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(Preliminary version: please contact authors before citing. Comments very welcome.)
Veto Bargaining and Coalition Formation: A Theory of Presidential
Policymaking with Application to Venezuela*
by
Octavio Amorim Neto
Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro
Rua da Matriz 82
Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22260-100
Brazil
[email protected]
and
Eric Magar
Department of Political Science, 0521
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0521
USA
[email protected]
Prepared for delivery at the 2000 meeting of the Latin
American Studies Association, Hyatt Regency Miami, March 16-18, 2000.
*The title originally proposed was “Veto Bargaining and Executive-Legislative Policy-Making
in Venezuela, 1959-1999.”
March 2000
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Veto Bargaining and Coalition Formation: A Theory of Presidential
Policymaking with Application to Venezuela
Abstract: This paper reports a work in progress. We extend a simple, complete-information
model of executive-legislative bargaining over policy devised for the U.S. to fit the case of
Venezuela. We first deal with two major differences between the two systems: Venezuelan
presidents have a weaker veto than their U.S. counterparts, and Venezuelan presidents can
initiate bills. Two main predictions follow from the model’s assumptions: no veto should ever
occur, and no executive-sponsored bill should ever be defeated; the logic behind both hypotheses
is anticipation. The evidence from Venezuela (1959-1995) falsifies both predictions, suggesting
that some of the model’s assumptions are too restrictive. We make tentative suggestions of what
a more complete model should look like.
We then address a third difference between the presidential systems of Venezuela and the
U.S.: Venezuelan presidents often make post-election coalitions to improve their support in the
assembly. We find strong evidence of one effect of this legislative strategy: coalition cabinets
have better support for their programs in the legislature.
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Veto Bargaining and Coalition Formation: A Theory of Presidential
Policymaking with Application to Venezuela
I. Introduction
How do chief executives in presidential systems obtain legislative passage to enact their
policy programs? Apparently, this varies a great deal as we move from North to South in the
Americas, the continent whose constitutional tradition is intimately associated with presidential
government. In the U.S., where the legislative agenda is firmly under the control of legislators,
presidential legislative success depends heavily on the majority status of the president’s party in
Congress (Bond and Fleisher 1990; Edwards III, Barret, and Peake 1997). When the legislative
party fails, the president has the possibility of directly appealing to voters in order to put pressure
on leaning members of Congress (Kernell 1993; but see Baum and Kernell 1999). When all else
fails, the president also possesses the formal faculty to return unpalatable legislation to the
assembly, thus forcing it to secure a two-thirds majority in support of it. This veto faculty is
essentially a reactive power, which usually allows more conservative presidents to protect the
legislative status quo from an opposition Congress (Kernell 1991; Kiewiet and McCubbins
1988).
Party support is also fundamental for the accomplishment of presidential goals in Latin
American presidential systems (Coppedge 1994b; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997b). However, in
stark contrast to the U.S., many Latin American presidents are granted substantial pro-active
legislative powers, an asset which greatly helps them shape the legislative agenda independently
from the size of their party support (Carey and Shugart 1998; Cox and Morgenstern n.d.;
Figueiredo and Limongi 2000; Londregan 1999; Shugart and Carey 1992).
Yet pro-active legislative powers - such as introduction of legislation and decree authority
- do not tell the whole story of presidential policymaking capacity in Latin America. At least two
additional features of some Latin American presidential regimes which differentiate them
sharply from the U.S. model, and are potentially of great import for the legislative performance
of presidents south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The first feature is constitutional in nature: the
size of the majority required in the assembly to override a presidential veto (see Carey, Amorim
Neto, and Shugart 1997; Magar 1998)). In the U.S. a presidential veto is overridden by a vote of
no less than two-thirds of the members of each house of Congress. Some Latin American
countries also require such majority (e.g. Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile), but other presidential
constitutions establish that a bare absolute majority of the assembly is sufficient (e.g. Brazil and
Colombia), or even a plurality (e.g. Venezuela). In some countries there is no veto on one class
of legislation approved by the legislature – the budget, the most crucial piece of legislation –
(e.g. Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras). In another the assembly has no override faculty on most
legislation (Ecuador).
The second feature is para-constitutional: the appointment of coalition cabinets. Amorim
Neto (1998), Deheza (1998) and Thibaut (1998) show that the frequency of coalition
governments in Latin America is higher than expected by comparative theorists of systems of
government (Jones 1994; Lijphart 1992; Linz 1994). Approximately half of the cabinets
appointed in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s were multiparty arrangements.
How do these two differentiating features affect the legislative strategies available to
Latin American presidents? What predictable effects does a change in the size of the overriding
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majority have on presidential policymaking capacity? Do multiparty cabinets actually boost the
legislative performance of the executive under separation of powers? Comparative scholars are
only beginning to answer questions such as these from an empirical standpoint for non-U.S.
presidential systems. In this paper we address the questions above, and proceed as follows. In the
next section we develop a simple spatial model of executive-legislative policymaking in
presidential regimes to isolate the effects of different veto overrides. We then focus on the
consequences generated by a 50% + 1 veto override majority. Our main hypotheses are that,
assuming complete information, (1) under such override requirement no veto should be issued by
the president, and (2), when proposing bills to the legislature, the president should make
proposals palatable to the leader of the coalition controlling the assembly; consequently, no
executive-initiated bill should suffer legislative defeat. The third section tests the hypotheses on
comprehensive data on legislative input-output in Venezuela in 1959-1995, a case of an absolute
majority override requirement. This period constitutes the heyday of the pre-Chávez democratic
regime, during which Venezuelan politics operated under a stable party system and a relatively
stable set of rules. The evidence refutes both hypotheses, although the first falsified to a lesser
extent than the second. Then, we relax the complete information assumption and set out to
identify the factors that led Venezuelan politics away from the predicted trend relating to the
issuance of vetoes and the fate of executive-initiated bills. We posit that while position-taking
strategies followed by presidents and legislative parties partly explain the defeat of executiveinitiated bills, coalition cabinets help presidents boost their legislative record. These propositions
are then econometrically tested and are found to be correct. Section four concludes.
II. A model of policy-making in presidential systems
We rely on a spatial analogy to describe the decision-making process under a stylized
presidential constitution and the bargaining process between the branches of government. Spatial
models are a useful analytical tool that isolates a couple of traits of the policy-making process
(for a good comprehensive review see Enelow and Hinich 1990; also Magar 1998). The
parsimony of this type of approach to the study of political phenomena explains, in great part, the
increasing popularization of spatial models in the discipline. Phenomena as diverse as
candidate/voter relations under different electoral systems (e.g., Cox 1990; Downs 1957) and
legislative/bureaucratic relations under democratic government (e.g. Calvert, McCubbins, and
Weingast 1989) have been modeled spatially. We extend here the now classic setter model
(Romer and Rosenthal 1978) to the bargaining process between the legislature and the executive
under separation of powers (cf. Baron and Ferejohn 1989; Cameron 2000; Kiewiet and
McCubbins 1988; Krehbiel 1998).
