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ABSTRACT
Does the executive's institutional hegemony represent a risk to the survival of democracy? By hegemony, we refer to the president's ability to control other institutions, particularly the legislature and judiciary. To answer this question, we develop two indices of presidential hegemony and analyze the duration of democratic regimes in 18 Latin American countries between 1925 and 2016. The results show that executive hegemony is a major driver of democratic instability. This finding is robust to non-linear effects and to potential endogeneity in the relationship between presidential power and democratic backsliding. Our findings challenge traditional concerns about executive-legislative deadlock, and have significant implications for the nascent literature on democratic backsliding, which highlights executive aggrandizement as a risk factor.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Uruguay's National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII) under Grant FCE_1_2014_1_103565. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 9th Latin American Congress of Political Science (Montevideo, July 2017) and the 2nd International Congress of Political Science (Popayán, Colombia, April 2018). We are grateful to Julián Caicedo, Adolfo Garcé, Gabriel Negretto, John Polga-Hecimovich, and two Democratization reviewers for their comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Svolik, “Which Democracies Will Last?”; Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.”
2. Svolik, “Which Democracies Will Last?”
3. Ibid., 735.
4. Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.”
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Levitsky y Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. See also Corrales, Fixing Democracy.
7. Corrales, “Why Polarize?”, 70.
8. Mainwaring and Shugart, Presidentialism and Democracy.
9. Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism”; Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy.”
10. Mainwaring, “Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy.”
11. Valenzuela, “Latin America: Presidentialism in Crisis.”
12. Alston et al., Brazil in Transition; Altman, “The Politics of Coalition Formation”; Amorim Neto, “Presidential Cabinets, Electoral Cycles”; Carey, “Parties, Coalitions, and the Chilean Congress”; Chasquetti, Democracia, presidencialismo y partidos; Deheza, Gobiernos de coalición; Lanzaro, “Tipos de presidencialismo”; Martínez-Gallardo, “Out of the Cabinet”; Mejía Acosta, Informal Coalitions and Policymaking; Ollier, Las Coaliciones Políticas en Argentina.
13. Helmke, Institutions on the Edge; Mainwaring and Shugart, Presidentialism and Democracy; Negretto, Making Constitutions; Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies.
14. Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies.
15. Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorships.
16. Helmke, Institutions on the Edge.
17. Cheibub, Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy.
18. Helmke, Courts under Constraints, Kapiszewski and Taylor, “Doing Courts Justice?”, Pérez-Liñán and Castagnola, “Presidential Control of High Courts.”
19. Gibler and Randazzo, “Testing the Effects of Independent Judiciaries”; Reenock, Staton, and Radean, “Legal Institutions and Democratic Survival.”
20. Reenok, Staton and Radean, “Legal Institutions and Democratic Survival,” 491.
21. Gibler and Randazzo, “Testing the Effects of Independent Judiciaries,” 699.
22. Toro-Maureira and Arellano-González, “The Architecture of Governments”; Garcé, “Hacia una teoría ideacional”; Cheibub et al., “Latin American Presidentialism.”
23. Tsebelis, Veto Players.
24. Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorship; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, “Cross Currents in Latin America.”
25. Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán classify as democracies regimes that meet four characteristics as of December 31 of each year: (1) president and congress are elected in free and fair elections, (2) there is a “universal” franchise among the adult population, (3) civil liberties are protected, and (4) the elected government is not controlled by the military or external agents. A minor violation of these principles leads to the codification of the case as semi-democracy. A significant violation of any of these principles transforms the regime into authoritarian, and marks the event of interest in our analysis (breakdown). Cases leave the sample once they become authoritarian. See Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorship.
26. Available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VSGRJH.
27. Pérez-Liñán and Castagnola, “Judicial Instability and Endogenous”; Pérez-Liñán and Castagnola, “Replication Data for: Judicial Instability.”
28. Castagnola, “I Want It All”; Castagnola, Manipulating Courts in New Democracies; Helmke, Institutions on the Edge.
29. Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies; Negretto, Making Constitutions.
30. Mainwaring, “Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy.”
31. Weyland, Making Waves: Democratic Contention.
32. Banks and Wilson, Cross-National Time-Series.
33. Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development.
34. Gerring et al., “Democracy and Economic Growth”; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorship; Martínez, “Presidential Survival in South America.”
35. Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies.
36. See also Helmke, Institutions on the Edge.
37. Svolik, “Which Democracies Will Last?”
38. The original variable in the Banks database is polit13. We consider the legislature ineffective when polit13 < 2 (no legislature, rubber stamp, turmoil, no meetings) and effective when polit13 > 1 (executive does not dominate legislature, legislature has substantial authority). Our variable counts the number of years that each country fulfills this condition between 1825 and 1924. Wilson, Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive.
39. Following Lewbel the second instrument is (polity – (m)polity) * (effective – (m)effective) where (m) indicates the average of each variable for the sample. See Lewbel, “Constructing Instruments for Regressions.”
40. Model 4.1 also hints at the ambiguous effect of the president's constitutional powers. The second-stage equation suggests that stronger constitutional powers may reduce the risk of breakdown by promoting governability. The first-stage equation, however, suggests that strong constitutional powers promote breakdown indirectly, by fostering presidential hegemony.
41. Chavez, The Rule of Law; Castagnola, Manipulating Courts in New Democracies; Corrales, Fixing Democracy.
42. Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.” Corrales, “Why Polarize?”; Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; Svolik, “Which Democracies Will Last?”
43. Corrales, Fixing Democracy.