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Instead of focusing on presidents, militaries, financial sector bureaucrats, or social actors, the preceding pages have placed the Argentine, Brazilian, Chilean, and Mexican legislatures at the center of democratic politics. While the authors all agree that the legislatures are potent, it is also clear that the legislatures take a less proactive role than does the U.S. Congress. In this chapter I draw on the previous chapters to argue that the legislatures take a generally reactive role, but within this role there is great variance in the way in which the legislatures assert their power and insert themselves into the policy process. I argue further that the chapters have also offered significant evidence that, as postulated in the introduction, many of the differences are explicable by institutional variation. The country chapters are arranged to focus on substantive questions about executive–legislative relations and the role of parties in organizing the business of the legislature. In this conclusion I return to the thematic questions raised in the introduction about the importance of reelection rates, electoral systems, partisan alignments, and constitutional powers on legislative politics. In doing so, this chapter has two primary goals. First, a main methodological strategy of this book has been to borrow from the U.S. model in deriving descriptions of key pieces of the legislative process and explanations for legislative behavior in Latin America. But, we have also shown that the assumptions embedded in models of the U.S. Congress must become variables in a comparative context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chapters in this book have shown that, although the Latin American legislatures are only reactive, they are not dysfunctional. Since they are reactive bodies, it is important to consider the force to which they are reacting, namely, the president. It is clear that at times this opposing force has dominated Latin American politics, but frequently the presidents do make policy concessions as a part of their overall strategy for getting their way. Even if one continues to view the president as the central actor in the civilian–political universe, his anticipation of a (possible) legislative veto should in theory condition most of his actions. The optimal strategy for even the most autocratically minded president is not to pretend that the legislature does not exist and propose whatever policies he likes, then react spasmodically when the legislature refuses its assent. Rather, the “cheapest” strategy will often be to cobble together as many legislative votes as possible purely on the merits, conserving other assets (such as pork and patronage) for securing any necessary marginal votes. Our goal is to theorize within a rational choice framework about how Latin American legislatures operate when they are in the policybargaining mode, as opposed to the supine, venal, or horrified-onlooker modes. Our discussion revolves around three themes. First, the venerable “rule of anticipated reactions” makes even primarily reactive institutions, such as Latin American legislatures, relevant. Second, to the extent that Latin American presidents are continually anticipating legislative reactions, their strategies will vary depending on the type of legislature that they face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The budget process in Mexico provides an excellent case study for how the party system interacts with constitutionally defined institutional relationships between the executive and legislative branches. The Constitution grants the Mexican Chamber of Deputies extraordinary powers over the budget. The Chamber has exclusive rights to approve the budget submitted by the president, and it may amend the budget. Moreover, according to the prevailing views of leading constitutional scholars, the president does not have the power to veto the budget. The outcome of the budget game in Mexico, however, does not reflect this institutional bias toward Congress. Between 1928 and 1999, the Chamber of Deputies always approved the budget sent by the president, usually without amendments, and only in the last year with amendments unacceptable to Hacienda (the finance ministry). Furthermore, the president has been delegated enormous discretion over where the money is actually spent, so that budget authorizations rarely correspond to the actual expenditures. No one in Mexico doubts that the only actor who has had any real influence over the budget is the executive. This is an emphatic result of the “metaconstitutional” powers of the Mexican presidency, powers beyond the Constitution that are derived from the partisan powers of the president. This chapter will examine why the president enjoys greater influence over the budget than what is granted him in the Constitution. The following section will explain how each of these conditions operate and when each condition has held over the past eighty years. The next section will explain the legislative procedures for the adoption of the federal budget, and demonstrate some important differences in the three budget laws that operated during the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If political ambition drives politicians, as this volume argues, then legislators should intervene in the policy process in ways that are calculated to advance their careers. In Argentina, due to features of the electoral system that are described in Jones' chapter, the keys to career advancement are held by the leaders of the parties to which legislators belong. In the main, legislators' career prospects are enhanced by toeing the party line on policies endorsed by the national party leadership. However, while Argentine parties are quite disciplined and hierarchically organized around a national political leader, provincial party leaders enjoy substantial autonomy over candidate selection within their own districts. Consequently, in seeking to cultivate ties to both provincial and national party leaders, governing party legislators sometimes face a conflict between the interests of the provinces that they represent and the national