The VSoP game. We intend to portray decision-making under a presidential system as a
game of strategy. We thus introduce a combination of players and rules of play that strips a
presidential constitution to its fundamental features. The rules of the Venezuelan Separation of
Power (VSoP) game mimic a presidential system by separating the power to change existing
policy between two independent branches of government, the executive and an assembly.
The game is played by three players, whom we call P, L, and V. Player P represents the
president, the head of the executive branch of government. The unicameral assembly, on the
other hand, is represented by the pair of remainder players: player L represents the leader of the
party or coalition controlling a majority of seats in the assembly, while player V (also referred to
as the veto-override player) is the last member of the assembly needed to form a coalition
capable of overriding a presidential veto.
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The decision-making rules under a presidential constitution are mimicked by the
sequence of play of the VSoP game, portrayed in extended form in Game Tree 1. Player P moves
first: he or she decides whether or not to initiate a bill (denoted xP) to replace the status quo
policy (denoted by SQ). This decision branches the game into two subgames, both starting with a
move by L. In the top subgame in Game tree 1 player L, upon receiving the president’s bill xP,
chooses whether to pass it (thus ending the game with a change in policy from SQ to xP), kill it
(hence retaining policy SQ as the outcome), or amend bill xP into a new bill xL. If there was an
amendment player P moves again, choosing whether to accept bill xL (replacing policy SQ) or
veto it. In case of a presidential veto the bill is returned to the assembly where player V gets to
choose whether to sustain the veto (hence retaining the SQ policy) or override the veto (hence
imposing xL as the new policy).
[GAME TREE 1 ABOUT HERE]
In the bottom subgame, player L faces a simpler choice, choosing whether to pass a new
bill xL after the president failed to initiate one, or to retain the SQ policy. If xL is passed by L the
remainder of the bottom subgame parallels the end the top subgame after L opts for an
amendment: P may veto or accept and V may sustain the veto or override it, with the same
distribution of outcomes.
Note that decision-making in the U.S. can be portrayed simply with the bottom subgame
of the VSoP game (cf. Kiewiet and McCubbins 1988). Since the U.S. president cannot initiate a
bill the first move would correspond to L. Presidential initiative makes the VSoP game resemble
policy-making in most of Latin America. We still refer to the game as Venezuelan because, as in
the U.S. case, it lacks a feature contained in several other of Latin America’s constitutions: the
president is not granted a faculty to decree new policy without prior passage in the assembly.1 In
section III we will elaborate on the formal rules that govern decision-making in Venezuela.
Solving the VSoP game requires an evaluation, for each player, of what strategies bring
him or her the highest welfare given what other players are predictably going to do. The solution
involves a definition of what welfare means for each player, as well as a mechanism allowing
each to compare any two alternatives. The simplest way to take all these factors into account is
by means of a spatial model.
The spatial model. Models of this sort portray a given policy as a point and, as indicated
by their family name, they distinguish one policy alternative from another by placing their
corresponding points in different coordinates in space. The smaller the distance between the two
points, the larger the similarity between the policies they represent, and vice versa. The policy
space is the field on which the game is played.
Another component of spatial models is the assumption that players have preferences
over policy, and perhaps more importantly that any two players’ preferences may be quite
different from one another. Each player considers one policy alternative to be his or her “ideal
1
If the president had such a faculty the structure of the game becomes more complicated. Whenever the outcome of
the game is policy SQ, P can opt to impose a new outcome of his or her choice by decree. Presidential decree power
forces the assembly to rescind or amend the decree if it does not find it palatable; the cost of this varies from one
constitution to another and under different scenarios. See Carey and Shugart (1998) and Smith (1998).
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point” in space, regarding all other policy points as less desirable. Every player’s preferences are
captured by his or her utility function, which establishes a transitive ordering of all feasible
policy alternatives. We rely on the simplest kind of preference mechanism, based on distance.
We thus assume that, for any player, alternative A is preferable to alternative B if A lies closer to
his or her ideal point than B (regardless of the direction); he or she is indifferent if A and B are
both as distant from the ideal (again, regardless of direction).
Finding equilibria of spatial games played in multi-dimensional policy spaces requires
several relatively sophisticated auxiliary assumptions. We avoid these complexities by assuming
that all policy alternatives can be mapped into a uni-dimensional policy space, a simple left-right
continuum.
The game is easier to solve by introducing the notions of cutting-point and preferred-to
set. A player’s cutting point is that point in space that he or she finds indistinguishable from
policy SQ. We denote each of these cutting points by p, l, and v (non-capitals distinguish them
from players’ labels), and define them as the symmetric projection of SQ on the policy space
using the player’s ideal point as the axis. Figure 1 portrays the location of the players’ cutting
points: p, l, and v, relative to their ideal points: iP, iL, and iV, and SQ. Geometrically speaking a
player’s cutting point is the symmetric projection of SQ on X using the player’s ideal point as the
axis.
[FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE]
A player’s preferred-to set is the set of points contained in the segment delimited, on one
end, by his or her cutting point and, on the other, by SQ.2 Denote a player’s preferred-to set by a
℘ subscripted by that player’s initial (in Figure 1, preferred-to set are delimited by the semicircles centered in players’ ideal points). Because utility functions are symmetric, a player will
prefer all points contained inside his or her preferred-to set to the status quo – all are closer to the
ideal – whereas he or she will prefer the status quo to any point outside his or her preferred-to set
– all are further away from the ideal.
With ℘P, ℘L, and ℘V solving the game becomes quite straightforward. The equilibrium
concept we rely on is sub-game perfection, a solution guaranteeing that, in equilibrium, the
threats players make at any stage are in fact credible (Schelling 1960). Sub-game perfect Nash
equilibria are derived by solving a game backwards: last nodes first, then up the game tree
(Morrow 1994:128-33).
We make the following claim:
Proposition 1—The equilibrium. The following set of strategies characterizes the sub-game
perfect equilibrium to the VSoP game when iL ≤ SQ (otherwise the result is symmetric):
L: “In case p or v is (are) to the left of iL, then propose xL = iL (or pass xP if xP = iL); in case p or
v is (are) between iL and the SQ then propose xL = p or xL = v , whichever is lowest (or pass xP if
xP is the lowest of p or v); if both p and v are to the right of SQ refrain from making a proposal
and kill any proposal sent by the President” .
Player J’s preferred-to set (where j denotes J’s cutting point) is thus the segment [j, SQ] if j ≤ SQ, or [SQ, j] if j >
SQ, J = L, E, V.
2
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P: “Sign bill xL into law if xL is either in ℘P or xL is in ℘V; veto xL otherwise.”
V: “Override a veto if the bill in question is within ℘V; sustain the veto otherwise.”
(Authors’ note: This is still an incomplete equilibrium: P’s strategy is missing the first move. In
the next iteration of the paper we will provide the full one.)
