Article
Parties for hire: How particularistic
parties influence presidents’
governing strategies
Party Politics
1–12
ª The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1354068813487109
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Marisa Kellam
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
I argue that political parties oriented towards particularistic goods affect coalition government in presidential systems.
Particularistic parties hire out their support on some item(s) of the presidential agenda in exchange for locally
targeted policies or resources under the control of presidents. They are relatively cheap coalition partners for
presidents in policy terms and their representation in the legislature provides presidents with coalitional flexibility. My
empirical analysis of cabinets in 10 Latin American countries shows that when particularistic parties hold a larger share
of the legislative seats minority presidents are less likely to form majority governments and more likely to change the
party composition of their cabinets.
Keywords
Empirical research, Latin America, office goals, presidential cabinets, theory construction
Introduction
Political parties oriented toward the distribution of particularistic benefits are common in democracies around the
globe, where patronage-based, as opposed to programmatic,
party-voter linkages predominate (Kitschelt and Wilkinson,
2007). These parties respond to voters’ demands in the
kinds of goods they distribute and help legislators gain
access to resources that can be channelled to their supporters in the electorate. They also can be useful to presidents
who often need their votes to secure passage of legislation
that more programmatic parties oppose. Scholars demonstrate that presidents in various countries distribute pork
and patronage to gain support in multiparty legislatures and
some argue that party leaders act as intermediaries in this
exchange (Ames, 2001; Amorim Neto and Santos, 2001;
Figueiredo and Limongi, 2000; Geddes, 1994; Gibson and
Calvo, 2000; Lyne, 2008; Mejı́a Acosta, 2006; Pereira and
Mueller, 2004; Raile et al., 2011; Shugart and Carey,
1992; Taylor, 1996; Zucco Jr., 2009). When U.S. presidents are without programmatic majorities backing them,
they too turn to pork-barrel benefits to ‘grease the wheels’
of policy-making (Evans, 2004).
The question typically framed by scholarly debate is
whether, and how, presidents can maintain stable majorities
and ensure disciplined voting if legislators seek particularistic benefits. However, for Juan Linz (1994: 34–35):
[O]ne of the paradoxes of presidential regimes in many
Latin American democracies (and the Philippines) is the
complaint that parties are weak and lack discipline and that
representatives behave in parochial and self-interested
ways. I say paradox because these characteristics of parties
and their representatives make it possible in multiparty systems (in particular) for presidencies to work.
Shugart and Carey (1992: Ch. 9) see this as the inefficient secret: in a multiparty system, a moderately strong
president can succeed in passing a national policy agenda
despite, or because of, the localistic rather than ideological basis of parties in the assembly. Prominent scholars of
comparative presidentialism agree that particularistic representation in the legislature is an important factor in
allowing multiparty presidentialism to function; yet the
role of particularistic parties in presidential coalitions has
not received systematic, cross-national examination. The
influence of particularistic-oriented parties on coalition
Paper submitted 19 July 2012; accepted for publication 02 February
2013
Corresponding author:
Marisa Kellam, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University,
169-8050 Nishi Waseda, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
Email: [email protected]
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Party Politics
government in presidential systems cannot be understood
using the standard theoretical framework of presidential
coalition-building that structures politics in left–right terms
and focuses on public policy (Aleman and Tsebelis, 2011;
Amorim Neto, 2006; Cheibub et al., 2004; MartinezGallardo, 2012; Negretto, 2006).
This article explains how parties with particularistic orientations affect presidents’ governing strategies in multiparty
systems. I argue that particularistic parties provide presidents
with coalitional flexibility. Presidents face potentially high
policy costs if they make the compromises that would be
necessary to build and maintain majority support for each
item of their policy agendas. Since presidents often have
considerable control over highly valued resources, they
can increase their support in the legislature by distributing
government largesse. Political parties that will trade their
support for some item(s) on the presidential agenda in
exchange for targeted benefits under the control of presidents provide an alternative source of votes when other parties with stronger ideological commitments balk.