party line as it is articulated by the president. To date, scholarship on Argentina has emphasized the extent to which strong national party identities in the legislature undercut legislators' loyalty to their provinces of origin (Frías 1980; Pírez 1986). In contrast, this chapter shows that legislators successfully demanded important changes in the president's fiscal policy proposals in response to some of their provincial concerns. One implication is that the Argentine legislature plays a more relevant though still clearly reactive role than is commonly acknowledged in the literature. In comparative perspective, since Argentine legislators cultivate relations with both national and provincial party leaders, their electoral incentives combine elements of the Brazilian and Mexican electoral systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book aims to relate legislators' political ambitions with various aspects of electoral politics and the policy process. In this chapter, I discuss how Brazilian federal deputies' careerist motivations are related to the process of pork-barreling in the yearly budget. In Brazil, the executive branch proposes the budget. Legislators add pork-barrel amendments to this proposal and then pass the budget back to the executive branch. However, the president possesses a line-item veto, so during the budgetary year Brazilian federal deputies spend a significant portion of their time seeking to convince the president to release funds that they want directed to their constituents. Ames (1995) argued that Brazil's electoral system, which encourages candidates to ignore their parties and campaign on individualistic grounds, encourages all deputies to engage in pork-barreling, and he suggested that deputies devote so much attention to pork-barreling because they want to bolster their chances of winning reelection. However, in other work (Samuels 1998) I questioned whether pork-barreling provides reelectionminded deputies with significant electoral benefits and found no statistical relationship between a deputy's pork-barreling success and his or her subsequent electoral success. This finding leaves us with a puzzle: If pork-barreling in Brazil provides no clear electoral return, then why do so many deputies devote so much time and energy to it? To reach an answer, we must discuss two distinct notions of political careerism: static ambition and progressive ambition. A deputy who exhibits static ambition seeks to build a career within the legislature. In contrast, a progressively ambitious deputy seeks to leave the Chamber after serving only one or two terms and continue his or her political career at the state and/or municipal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the long period of single-party dominance over the Mexican political system, the study of the legislature was exhausted by the study of the congressional delegations of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). Founded in 1929, the PRI maintained a long-lasting control of access to the vast majority of elected offices, which allowed it to monopolize the constitutional powers formally residing in the two houses of the Congress – the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The congressional opposition played a marginal role in the decision-making process, questioning presidential initiatives in floor debates but without any significant impact on policy outcomes. Political analysts have identified two institutional aspects of the PRI congressional delegations that have had an enormous significance in terms of the operation of the Mexican political system as a whole. First, the real source of party leadership has not resided within the Congress itself but in the Presidency of the Republic. Second, PRI congressional delegations have regularly shown a high degree of party unity. According to Weldon (1997), as long as the PRI has had the majority in the Congress, presidential leadership and party discipline have provided sufficient conditions for executive dominance over the policy-making process. Casar (1999) argues that one of the distinguishing features of Mexican presiden cialismo was that the enormous authority of the chief executive did not spring from his constitutional prerogatives but from his ability to mobilize at will the disciplined support of PRI congressional majorities. Unlike other Latin American chief executives, Mexican presidents are not allowed by the Constitution to introduce changes in legislation without active congressional approval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chile's Congress has conventionally been regarded as among the most effective in Latin America in representing diverse interests and influencing policy. Analyses of Chilean politics prior to the 1973 coup consistently point to the strength of Chilean parties to support this evaluation. Valenzuela (1994), for example, argues for the adoption of parliamentarism in Chile largely on the grounds that its party system resembles those of western European parliamentary democracies. Mainwaring and Scully (1995) point to the stability of support for Chilean parties among the electorate, their ideological consistency, and the strength of national party organizations. In the 1990s, after the return to democracy, the central questions were whether and how the Chilean legislative party system is different from the preauthoritarian period, and what are the implications for the effectiveness of the Congress. Accounts of Chilean politics at midcentury portray a system characterized by parties with widespread membership and activism at the grassroots, prominent parliamentary leaders, and highly articulated national policy agendas that were spread across a broad ideological spectrum (Scully 1995; Valenzuela and Wilde 1979). This portrait stands in sharp contrast to that of party systems in neighboring Argentina (McGuire 1994), Brazil (Mainwaring 1999), and Peru (Cotler 1994), where personalism and clientelism were endemic, weakening the ability of legislatures to act collectively and to compete with strong presidents in shaping policy. In addition to portraying a highly institutionalized party system, the literature