The claim results from solving the game with backward induction.
Step one. Player V, located in the last decision node of Game Tree 1, faces a
straightforward choice (regardless of whether in the top or bottom portion of the game tree). V
will simply have to choose that move which maximizes his or her utility with no other strategic
considerations. Which option accomplishes this end, of course, depends on what the bill xL looks
like. V gets to play only if P, in the previous move, opted to veto the bill sent by L to his or her
desk. V’s option to sustain the veto or to override it is equivalent to a choice between retaining
SQ if the veto is sustained, or bringing policy to x if the veto is overridden (Kiewiet and
McCubbins 1988). With the ℘-sets it becomes easy to determine V’s best reply to any proposal
xL: “Override a veto if the bill in question is within ℘V; sustain the veto otherwise.”
Step two. Moving backwards brings us to P’s choice to sign bill x into law or veto it,
thence letting V move as prescribed in Step one. P will sign bill xL into law if xL is contained by
℘P. However, if xL is not included in ℘P, there are two possibilities (looking downwards in the
game). First, if xL falls within ℘V a veto will be overridden by V – imposing xL as the new
policy outcome despite the veto. A veto under this scenario, unless valued per se by P, would be
outcome-equivalent to signing the bill upon arrival to P’s desk: in both cases the outcome is xL,
with some economy of legislative steps in the latter case, though. Since the present model
ignores the possibility of P drawing utility from a veto qua veto, we conclude that P would sign
xL in to law. Second, if xL is not in ℘V a veto will be sustained by V, thus retaining SQ as the law
of the land.
These considerations permit the deduction of P’s best reply to any bill xL: “Sign bill xL
into law if xL is either in ℘P or xL is in ℘V; veto xL otherwise.”
Step three. Another level up Game tree 1 brings us to the nodes where L gets to move.
The top and bottom parts of the game need to be analyzed separately because L faces a choice of
slightly different actions in each. In the bottom node, L gets to choose whether to retain the
status quo or propose a bill and, in the latter case, which bill xL to send to P’s desk. We will
simplify the logical picture by restricting iL ≤ SQ (the argument is no less generalizable because
when iL > SQ the situation is merely symmetric). Three cases need to be considered here.
Case (a). L is free to propose his or her ideal policy whenever his or her ideal point is
included in ℘P, simply because the president will sign it into law. The same occurs if iL is
included inside ℘V, in this case because V would override any veto, thus imposing the bill as the
new outcome over the P’s contrariety. IL is included in either ℘P or ℘V whenever p ≤ iL or v ≤
iL. Figure 2(a) illustrates a situation of this kind: faced with a proposal xL = iL the President
would rather retain SQ, yet faces a Veto-player with contrary preferences (xL = iL ∈ ℘V); a veto
would thus be overridden.
[FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE]
Case (b). If neither p nor v are to the left of L’s ideal point, then xL = iL is vetoed with no
possible override, hence bringing no improvement in L’s utility (unless, of course, there were
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some value in a veto qua veto for L, which is not the case in this game). There may be, however,
gains to be made for L by making a concession to some other player. If iL < p < SQ a compromise
bill at xL = p falls within ℘P and is, thus, accepted by the president. Alternatively, if iL < v < SQ a
bill at xL = v falls within ℘V and is, consequently, veto-proof. If both iL < p < SQ and iL < v < SQ,
then L has leeway in choosing to send xL at p or v, whichever is lowest (i.e. closest to iL). Figure
2(b) illustrates this latter scenario, with L sending an optimal bill xL* = v.
Case (c). Finally, if both p and v are to the right of SQ there are no gains to be made
through concessions. The reason is that any bill that either P or V would accept is to the right of
SQ: concessions are way worse than the status quo from L’s standpoint. Any bill acceptable to L
(below SQ) is outside both ℘P and ℘V: their proposal returns the status quo again, with a loss of
time. Thus, unless L would have something to gain from a veto – again, something not
contemplated in this version of the game – L will prefer to retain SQ under this scenario. Figure
2(c) illustrates this case of pure recalcitrance between the players.
These three cases boil down to the following strategy for player L when the bottom
branch of Game Tree 1 is reached: “Propose xL = iL if either p or v are to the left of iL; if either p
or v is (are) between iL and the SQ then propose xL = p or xL = v, whichever is lowest; if both p
and v are to the right of SQ refrain from making a proposal.”
When the top half of the game is being played, L receives a bill xP from the President and
has to choose whether to amend it, pass it, or kill it. The decision is similar in essence to that of
the bottom branch. L will use the same rationale to amend xP into a bill xL under the same
conditions presented above. If changes to the SQ that L finds desirable are not feasible (i.e. vetoproof) then, instead of amending xP, L will decide to kill it (mirroring the situation in the bottom
node). If there are veto-proof changes to the SQ, then L will amend xP into a feasible xL (again,
mirroring the conditions above); if xP happens to be that policy, then L will pass it with no
amendment.
This boils down to the following best-reply for L when the top part of the game is being
played: “In case either p or v are to the left of iL, then propose xL = iL (or pass xP if xP = iL); in
case either p or v is (are) between iL and the SQ then propose xL = p or xL = v , whichever is
lowest (or pass xP if xP is the lowest of p or v); if both p and v are to the right of SQ refrain from
making a proposal and kill any proposal sent by the President.”
We finally reach the initial node of the game, where P gets to choose whether or not to
initiate a bill in the assembly, and if yes, what bill exactly. The president knows, from looking
down the game tree, that a bill initiated by him will only survive if not amended and if the bill
follows the criteria used by L in drafting a bill. So unless there is something to win from having
the assembly amend or kill an executive-initiated bill, the president’s role in the initiation
process is purely anticipatory.
Since players are choosing reciprocal best replies this strategy combination is in
equilibrium, completing the proof of Proposition 1.
The Paradoxical Nature of Vetoes. A critical assumption that underlies the model just
presented, which we have not mentioned so far, is that players are playing a complete
information game. The derivation of the equilibrium above is constantly taking advantage of the
fact that each player knows the utility function of the other players – i.e. he or she knows the
exact location of the other players’ ideal points in space. L, for example, upon calculating where
to situate a new proposal xL (if at all), locates the cutting points of P and V in space, and
concocts a strategy accordingly.
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One of the known paradoxes of complete information games is that anticipation
eliminates all observable instances of conflict. Wars should never occur according to complete
information models of geo-politics; strikes should never burst in complete information models of
labor markets. If each country knows the adversary’s tolerance for recalcitrance, and each knows
the outcome of an eventual war, the weakest side, in anticipation, should make enough
concessions to leave the enemy indifferent. Wars should never occur.
The same paradox rises in the VSoP game. The following hypothesis is a well known
implication of Proposition 1 (Kiewiet 1988, p. 731).
The Nil Veto Hypothesis. The president-legislature policymaking game, in equilibrium, will not
produce vetoes under any circumstance.