By putting their votes up for hire, particularistic-oriented
parties make for relatively cheap coalition partners for presidents in policy terms. When parties-for-hire are represented in the legislature, presidents are more likely to
decide that the benefits of a stable governing coalition are
not worth the costs of the policy compromises required to
maintain stability. Yet, hiring the support of particularistic
parties across the entire presidential agenda is unlikely to
be cost effective either. Presidents will, instead, govern
through shifting coalitions because it provides a cheaper
strategy for accomplishing their policy goals. Thus, coalitional instability may actually indicate that the legislative
arenas in some cases allow presidents to find the votes that
they need to pass legislation without making major concessions on the policy content of their reform agendas.
Latin America is a good place to study how particularistic interests in the legislature influence coalition-building
strategies of presidents. Minority presidents are common
in the region and Latin American presidents control extensive resources that legislators depend on for political survival. Latin America also provides considerable variation
within party systems, with some political parties that cultivate programmatic reputations and others that adhere
to particularistic orientations. I test implications of the
parties-for-hire argument through an empirical analysis
of both the majority status and duration of presidential
cabinets in 10 Latin American countries with considerable
democratic experience. My findings suggest that, all else
equal, minority presidents are less likely to form majority
cabinets when particularistic parties hold a larger share of
the legislative seats. My analysis also indicates that these
parties’ legislative representation reduces stability in the
party composition of presidential cabinets, after taking
into account majority status and other factors thought to
influence cabinet duration. In light of these findings, the
conclusion of the article returns to the governability
debate in Latin America.
Governability in presidential systems
Since presidents need majorities (and sometimes supermajorities) to pass their legislative agendas, minority government and coalitional instability have typically raised
concern about governability. The conventional wisdom
once predicted insurmountable conflict between minority
presidents and multiparty legislatures because scholars
assumed that presidentialism provides few incentives for
coalition-building. The standard argument was that fragile
coalitions in these presidential democracies would lead to,
at best, ineffective governments unable to address social and
economic problems and, at worst, democratic breakdown
(Linz, 1994; Mainwaring, 1993; Stepan and Skach, 1993).
Minority government
Recent work challenges this conventional wisdom by
demonstrating that under some circumstances minority presidents have strong policy incentives to form coalition governments, and that in other circumstances presidents may
succeed in passing their legislative agendas without forming majority cabinets.
If parties have policy positions close to the president’s, a
minority president should be able to govern adequately
through multiparty coalitions in the legislature (Cheibub
et al., 2004; Negretto, 2006). When the president’s party
is the median party, the situation will be equivalent to
single-party minority government in parliamentary systems
that operate with majority support from the legislature; in
other minority situations, the extent of executive–legislative conflict will depend on whether or not the president
can sustain a veto and the position of the status quo relative
to pivotal parties in the legislature. When large policy differences exist between the president and legislative parties,
the government may remain a minority in both the portfolio
and legislative arenas. According to these models of executive–legislative relations, the probability of presidents
governing with minority cabinets should thus have a nonlinear relationship with the policy distance between the
president and parties in the legislature. When policy distances are small, or when they are large, minority governments should be more common.
Constitutional powers that affect presidents’ abilities to
set the legislative agenda, including decree authorities and
vetos, also affect their incentives to form and maintain
majority coalitions (Aleman and Tsebelis, 2011; Amorim
Neto, 2006; Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997; Shugart and
Carey, 1992). When they possess substantial institutional
powers, presidents are less dependent on a majority coalition government with parties that will support their preferred policies.
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Kellam
3
When presidents control substantial material resources,
including discretionary funds and budget appropriations,
they have greater ability to entice cooperation in government (Amorim Neto and Santos, 2001; Mejı́a Acosta and
Polga-Hecimovich, 2011; Pereira and Mueller, 2004). At
the same time, majority governing coalitions may be less
valuable to presidents where parties cannot routinely
deliver the votes of their legislative contingents (Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997). Where electoral rules encourage
politicians to cultivate personal, as opposed to party, reputations and generate intra-party competition, individual
legislators are likely to press for resources to meet the pork
and patronage demands of local municipalities and/or constituent groups critical to their own re-election (Ames,
1995; Carey and Shugart, 1995). Presidents may negotiate
with individual legislators in these situations, funding their
pet projects in exchange for their individual votes. If parties
are less disciplined in personal vote electoral systems,
majority government may be less common in these systems. It is also possible that presidents respond to weak
or less disciplined parties by forming supermajorities.