on Chilean politics emphasizes that coalitions among legislative parties were highly fluid (Agor 1971). Between 1932 and 1973, for example, Valenzuela (1994, pp. 123–125) identifies 19 separate coalitions among legislative parties in support of the eight presidents who served during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although political parties are key actors in all legislatures, their roles vary enormously. In Great Britain and Argentina, parties are the main players, and the legislative game can be understood with few references to individual deputies. No one would argue that Brazil's legislative parties have the strength of Argentina's Peronists or Britain's Labor Party. Nonetheless, leaders of Brazil's congressional parties organize the legislative calendar, participate in legislative negotiations, and mediate between individual deputies and ministers. This chapter adapts theories of legislative parties to the Brazilian case. The first section demonstrates that Brazilian presidents, while powerful, are far from dominant. From the administration of José Sarney through the first government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, most executive proposals come out of the legislature highly modified or fail to come out at all. Why do presidential proposals so seldom emerge unscathed from the Congress? Do party leaders, especially leaders of parties that are nominally part of presidential coalitions, really oppose these proposals? If, instead, party leaders are simply unable to marshal their troops to support these bills, why are backbench deputies so reluctant? The answers lie in the nature of Brazil's legislative parties. The second section reviews the theoretical literature on legislative parties, a literature based mainly on the U.S. experience. This dscussion demonstrates that Brazil ought to be a case of “conditional party government.” Given Brazil's electoral rules and its federal structure, influence should flow from the bottom up, from party members to leaders, not from the top down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians and academics consider party discipline in the Argentine Congress to be (comparatively) very high (Jones 1997a; Molinelli 1991; Mustapic and Goretti 1992). While the conventional wisdom of high levels of party discipline is nearly universal in Argentina, there have been no empirical studies of roll-call voting behavior during the post-1983 era and virtually no structured attempts to explain the principal sources of this high level of discipline. This chapter has two goals. First, undertaking the first analysis of rollcall votes in the post-1983 period, it underscores the comparatively high levels of party discipline in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. Second, it identifies the primary determinants of this highly disciplined voting behavior. Argentine Political Institutions Argentina is a federal republic consisting of 23 provinces and a semiautonomous federal capital. It has a presidential form of government with a bicameral legislature and since 1983 has represented one of Latin America's most vibrant and successful democracies. The Argentine Chamber of Deputies has 257 members, who are elected from multimember districts (the 23 provinces and the federal capital) for four-year terms. The deputies are elected from closed party lists using the d'Hondt divisor form of proportional representation. In the event that a deputy dies or resigns during office, he/she is replaced by the next person on the party list who has not yet occupied a Chamber seat. One-half (127 and 130) of the Chamber is renewed every two years, with every district renewing one-half of its legislators (or the closest equivalent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variance in the balance between the executive and the legislature has a major impact on democratic stability and on the presidential system's performance. In addition, in the case of Mexico – a country that has recently moved into an environment of political plurality – the changing relation and balance between the governmental branches may be of the utmost importance in drafting some of the aspects of the pending state reform. Analyzing executive-legislative relations in Mexico poses certain difficulties that are not found in other case studies. First, there is the wide gap between formal and informal powers of the executive. Owing to the long dominance of the official party (the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI), presidents in Mexico have been far more powerful than what one would gather from an analysis of only their constitutional prerogatives. I will show in this chapter that these extraordinary informal powers do have institutional roots. They derive, I argue, from the party and electoral systems and the incentives that these have created, not from the abuse of power or usurpation of powers by the presidency. A second difficulty is posed by the fact that the Mexican political system is still moving. Most analysts date the liberalization of the political system to 1978, when the first serious electoral reform since 1963–1964 was enacted. Nonetheless, it was not until 1988 when the Chamber experienced the first profound change in its composition, a change that deprived the president's party from the two-thirds majority needed to alter the Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction With few exceptions, the scholarly study of Latin American legislatures has been tangential to the wider study of the executive branch and presidential authority. This is the case primarily because of the real disparities in power between branches of government in the region, but also because legislative branches have traditionally been perceived as either “rubber stamps” or impediments to the efficient execution of presidential policies. More recent literature treats legislatures more seriously, but still tends to focus on the executive side of the interbranch equation. This is, of course, due to the overwhelming strength or perceived strength of Latin American presidencies in many postauthoritarian democracies. Yet, scholars should not commit the same error again, simply revisiting