It follows from Proposition 1 that, if there is a veto threat, L will seek to accommodate
the preferences of V in order to obtain his or her support for a successful override, thus
circumventing the bite of the veto. The president, upon receipt of such compromise bill on his or
her desk, knows (by the complete information assumption) the outcome-uselessness of a veto,
and instead signs the bill into law (with an economy of legislative steps). If such a compromise
with V is not feasible, then L initiates no bill at all, again diverting the occurrence of a veto.
Likewise, another relevant hypothesis following from Proposition 1 and the complete
information assumption concerns the fate of executive-initiated bills. Recall that in Game Tree 1,
the VSoP game starts with a decision by the president to propose or not a change in the status
quo. Where would he set policy at? The president knows that if xP ≠ iL, xP is irrevocably bound to
be either amended or defeated. So in equilibrium a president would only submit bills at iL. This
results in the following hypothesis:
The Nil Presidential Defeats Hypothesis. The president-legislature policymaking game, in
equilibrium, will not defeat executive-initiated bills under any circumstance.
The same reason that leads the president not to emit any veto also explains why none of
the bills he eventually proposes to the assembly should be defeated. As stated above, his role in
the initiation process is purely anticipatory. By this logic, when the president decides to initiate a
bill, he or she will set policy where L would accept it – the president simply sends the bill that L
would have initiated him or herself.3
In the next section we analyze whether the empirical record allows to reject or not the
hypotheses drawn from a complete-information spatial model of decision-making in Venezuela.
III. The Case of Venezuela, 1959-1995
Under the now defunct 1961 Constitution, the Venezuelan chief executive was elected by
plurality for a five-year term. Presidential and congressional elections were concurrent.
Presidents could only be reelected after 10 years have elapsed since they last held office. The
president appointed his cabinet without restriction. Individual ministers, however, could be
censured by a two-thirds vote in the Chamber of Deputies. With respect to constitutional
3
Authors’ note: this is the part of the equilibrium that we still need to specify. The intuition behind this claim is
simple: L can amend any bill initiated by P; a president interested in policy outcomes only (such as the one we have
been assuming so far) anticipates this amendment and sends the bill L would accept. This would change drastically
if players were motivated by another goal besides bringing policy close to their ideal: for example, if players wish to
advertise their ideals.
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legislative powers, Venezuelan presidents were weak compared to some of their Latin American
counterparts (Crisp 1997; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997a; Shugart and Carey 1992). Except for
the budget, they had no power of exclusive introduction of legislation. Also, they had no
constitutionally guaranteed decree authority. The executive could only issue decree-laws after
Congress enacted an enabling law delegating to the president authority to do so. Moreover, the
delegated decree authority could only be used to deal with matters relating to appropriations,
revenues, the creation and abolition of public services, monetary policy, and to maintain order.
According to Crisp (1997), given that the passage of an enabling law required majority support
in Congress, the general pattern observed in Venezuela was that only presidents whose parties
commanded a legislative majority were delegated decree authority. This means that party support
was essential for presidents to activate all the weapons the Constitution potentially grants the
executive.
Moreover, Venezuelan presidents held a weak veto over bills. Article 173 stated that the
president could return a bill within 10 days with suggested changes. Overriding the president’s
objections required a two-thirds vote by Congress in a joint session. Yet a simple majority (a
plurality) of the joint session was sufficient to send the bill back to the president, who could
return it again within five days. In case, however, a president did so, a simple majority of a joint
session could promulgate the bill into law without the president’s signature. This means that a
plurality was, de facto, capable of overriding a presidential veto in Venezuela in its pre-1999
democratic period.
Evidence for Hypothesis 1. Table 1 displays the number of bills returned per president
and the number of laws enacted per legislature in the 1959-1994 period. The number of returned
bills is impressively small. Three presidents never returned a bill, namely Betancourt, Leoni, and
Pérez I. Two presidents returned only a single bill, Caldera I and Pérez II. Campíns and Lusinchi
returned 5 bills each. However, interim president Velásquez, in his few months in office,
returned 2 bills; and Caldera II returned 6 bills.
[TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]
The numbers are, however, pretty small, especially when seen from a comparative
perspective. Table 2 provides a rough, but illustrative, picture of veto incidence in presidential
systems. Venezuela indeed stands at one end of our small distribution, with 20 vetoes in 37
years. The 11 first vetoes, which occurred between 1959 and 1989, contrast with the 860 bills
that were signed into law by the executive immediately after Congress sanctioned them in the
same time period (a ratio of 78 bills signed for every bill vetoed). Argentina until 1976 presents a
similar picture (a 50:1 ratio), followed by the U.S. (40:1), Chile (28:1), and Argentina in the
recent years (an 8:1 ratio). Yet the record, at least in this handful of cases we present, belongs to
Brazil, where hundreds of vetoes have been recorded. We unfortunately do not have the number
of bills passed in the time period, but a comparison with other country figures can be done by
means of the average number of vetoes per year. An eloquent difference results from the
comparison of the 0.4 vetoes per year in Venezuela (1959-89) with the 72.5 vetoes per year in
Brazil (1985-96).
[TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]
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All in all, the number of vetoed bills in Venezuela in 1959-1995 meets our expectations
to a certain extent, but not to the point of allowing us to say that Hypothesis 1 is confirmed. So
this should motivate further inquiry on veto politics in Venezuela.
Possible Explanations for the Occurrence of Vetoes
Recent analyses of executive-legislative bargaining have started to incorporate some of
the factors highlighted in the more qualitative literature as driving vetoes. In this sub-section we
overview the potential role that incomplete information (Cameron 2000), electoral concerns
(Magar n.d.), and going public strategies (cf. Kernell 1993) might play in the case of Venezuela.
Incomplete information. The results drawn from the model presented in the previous
section rely on the fact that each players knows the location of the ideal point of all other players.
With this (complete) information, they can fine-tune the policy proposals they make so that they
leave others indifferent and get some gains from the game. Given that preferences are not
observable, it seems very plausible to suggest that the complete information assumption is too
strong. Adding a little uncertainty about the location of the adversary’s ideal point opens the door
for mistakes (one may under-estimate the size of concessions needed to get a veto-proof bill) and
for a strategic use of uncertainty (if one appears more conservative than he or she really is, one
will get larger concessions).
Venezuela, however, is not a case where this argument could stand. It is the two-thirds
override requirement that drives vetoes-caused-by-uncertainty in the U.S. The question behind
vetoes boils down to whether it will be sustained by V or not. In Venezuela, where the same
coalition who supported a bill can override a veto, there is no question of whether the bill was
fine-tuned enough to convince the V player of an override because the V player is included in the
coalition who voted for the passage of the bill. For this reason, Venezuela is a good test case:
there is a fairly good argument to suggest that uncertainty is not a driving factor.
