. In Chile, the impeachment threshold is 50% as opposed to 25% for incapacity declaration (Blaustein and Flanz, Constitutions of the Countries of the World Online).
74 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America.
75 Note that while the data show that impeachment attempts occurred more frequently when there was a presidential scandal, there were also a number of attempts when no scandal had occurred. For example, Romanian President Iliescu faced an impeachment vote in 1994 for violations of the constitution and judicial independence, not for personal malfeasance. And the grounds for an impeachment drive against President Yeltsin in 1999 focused on the use of armed force against parliament in 1993, the destruction of the Soviet Union, and the unleashing of the war in Chechnya.
76 Alvarez and Marsteintredet, “Presidential and Democratic Breakdowns in Latin America.”
77 Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99).”
78 This may be due to the fact that the non-legislative powers include functions such as appointments and cabinet formation, and disagreements over such patronage opportunities might well generate conflict. The non-legislative powers also include the president's ability to dismiss the legislature, another element of contention. On the other hand, the Siaroff data include only two indicators of a president's legislative powers (veto and emergency/decree powers), while Shugart and Carey (Presidents and Assemblies) suggest including broader aspects of legislative powers such as a president's authority to introduce legislation. It may thus be that a broader measure of legislative powers might yield different results.
79 It could be argued that the effects of presidential non-legislative powers may become more pronounced when the president is implicated in a scandal. I tested this argument by including an interaction term for non-legislative powers and scandals. But it did not add any explanatory power to the models in .
80 Siaroff's presidential power index and the semi-presidentialism dummy are correlated at −0.554.
81 However, the effect dropped out when I used more general measures of social discontent such as anti-government demonstrations and strikes (Banks, “Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive”). It appears that only public discontent aimed directly at the chief executive makes presidents vulnerable.
82 It is possible that some deputies/political parties spur protests in order to put pressure on congress to challenge a president. Due to limitations of data, such a possibility is not tested in this study.
83 In so much as countries with “low press freedom” are less likely to be democratic, I ran analysis without them. But a freer press still does not influence presidential vulnerability. I also used press freedom raw data that are on a 0 (highest level of press freedom) to 100 (lowest level of press freedom) scale since 1994, and the results remained consistent.
84 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America.
85 Given that about a third of countries in the sample have bicameral legislatures, I also created an alternative measure of seat share by taking the lower of the presidential party's seat share of either chamber when a country has two chambers (Jones, Electoral Laws and the Survival of Presidential Democracies). The results did not change. Besides, I explored the effect of the seat share held by presidential coalitions, using data from the World Bank's Database on Political Institutions (Beck, Keefer, and Clark, “Database of Political Institutions”). The variable, however, is not significant, supporting Amorim Neto's (“Presidential Cabinets, Electoral Cycles, and Coalition Discipline in Brazil”) notion that presidential coalitions are less cohesive, thus less likely to translate into stable support in parliament. Finally, I tested the possibility that the impact of legislative support may be conditional on presidential scandals. There was no empirical support for the argument.
86 Fukuyama, Dressel, and Chang, “Facing the Perils of Presidentialism?”; Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Survival and the Impeachment Process”; Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America.
87 Allison, Fixed Effects Regression Models.
88 Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America. It is important to note that Pérez-Liñán included Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela, which are not “new” democracies. They are not in my sample.
89 The June 2012 impeachment of President Lugo in Paraguay provides a recent example. In April 2008, Lugo became the first non-Colorado Party president in 61 years, winning about 42% of the popular vote with the support of his own Patriotic Alliance for Change (APC) and of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA). However, his APC won only two of 80 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and none in the 45-seat Senate in the legislative elections held on the same day as the presidential election (Carr, “Adam Carr's Election Archive”). The PLRA won 26 and 14 seats in the lower and upper houses respectively. The PRLA later left the president's electoral alliance, reducing his odds of resisting potential legislative challenges. When a clash between the police and peasants in June 2012 left 17 dead, the Chamber of Deputies voted 76–1 to impeach Lugo (The Economist, “Paraguay's Impeachment”). On the next day, the Senate upheld the motion by the vote of 39–4 and inaugurated Vice President Franco as Paraguay's new president.
90 Allen, “Madagascar”; Baumgartner, “Impeachment, Russian Style (1998–99)”; Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán, “Presidential Survival and the Impeachment Process”; Kada, “Impeachment as a Punishment for Corruption?”; Kasuya, “Weak Institutions and Strong Movements”; Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America.
91 Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism”; Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy.”