Coalitional instability
The conventional wisdom has also been challenged by the
empirical record demonstrating that multipartism does not
always cause instability; some coalitions survive until the
end of the president’s term and some even last into the next
presidency. To account for variations in coalition stability
across presidential systems, recent research emphasizes the
relative institutional and political powers of the president
and the legislature. Presidential decree authority reduces the
incentive of presidents to engage in coalition-maintenance,
while strong, effective legislatures increase presidents’
incentives to compromise with their coalition partners
(Martinez-Gallardo, 2012). Recent research also explains
how pork expenditures can substitute for cabinet positions,
such that presidents’ use of discretionary spending influences coalitional stability over time (Mejı́a Acosta and
Polga-Hecimovich, 2011; Raile et al., 2011).
Attributes of the cabinet itself, such as majority status
and party composition, should affect the stability of presidential coalitions (Deheza, 1997; Martinez-Gallardo, 2012),
much like they affect cabinet duration in parliamentary
systems (Warwick, 1994). Internal policy conflict increases
when cabinets include more parties and are more ideologically polarized, raising the risk of cabinet collapse. In more
ideologically polarized legislatures as well, bargaining is
more complex and the incentives to renegotiate coalitions
increase (King et al., 1990; Laver and Schofield, 1990;
Martinez-Gallardo, 2012).
It also may be more difficult for presidents to broker stable coalition arrangements when electoral institutions make
deputies less beholden to party leaders and more beholden
to special interests in their district. As Mainwaring (1997:
80) sees it: ‘Party indiscipline is inimical to stable coalition
building.’ In her cross-national analysis, Martinez-Gallardo
(2012) finds that cabinets last longer in systems with electoral rules thought to produce greater party discipline. However, if the organization of legislatures empowers party
leadership to act as ‘brokers’ for the government resources
critical to legislators’ own re-election, then governing parties
should be able to ensure loyal voting on presidents’ legislative agendas most of the time, even where electoral rules
weaken parties’ influence over legislators’ careers (Figueiredo and Limongi, 2000; Lyne, 2008).
Finally, the stability of governing coalitions varies over
the course of the presidential term, and with changes in the
approval rating of the president and economic performance
(Altman, 2000; Mainwaring, 1993; Martinez-Gallardo,
2012; Mejı́a Acosta and Polga-Hecimovich, 2011; Raile
et al., 2011). Where incumbency tends to be a liability, presidents struggle to maintain a workable coalition as their
terms in office draw to a close.
Parties for hire: Another explanation for why
presidents govern with shifting coalitions
Coalition-building and governing strategies of minority presidents depend on the bargaining circumstances they face.
Previous research demonstrates that minority presidents,
under some circumstances, have incentives to build stable
majority coalitions. For presidents who lack such incentives,
however, the question remains why their coalitions change –
or why they change their coalitions. To account for coalition instability, I argue, we must consider the institutional
and material resources of presidents and the kinds of interests, both programmatic and particularistic, that gain representation in the legislature. In this section, I explain
how presidential resources and partisan interests in the legislature that cannot be ordered from left to right affect presidents’ proclivities to govern through shifting coalitions.
Presidents are always under pressure to govern adequately, improve economic conditions and maintain political stability; otherwise they may find themselves out of a
job (and out of the country) sooner than they expected
(Hochstetler, 2006). Presidents usually include macroeconomic policy in their agendas, and are often constrained
by other actors, such as international lenders and financial
institutions, in setting economic policy. Yet programmatic
parties in the legislature may not support the presidential
agenda. Presidents therefore face potentially high policy
costs if they make the compromises that may be required
to build and maintain a majority coalition across each piece
of legislation. Along with their institutional resources, presidents often possess material resources. Where presidents
control vast resources of government, parties that seek narrowly targeted benefits will compete for places in the presidential coalition, along with programmatic parties. These
particularistic-oriented parties can sometimes be cheaper
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4
Party Politics
coalition partners for presidents who prefer not to compromise their positions on key policies upon which their reputations depend.