Position taking. Vetoes are highly noticeable political events. Because conflict and
confrontation rate highly among audiences, newscasts tend to highlight instances when a
president vetoes a bill in their opening lines or front cover. Given the salience of a veto, it can be
reasonably suggested that politicians will seize the occasion in their search for opportunities to
advertise the positions they stand for in their quest for (re-)election. Vetoes can be interpreted as
position-taking exercises.
Magar (n.d.) has actually altered the model’s assumptions to include a bit more
sophisticated players. Players in his model have a secondary goal (“to advertise what I stand
for”) in addition to the one in the model above (“to bring outcomes as close to my ideal as
possible”). In a study of U.S. state governments he finds evidence that, controlling for a number
of other factors, the incidence of vetoes follows the electoral cycle. Politicians seem to switch to
a position-taking behavior as elections approach: executives emit vetoes that they know will be
overridden in order to show that they tried to impede a bill’s publication but the assembly
insisted; similarly, legislators send bills to the executive that they know will be vetoed (with no
possible override) to bring evidence about their ideals.
In Venezuela there is no evidence of a similar behavior. Table 3 lists when each of the 20
bills were returned by the president to the assembly. Vetoes in Venezuela occurred almost 1,000
days before the end a president’s term, that is, the president remained, on average, 2 years and 9
months in office after the veto. The standard deviation around that mean is relatively small, one
year five months approximately. The vetoes that occurred closer to the next election were those
issued by Ramón Velásquez (vetoes #13 and #14), the one-year interim president who finished
Carlos Andrés Pérez’s term: the closeness to the election is quite artificial in this case.
12
[TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE]
So, contrary to the evidence in U.S. state governments, Venezuelan vetoes seem not to be
driven by position-taking concerns.
Going public and delay. When the Venezuelan president returns a bill to Congress, a joint
session has to be called, and a new discussion and vote of the bill has to take place. This is very
likely to give the president and those who oppose the bill some more time under the SQ. How
much time?
Table 4 below reports the delay caused by the 20 vetoes in the promulgation of the
relevant law. It is impossible to know when a bill that was returned would have been
promulgated had it not been returned to Congress. We do know, however, either the date the bill
was sanctioned by Congress (and submitted to the president for publication) or the date the bill
was returned to Congress. Using this date as a proxy for the original sanctioning date and
comparing it with the date the bill was eventually promulgated in the Gaceta Oficial, vetoes in
Venezuela delayed laws 4 and a half months on average, with some variation around this
statistic. The minimum delay was 3 weeks.
[TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE]
More interestingly, three, maybe four, of the bills that were returned by the president
were effectively killed by this maneuver. If the same coalition that favored a bill in the first place
is sufficient to insist on a bill after it has been returned, how come overrides ever fail? The fact
that this occurred in Venezuela suggests that vetoes may, under certain circumstances, change
the nature of a bill. A legislator who was willing to vote in favor of a bill may change his or her
mind after it has been returned by the president. Why?
A veto, because of its notoriety, may well change the salience of a bill. An issue that was
somewhat hidden from the public’s eye is highlighted by a veto. This phenomenon parallels
Kernell’s going public strategy, frequently used by U.S. presidents (1993). However, so far we
have no information that would allow us to state whether this ever happened in Venezuela.
Evidence for Hypothesis 2. Due to the absence of a constitutionally granted decree
authority, the primary method Venezuelan presidents in the pre-Chávez period had to promote
their legislative agendas was by initiating statute bills in the Congress. Hypothesis 2 expects that
no executive-initiated bill would be defeated in Venezuela. What does the available evidence tell
us about it?
Table 5 below reports the executive’s legislative input and output in Venezuela’s lower
chamber per presidential-congressional period between 1959 and 1989.
[TABLE 5 ABOUT HERE]
Executive-initiated bills represent 34.2% of all the bills introduced in the lower chamber
in the period analyzed. Surprisingly, there is substantial variation in legislative success across
presidencies. While president Campíns, who led a minority COPEI administration in 1979-1984,
only had 50% of his legislative agenda approved, AD president Lusinchi (1984-1989), whose
party commanded the largest legislative contingent in Venezuela’s democratic history (56.5% of
lower chamber seats), achieved a 89.5% success rate. Another important observation is that all
minority presidents – Leoni (AD, 1964-1969), Caldera (COPEI, 1969-1974), and Campíns
13
(COPEI, 1979-1984) had a poorer performance than majority ones – Betancourt (AD, 19591964), Pérez (AD, 1974-1979), and Lusinchi (AD, 1984-1989). Overall, Hypothesis 2 failed
blatantly. Why?
Why Were Executive-Initiated Bills Defeated
One possible reason for the defeat of executive-initiated bills may also have to do with
electoral strategies and position-taking, although these factors were found not apt to explain the
vetoes issued by Venezuelan presidents. Note first that there were two types of presidents in
Venezuela with regard to their governing status, namely, majority and minority. As for minority
presidents, they, as presidential candidates, ran on publicly advertised policy promises. Their
direct election by the people bound them to at least initiate their electoral platform, no matter its
fate in Congress. One can plausibly surmise that failure to do so could be very costly in terms of
public approval and trust. Moreover, although Venezuelan presidents were not allowed to run for
a consecutive term, it is fair to assume that they had strong incentives to help their parties
perform well in the next presidential and congressional elections. To accomplish that, minority
presidents could use congressional battles to advertise the efforts they have spent in
accomplishing the policy promises on which they were elected. This is also position-taking.
After a congressional defeat, presidents were always too eager to point the finger to opposition
intransigence and blind partisanship as the cause of their failure to pass the executive’s agenda.
Playing a position-taking game with an opposition Congress could be used as a means by which
a minority president, on the one hand, could help his party shore up electoral support for
congressional races. On the other, the majority opposition in Congress also has strong incentives
to defeat the president’s agenda so as to boost the opposition’s chances to win the next
presidential election. If this much is true, then bills initiated by minority presidents should have
been more often defeated as a new electoral cycle approached.
In regard to majority presidents, it is even more puzzling that they also suffered
legislative defeats. However, Coppedge (1994a, pp. 94-135) shows that AD, the only party that
elected majority presidents, despite being tightly disciplined on the floor of Congress, was
plagued by factionalism. Because presidents were not allowed to run for a consecutive term,
factions formed within the AD mainly to contest the presidential succession. As the presidential
term came to an end, factional strife became more and more intense. The rise of factions within
AD was also prompted by differences of outlook between the executive and the party. Upon
taking office, AD presidents were concerned with interests other than those of his party.
Consequently, as Coppedge puts it,
This broader perspective leads them [the presidents] sooner or later to take actions that are
contrary to the interests of their party, and an executive-party crisis heats up as a result. The
different perspective of government and party are therefore said to cost an executive some
support within his party (p. 129).
So there is ground to argue that the electoral cycle affected the legislative support of
majority and minority presidents, and this should be reflected in more legislative defeats late in
the president’s term. What does the evidence say about it?
