Gobiernos y estrategias de coalición en democracias presidenciales: el caso de América Latina

Abstract

The scholarly literature on presidentialism and parliamentarism in modern comparative politics has argued that the combination of presidential government and a multiparty system is problematic. In multiparty systems, of course, the formation of coalition cabinets is essential for attaining a legislative majority. However, parliamentary regimes are more coalition requiring and coalition sustaining and have more coalition-building mechanisms than presidential regimes. Incentives to form and to sustain coalitions are quite different in a presidential system. This is because the president always plays the role of formateur of the coalition, the president’s party is normallly a necessary coalition partner and the terms of the executive and assembly are fixed. Since many of the countries in the world are presidential/ semi-presidential democracies, it would appear that intellectually and politically it is of the highest priority to fill the lacunae in our understanding of governments and coalition strategies under multi- party presidential systems. Can we move toward a more powerful understanding about a number of essential issues such as the problems of political cooperation and coalition building in presidential systems, as the subtypes of presidential cabinets and as cycles of party support for the president in congress? This article (a brief discussion of an as yet undertheorized aspect of presidentialism) endeavors to further the analysis by focusing on these questions