While most of the literature on executive-legislative
relations in presidential systems treats parties as programmatic organizations and attributes particularistic goals to
individual legislators, I claim that the combination of strong
presidents who control the bulk of government resources
with regionalized and particularistic interest representation
alters the behaviour of some parties in the legislature and the
strategies of president-formateurs. Particularistic-oriented
parties of the past and present exploit a common niche: many
Latin American voters want jobs, other individual benefits
and local pork delivered to their towns or neighbourhoods;
ideological promises do not win their votes. Particularistic
party representation also occurs when specifically regional
and sometimes ‘off-dimensional’ interests dominate local
politics such that the political careers of politicians in
regional parties depend on their advocacy for narrowly targeted policies/benefits and are not tied to position-taking
on the national left–right policy dimension. In Latin America, the electoral connection means that regional and particularistic interests sometimes and in some places give rise
to parties that seek particularistic benefits from the government because that is what their supporters seek from them.
These particularistic-oriented parties cultivate reputations
as providers of patronage and pork and help legislators gain
access to influence and resources that can be channelled to
their supporters in the electorate. For example, in Ecuador’s fragmented legislature, party leaders are key intermediaries between the president and rank-and-file legislators:
When negotiating with the president, party leaders were
often interested in obtaining bulk entitlements (also known
as collective contracts) to sectors of the government or
‘asked for [control of] entire provinces’ in which they considered to have their strongholds. Leaders, in turn, used
these baskets of goodies to discipline and reward their party
members. (Majı́a Acosta, 2009: 123)
Particularistic parties put their votes up for hire in presidential coalition-bargaining.1 They are eager to reach a
compromise with the president in order to access patronage, pork and targeted benefits. The former Radical Party
in Chile is an example:
Only the successful alliances formed by the party, obviously because they provided easy access to governmental
jobs, kept it together and even led to a broadening of its
base. After 1932, the Radical party became the symbol of
patronage for public employees, and in political circles its
members were known as masters of opportunism and compromise. (Caviedes, 1979: 69)
Similarly, since re-democratization in Brazil, every
president has hired the support of the Party of the Brazilian
Democratic Movement (PMDB); in exchange, the PMDB
accomplishes its primary objective: ‘to fill as many posts in
federal agencies with its people and make sure it has a deciding role in how budgets are spent’ (Brazil Report 9/30/03).
Given budget constraints, the demands of particularistic
parties have consequences for macro-economic policymaking, but their specific demands target a particular group
or local area and tend to be less contentious to other actors.
Examples of benefits that particularistic-oriented parties in
the legislature seek from presidents include: radio transmitter licences for local communities; local ambulance service; rural electrification in a particular area; government
transfers to specific provinces or municipalities; recognition
of indigenous nationalities, languages of instruction in
schools, and forms of justice; natural resource protection in
the Amazon; management of state-run regional development
banks; ambassadorships and domestic political appointments; and government jobs for the party to distribute (e.g.
by controlling government ministries). As these examples
indicate, not all particularistic parties seek resources for
pork or patronage; some particularistic parties are
oriented toward particularistic policies. Although less
common in Latin America, single-issue parties, such as
green parties or indigenous parties, trade their support for
locally targeted or group-specific policy concessions that
run orthogonal to the primary macro-economic policy
dimension, which is most relevant to presidents and to
programmatic parties that do take Left–Right positions
regarding the redistribution of wealth. In other words,
by definition, all particularistic parties lie off the standard
left–right ideological dimension. These parties are willing
to support the policy proposals put forth by the president
without demanding major concessions in the content of
the legislation.