How can we check whether the fate of executive-initiated bills was affected by the
elapsing of the president’s term. The fate of an executive-initiated bills is simply whether it was
approved or rejected. This dependent variable is thus a dummy to which we assign the value 1 if
the bill was approved, and the value 0 if it is defeated. To operationalize the elapsing the
president’s term, we propose the following formula:
14
ELAPSE = 1 − (Nb/Pt)
where
Nb = number of days elapsed between the beginning of the
president’s term and the date a bill is initiated;
Pt = number of days of the president’s term.
So, for example, consider a bill introduced 100 days after the inauguration of a
presidency. As in Venezuela the presidential term is 5 years (1825 days), this bill’s score on
ELAPSE is: 1 − (100/1825) = 1 − 0.055 = 0.945. We expect that ELAPSE will have a positive
sign, that is, the closer is the initiation of a bill to the beginning of the president’s term, the more
likely its approval. Additionally, a dummy variable tapping the governing status of the
president’s party (call it STATUS) will also be included in the test. It assumes the value 1 if the
president’s party commands a majority of legislative seats, and the value 0 otherwise. STATUS
is expected to have a positive sign.
We estimated the logit equations reported in Table 6 below. This technique produces
maximum likelihood estimates of coefficients measuring the effect of an independent variable on
the probability that an observation falls into one category rather than the other.
As the regression output shows, ELAPSE was found significant at the 0.01 level but
came with wrong sign. Surprisingly, the latter indicates that executive-initiated bills are more
likely to be defeated early in the president’s term. STATUS worked about as expected. It had a
significant effect on the fate of executive-initiated bills (at the 0.01 level), and displayed the right
sign. Setting ELAPSE at the mean, the probability of an executive-initiated bill being approved
under a majority president is 0.86, while a minority president stands only a 0.57 probability of
having his bills approved.
TABLE 6: Logit Estimates of the Fate of Executive-Initiated Bills
in Venezuela (1959-1989)
______________________________________________________________________
Equation Estimating the Probability of a Bill Being Approved by the Lower Chamber
Independent
Estimated
Standard
Variables
Coefficients
Errors
______________________________________________________________________
CONSTANT
.746*
.283
ELAPSE
−.847***
.440
STATUS
1.524*
.258
Pseudo R-squared
.094
N of Obs =
388
______________________________________________________________________
* ρ > 0.01; ** ρ > 0.05; *** ρ > 0.1
15
All told, position-taking as measured by the electoral cycle was also not able to explain
why executive-initiated bills were defeated in Venezuela in 1959-1989. However, the fact that
the fate of those bills depends heavily on the governing status of the president’s party is to some
extent indicative of the impact of position-taking strategies, particularly under minority
presidents. The latter are always striving to find ways to weaken the majority opposition in
Congress. One way to do so is to try to show to voters that the opposition conspires against the
public interest by defeating presidential proposals. However, are minority presidents bound only
to devise position-taking strategies to overcome the obstacles posed by their condition?
What Can Presidents Do Other Than Position-Taking
The spatial model developed in Section II confers a mostly passive role to the president.
After all, he is expected not to veto bills or to propose tailor-made bills to suit the preferences of
the median legislator. Our empirical evidence, however, shows that presidents veto bills and are
willing to submit proposals that are very likely to be voted down by the legislature. Yet,
according to the literature on Venezuela and to the econometric test performed above, the factor
that best explains the legislative performance of presidents in this country in 1959-1989 is not
directly related to presidential agency but rather to the distribution of preferences in the national
electorate, that is to say, the size of the president’s party. Although we identified a strategic
mechanism – position-taking by presidents and the opposition – that possibly mediates between
the governing status of the president’s party and the fate of executive-initiated bills, this analysis
still leaves the chief executive with a marginal, at most reactive, role in policymaking in a Latin
American presidential system such as Venezuela.
Actually, presidents can do more. The 1961 Constitution granted Venezuelan presidents
the power to freely appoint and dismiss cabinet ministers. Ministerial portfolios can provide
politicians with good opportunities to influence policymaking, to boost their reputation and
prestige, and plenty of resources to dispense patronage and make new allies. Shouldn’t
presidents use the bait of ministerial posts to increase their influence over the policy process?
Suppose a president with a firm grip on his legislative party, but with no majority. Suppose also
that the addition of the votes of a more conservative party would create a majority. The president
could make his stand more conservative, bringing his “ideal” closer to the other party's and buy
their support in this fashion. But if this goes contrary to his platform and, if taken too far, will
alienate his own partisans. Alternatively, the president can buy concessions from the other party
by offering them some cabinet portfolio(s): this will bring the other party's ideal closer to P’s,
with similar limitations. Most likely, a combination of the two moves will take place. A coalition
cabinet will thus shift the ideal points of P and L, bringing them closer. A coalition might also
bring the ideal point of V closer to P's and/or L’s. If so, then a coalition cabinet should allow the
president to dodge the passive role to which he was relegated by our model based on complete
information. By this logic, a coalition cabinet should have the effect of boosting the president’s
legislative performance (Figure 3 below presents a sketch of what a more complete CabinetVSoP game might look like).
[FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE]
Table 7 below shows that coalition cabinets were actually appointed in Venezuela in
1959-1999, some of them giving a majority to a minority president (Leoni’s second cabinet and
Pérez’s second cabinet in his second presidency), and one of them providing the president with a
near majority (Caldera’s first cabinet in his first presidency). Coalition cabinets were also
16
appointed when the president’s party commanded a majority (Betancourt’s two cabinet). What is
the impact of presidential cabinets on the legislative performance of the executive?
[TABLE 7 ABOUT HERE]
First, how do we operationalize a coalition cabinet? The nominal size of the cabinet could
be used for this purpose. The nominal size of the cabinet is the sum of the legislative weight of
all the parties represented in the cabinet. However, the problem with this indicator is that the
cabinet always includes the president’s party, and in the case of single-party cabinets, the size of
the cabinet equates with the size of the president’s party (% of lower chamber seats). The
solution, then, is to find an indicator that tells us how much legislative support the cabinet adds
to the president’s party. For convenience, let us call it the Cabinet Legislative Surplus, which
can be expressed by the following formula:
Cabinet Legislative Surplus = (Scab – Spres)/Spres
where
Scab = Legislative Size of the Cabinet
Spres = Legislative Size of the President’s Party
To arrive at Cabinet Legislative Surplus, we subtract the size of the president’s party
from the size of the cabinet, and then divide this value by the size of the cabinet. This indicator
varies from 0 to 1. If the cabinet is a single-party cabinet, its legislative surplus takes on the
lowest value, zero, because the numerator will be zero. If a president whose party commands no
seat in the legislature appoints a national unity cabinet comprising members of all legislative
parties, the legislative surplus of this cabinet will score the maximum value, 1 (1 – 0/1 = 1).