the theme of executive predominance without a closer examination of the real and important role that legislatures play in the region. Even in academic work that expresses a specific intent to examine Latin American legislatures, the president seems ultimately to end up playing the starring role. Part of the reason that presidents receive so much attention in work on legislatures is the very way in which legislative power is measured. As much as one tries to avoid it, a discussion of the legislature inevitably returns to a discussion of the executive branch, given the intricate and intimate relation between the two and the fact that legislative power is often conceptualized as the amount of influence that assemblies can exert over executive actions, in both the spheres of legislation and administrative oversight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Recent works on Latin American presidentialism (Amorim Neto 1998; Deheza 1998; Thibaut 1998) indicate that the frequency of coalition governments in this area is higher than expected by comparative theorists of this system of government (Jones 1995; Lijphart 1992; Linz 1994). While such a finding reveals that Third World presidential democracies are able to devise extraconstitutional means by which the crisis proclivity of minority presidents can be overcome, it remains to be seen whether multiparty presidential cabinets can work as parliamentary-style coalitions that in general display a high degree of unity on the floor of parliament and operate in conjunction with the executive to promote legislation. Brazil is a good starting point to tackle this question. There is an ongoing debate in the comparative presidentialism literature about Brazil's prevalent pattern of government formation. On the one hand, Abranches (1988), Deheza (1997, pp. 192–230), and Meneguello (1998) contend that all Brazilian presidents appoint coalition governments. On the other, Amorim Neto (1994, 1995) and Thibaut (1996, pp. 282–321) caution against a loose application of the concept of coalition government to presidential systems and argue that other types of cabinets also have been formed in this country. While Abranches, Deheza, and Meneguello simply count the number of parties drafted into the cabinet to assert their coalitional status, Amorim Neto and Thibaut also look at cooptation strategies (as opposed to coalition ones) employed by presidents in their dealings with political parties and social actors, and the recruitment criteria of individual ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter analyzes executive–legislative relations in Argentina from the inauguration of democracy in 1983 through 1995, when Carlos S. Menem finished his first term in office. We will enter into this theme by investigating the principal risk to executive-legislative relations in presidential regimes: institutional paralysis. Juan Linz and other critics of presidentialism have called attention to the risks of institutional paralysis, which they argue originate from the principle of division of powers and fixed electoral calendars. These factors, therefore, are inherent in the institutional structure of presidentialism. In effect, the principle of division of powers, which originates from the independent election of the executive and the legislative branches, generates autonomous powers armed with mutual vetoes. On top of this, the rigidity that stems from fixed electoral periods prevents a change of leadership, even during crisis situations, as well as the forced retirement of popular leaders. This argument leads to important questions about the two postdictatorship Argentine presidencies, both of which contained the seeds propitious for generating institutional paralysis. On the one hand, President Alfonsín faced a divided government and President Menem lacked an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies. On the other hand, the country faced crisis situations including military rebellions and hyperinflation. Nevertheless, Argentina has not experienced harmful episodes of gridlock. These facts suggest that the critique of Linz and his followers requires a more careful specification of the conditions necessary to engender gridlock. First, independent election of the two branches should not generate gridlock where presidents can count on a reliable majority in the Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambition, channeled by incentives and institutions, drives politics. Ambitious politicians lead coups and palace takeovers in nondemocracies and engineer election victories and votes of no-confidence in consolidated democracies. In democratic situations, however, these leaders are constrained by party and electoral institutions, constitutions, federal arrangements, and various societal factors. While ambition and political institutions have long driven much research on the United States and other developed democracies, the turbulent histories of Latin American nations have not lent themselves to parallel analyses. In recognition of democracy's movement toward consolidation in much of the region, this book adapts the questions and hypotheses generally applied to studies of the United States and other Western consolidated democratic systems to the analysis of legislative politics in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. An important change in Latin America is the high value that most voters and politicians profess to place on democracy. At the same time, however, many recent Latin American presidents (maybe not unlike their predecessors or even their U.S. counterparts) have railed against obstructionist, corrupt, or ineffective legislatures. Fujimori used this excuse to close the Peruvian Congress, and Menem in Argentina and Collor in Brazil sought to govern without involving their legislatures. In fear that they would undo his economic reforms and bleed the budget, Pinochet emasculated the Chilean Congress before allowing a transition to civilian rule, and Chavez overtook the odious Venezuelan Congress by (illegally) organizing a plebiscite to create a constituent assembly, which eventually subsumed the Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]