We test the impact Cabinet Legislative Surplus on the fate of executive-initiated bills,
just like we did above. ELAPSE and STATUS are again included on the right-hand side of the
equation. We expect that Cabinet Legislative Surplus will have a positive sign, that is to say,
the higher the surplus, the more likely the approval of a executive-initiated bill.
Table 8 below reports the regression results. STATUS was found significant at the 0.01
level, and came with right sign. Again, the coefficient on ELAPSE was statistically discernible
from zero (at the 0.01 level) but its sign was wrong. Cabinet Legislative Surplus had a
significant effect on the fate of executive-initiated bills, and came with the right sign. Cabinets
with a higher legislative surplus due to a coalition arrangement were more likely to have their
bills approved. Setting STATUS and ELAPSE at their respective means, the probability of a bill
being approved increases from 0.592 to 0.731, a considerable spread, if a minority president
changes from a single-party cabinet to a broad based multiparty cabinet. This is precisely the
case of president Leoni (1964-1969), whose first cabinet included only his party, AD, which
commanded a plurality of 37.1% of lower chamber seats. Later on his term he decided to form a
coalition with URD and FND, the so-called Ancha Base (broad base), which gave his
government a 65.7% majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
17
TABLE 8: Logit Estimates of the Fate of Executive-Initiated Bills
in Venezuela (1959-1989)
______________________________________________________________________
Equation Estimating the Probability of a Bill Being Approved by the Lower Chamber
Independent
Estimated
Standard
Variables
Coefficients
Errors
______________________________________________________________________
CONSTANT
.652
.268
ELAPSE
−1.526*
.433
STATUS
1.524*
.258
CABINET LEGISLATIVE SURPLUS
1.441**
.680
Pseudo R-squared
.084
N of Obs =
388
______________________________________________________________________
* ρ > 0.01; ** ρ > 0.05; *** ρ > 0.1
In short, cabinet posts can be used by presidents to obtain political support beyond their
own party, thus eventually allowing the chief executive to overcome a minority situation
determined by the ballots cast in the last election.
IV. Conclusion
This work-in-progress tentatively formulated a spatial theory of presidential
policymaking and tested the latter on Venezuelan data. While our theory allowed us to
deductively derive hypotheses on the frequency at which presidents issue vetoes and the fate of
bills initiated by the presidents, the available evidence failed to confirm our predictions. Our
predictions were that presidents should emit no vetoes and that executive-sponsored bills should
suffer no defeat. The negative results generated by the tests made us question the key assumption
on which our model was premised, namely, the assumption that presidents operate under
complete information. Such strict assumption led us to model presidents as playing a merely
anticipatory role in policymaking, a role that our data did not corroborate. The question, then,
became: what factors not captured by the model could be driving Venezuelan presidents to
perform a more active role? We argued and found some positive evidence that position-taking
strategies and the use of appointment powers aiming at the formation of coalition cabinets could
partly explain why Venezuelan presidents were more active than expected by our theory.
However, our evidence is too suggestive, and we still have a long road ahead to empirically
sustain our claims with more certainty.
Finally, a note on how cabinet formation relates to spatial models is in order. It is difficult
for the latter to capture the importance of cabinet formation in a presidential system because they
represent political actors as motivated only by policy-seeking concerns, whereas the drafting of a
party to the executive often signifies that politicians are willing to trade off their policy ideals for
the benefits of office. This is an important theoretical challenge that needs to be faced up by
analysts of Latin American presidentialism. In the present state of our model, however, we were
only able to consider the cabinet-making process as exogenous to the policy-making process –
18
i.e. the equilibrium described in Section II applies to a game starting with P’s decision to propose
a bill or not to the legislature. This, of course, is not appropriate, and we will need to endogenize
it so that the equilibrium of the game takes the president’s design of cabinet into account. For the
limited purposes of this paper, we offered only some tentative, ad hoc arguments about the how
cabinet-making can help presidents in their dealings with legislative parties.
19
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21
TABLE 1: Laws Enacted per Legislature and Number of Bills Returned per President (1959-1995)
___________________________________________________________________________________
President
Period
President’s Party and
N of Laws N of Bills Bills Returned
in Office
its Governing Status
Enacted
Returned
to Laws
___________________________________________________________________________________
Betancourt
1959-1964
AD: Majority
91
0
0
Leoni
1964-1969
AD: Minority
132
0
0
Caldera I
1969-1974
COPEI: Minority
134
1
0.007
Pérez I
1974-1979
AD: Majority
165
0
0
H. Campíns
1979-1984
COPEI: Minority
159
5
0.031
Lusinchi
1984-1989
AD: Majority
179
5
0.028
Pérez II
1989-1993
AD: Minority
126
1
0.008
Velásquez
1993-1994
Non-partisan
36
2
0.056
Caldera II
1994-1999
Convergencia: Minority
76*
6**
0.079
___________________________________________________________________________________
* Updated up to December 1995.
** Updated up to December 1995.
Source: Venezuela – Congreso de La Republica. n.d. “Leyes Aprobadas por el Congreso de la
Republica.” Disk File, Caracas: Departamento de Archivo de Diputados; Venezuela – Servicio
Autónomo de Información Legislativa. Nd. “Leyes Devueltas por el Ejecutivo Nacional para Su
Reconsideración por el Poder Legislativo.” Typescript, Caracas: SAIS.
Table 2: Veto incidence in comparative perspective
Argentina (1983-1997)
Chile (1990-1994)
U.S. (1945-1992)
Argentina (1862-1976)
Venezuela (1959-1989)
Venezuela (1989-1995)
Brazil (1946-1964)
Brazil (1985-1996)
Sources: **
Bills
signed by
president
into law
1,703
440
17,198
9,308
850
?
?
?
Bills vetoed by
president
Ratio
Average
vetoes per year
212
16
434
188
11
9
260
870
8:1
28:1
40:1
50:1
77:1
?
?
?
14.1
3.2
9.0
2.2
0.4
1.3
13.7
72.5
22
Table 3: When in his term did a president opt for a veto?
Days
Portion of
Date vetoing
Date bill
remaining
No.
term
president’s
in term after
was vetoed
remaining
term ends
the veto
1
12-Aug-69
11-Mar-74
1,672
.92
2
30-Dec-80
1-Feb-84
1,128
.63
3
4-Jan-82
1-Feb-84
758
.42
4
24-Aug-82
1-Feb-84
526
.29
5
10-Sep-82
1-Feb-84
509
.28
6
13-Aug-83
1-Feb-84
172
.10
7
18-Apr-84
1-Feb-89
1,750
.96
8
14-Dec-84
1-Feb-89
1,510
.83
9
8-Oct-85
1-Feb-89
1,212
.66
a
10
22-Dec-86
1-Feb-89
776
.42
11
2-Sep-87
1-Feb-89
518
.28
b
12
30-Dec-91
1-Feb-94
764
.42
13
2-Sep-93
1-Feb-94
152
.66c
14
6-Sep-93
1-Feb-94
148
.64c
d
15
25-Nov-94
1-Feb-99
1,529
.84
16
20-Dec-94
1-Feb-99d
1,504
.82
d
17
20-Jan-95
1-Feb-99
1,473
.81
18
19-Jul-95
1-Feb-99d
1,293
.71
d
19
27-Jul-95
1-Feb-99
1,285
.70
20
27-Jul-95
1-Feb-99d
1,285
.70
Average
998
.61
Std. Dev.
517
.24
Notes:
(a) We estimated this veto date relying on article 173 of the Constitution: 10 days after the bill was sanctioned by
Congress.
(b) This is the formal end-date of C.A. Pérez’s term; he was impeached before expiration.
(c) This proportion seems higher because the interim president, R.J. Velásquez, had a shorter term (231 days in
office).
(d) The data we rely truncates R. Caldera’s term; we only follow returned bills up to 29Nov95.
Sources: same as for Table 1.
23
Table 4: The delay- and killer -effect of vetoes.
Date bill
Date law was
Was the
was
eventually
bill killed
originally
No.
published in
by the
sanctioned
the Gaceta
veto?
by Congress
Oficial
1
26-Jul-69
17-Feb-70
a
2
20-Dec-80
1-Jul-81
3
25-Dec-81a
3-Aug-82
4
14-Aug-82a
8-Sep-82
a
5
31-Aug-82
23-Dec-82
6
3-Aug-83a
12-Sep-83
a
7
8-Apr-84
30-May-84
8
29-Nov-84
6-Nov-85
a
9
28-Sep-85
6-Dec-85
10
12-Dec-86
Yes
a
11
23-Aug-87
16-Dec-87
12
20-Dec-91a
10-Mar-92
13
23-Aug-93a
Yes
a
14
27-Aug-93
Yes
15
3-Nov-94
23-Dec-94
16
10-Dec-94a
17-May-95
17
20-Jan-95
30-Jun-95
18
19-Jul-95
18-Dec-95
19
27-Jul-95
?
Yes?
20
6-Jul-95
18-Dec-95
Averageb
Std. Dev.b
Delay caused
by veto (in
days)
Approximate
delay (in months
and weeks)
206
193
221
25
114
40
52
342
69
–
115
81
–
–
50
158
161
152
–
165
134
81
7 mo.
6 mo. 2 we.
7 mo. 2 we.
3 we.
3 mo. 3 we.
1 mo. 1 we.
1 mo. 3 we.
11 mo. 2 we.
2 mo. 1 we.
–
4 mo.
2 mo. 3 we.
–
–
1 mo. 3we.
5 mo. 1we.
5 mo. 2we.
5 mo.
–
5 mo. 2we.
4 mo. 2 we.
2 mo. 3 we.
Notes:
(a) We estimated the date the bill was originally sanctioned by Congress relying on article 173 of the constitution:
10 days before the president returned the bill.
(b) We evidently omitted the three killed bills as well as the censored observation in the calculation of the average
and standard deviation.
Sources: same as for Table 1.
24
TABLE 5: EXECUTIVE’S LEGISLATIVE INPUT
AND OUTPUT IN VENEZUELA’S LOWER
CHAMBER (1959-1989)
________________________________________________
PresidentialBills
Bills
Congressional
Initiated
Approved
Period
N %a
N
%
________________________________________________
1959-1964
53
41.7
46
86.8
1964-1969
64
35.4
36
56.3
1969-1974
83
41.7
48
57.8
1974-1979
48
26.5
32
66.7
1979-1984
64
29.5
32
50.0
1984-1989
76
32.9
68
89.5
TOTAL
388 34.2
262 67.5
________________________________________________
a
This is the percent of executive-initiated bills
over all bills considered by the lower chamber in
a given presidential-congressional period.
Source: Venezuela – Camara de Diputados (n.d.),
Registro de Materias, vols.I-III, Caracas:
Archivo de Diputados.
25
TABLE 7: Presidential Cabinets in Venezuela (1959 - 1999)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
PRESIDENT/
Period
Parties
Type
Legislative
Legislative
CABINET
in
Represented
of
Size of the
Size of the
Office
in the
Cabinet
Cabinet in
President’s
Cabinet
the Lower
Party in the
Chamber
Lower
Chamber
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Betancourt 1st
Betancourt 2nd
(02/59-11/60)
(11/60-3/64)
AD-COPEI-URD
AD-COPEI
Coalition
Coalition
94.7
69.2
54.9
54.9
Leoni 1st
Leoni 2nd
Leoni 3rd
(3/64-11/64)
(11/64-04/68)
(04/68-03/69)
AD
AD-URD-FND
AD
Single-Party
Coalition
Coalition
37.1
65.7
37.1
37.1
37.1
37.1
Caldera I-1st
Caldera I-2nd
(03/69-05/70)
(05/70-03/74)
COPEI-MEP-URD
COPEI
Coalition
Single-Party
47.2
27.6
27.6
27.6
Perez I-1st
Perez I-2nd
(03/74-01/77)
(01/77-03/79)
AD
AD
Single-Party
Single-Party
51.0
51.0
51.0
51.0
Campíns
(03/79-02/84)
COPEI
Single-Party
42.2
42.2
Lusinchi
(02/84-02/89)
AD
Single-Party
56.5
56.5
Perez II-1st
Perez II-2nd
(02/89-03/89)
(03/89-05/93)
AD
AD-COPEI
Single-Party
Coalition
48.2
81.5
48.3
48.3
Velásquez
(06/93-02/94)
AD
Non-partisan
48.2
0.0
Caldera II
(02/94-02/99.)
Convergencia-MAS
Coalition
25.0
12.6
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sources: Olmos, Helena (n.d.), Ministros de la Democracia, Caracas: Instituto
Autonomo Biblioteca Nacional – Colección de Publicaciones Oficiales;
and data provided by Valia Pereira.
Figure 1
The location of players' cutting points and preferred-to sets
X
l
iL
℘L
SQ
iV
v
iP
℘V
℘P
p
27
Figure 2
Player L's choice of an optimal bill xL*
(a) Veto-player finds
xL = iL palatable.
X
v
iL
p
iV
iP
SQ
xL*
(b) Veto-player rejects
xL = iL, yet finds
xL = v palatable.
X
iL
v
p
iV
iP
SQ
xL*
(c) No bill acceptable
to L is acceptable
to P nor V; thus
xL* = SQ .
X
iL
SQ
xL*
iV
iP
v
p
28
Game tree 1
The VSoP game (Venezuelan Separation of Power game)
sustain
SQ
override
xL
V
veto
amend
xP to xL
P
accept
initiate
bill
xP
L
reject
xP
xL
pass
xP
xP
SQ
P
sustain
SQ
override
xL
V
veto
~
pass
bill xL
P
accept
L
xL
~
SQ
Figure 3
The Cabinet-VSoP game sequence
P may form
a coalition
cabinet or not
a coalition cabinet
affects the location
of ideal points
VSoP game