Presidents weigh the costs of policy compromise against
the costs of particularism. The attractiveness of this outside
option depends not only on the availability of parties-forhire, but also on what the president could achieve by bargaining strictly along the main policy dimension. The president can either move policy away from her ideal position
on, say, structural adjustment reform, or she can replace an
ideologically based coalition with a temporary alliance
based on an off-dimensional bargain. The president might,
for example, augment budgetary allocations for health
resources in a certain province represented by a strong provincial party, agree to weaker restrictions on traditional
coca growing in a region dominated by an indigenous
party, or distribute goods to areas controlled by a clientelistic party in exchange for the votes she needs to pass
national economic reform, rather than compromise the
reform in order to get the votes of legislators from more
programmatic parties. The presence of alternative policy
dimensions, to which different parties give varying degrees
of salience, widens the scope of policy change available to
a presidential agenda-setter (Londregan, 2000).
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Kellam
5
Particularistic parties themselves are unlikely to provide
a basis for a stable presidential coalition. First, hiring the
continual support of particularistic parties across the entire
presidential agenda is unlikely to be cost-effective, since
many of these parties would continue to demand a steady
stream of particularistic benefits. In the middle of Brazilian
President Lula’s first term, for example, PMDB governors
led one faction of the party out of Lula’s coalition and
would reconsider their support for the government only if
the finance ministry released about 2.5 billion dollars to
their states (Latinnews Daily 6/28/05). Facing these expensive hiring costs, President Lula instead reshuffled his cabinet to shore up support, bringing in the Progressive Party
(PP) and increasing the PMDB’s portfolios so as to keep the
other wing of the PMDB on board.
Second, when there are multiple political dimensions,
social choice theory suggests that an agenda-setter sometimes will achieve her ideal policies, or get closer to them,
by changing coalition partners from one issue to the next
(McKelvey, 1976). For instance, after Ecuadorian President Mahuad lost programmatic support from the rightwing Social Christian Party (PSC) for legislation critical
to securing an IMF loan, he turned to short-lived alliances,
first with the indigenous Pachakutik party and the Democratic Left (ID) to pass banking reform and later to the personalist/populist Ecuadorian Roldosista Party (PRE) to get
his budget approved; Ecuadorian presidents also at times
turn to individual legislators-for-hire (Mejı́a Acosta,
2009). Brazilian presidents govern with shifting coalitional
strategies as well: ‘an executive can compensate, at least in
the short term, for an ideologically narrower or less proportional cabinet through increased pork expenditures. Similarly, an executive can get by with expending less pork
when the cabinet is ideologically broader or the cabinet is
more proportional’ (Raile et al., 2011: 7 f.). A similar
dynamic was observed in the electoral and governing
coalition strategies employed by former Argentine President Menem, such that ‘the coalitions that guarantee the
political survival of a governing party may not be the
same coalitions that are direct protagonists in its economic
policy-making process’ (Gibson and Calvo, 2000: 33).
To summarize, where a high demand for particularistic
benefits creates legislative parties for hire – as in several
Latin American countries – presidents can govern with
shifting coalitions and it is likely that it will be in their
interests to do so.
Testable implications of the parties-for-hire
argument
The theoretical mechanism I describe above links the representation of particularistic parties to presidents’ coalitional strategies. I argue that these ‘parties-for-hire’ give
presidents greater flexibility in finding coalition partners
to support their legislative agendas.
Minority government is one implication of such flexibility. If parties seek pork in exchange for their votes, with no
regard for programmatic agreement, then presidents could
govern with minority cabinets and pass their policy agendas with ad hoc legislative majorities. Presidents could also
allocate government jobs outside of government ministries,
such as positions on the boards of state-owned businesses,
to hire legislative support as needed (Diermeier and Merlo,
2000). Where more seats are held by parties that will hire
out their support for these types of particularistic benefits,
presidents’ legislative coalitions will be more likely to
change between one vote and the next. Under these circumstances, shifting legislative coalitions will not necessarily
translate into shifting cabinet coalitions. But, legislative voting coalitions are not observable in my dataset and, in general, evidence based on roll-call votes is difficult to compare
cross-nationally. However, minority cabinets should be
more common where this type of legislative strategy is
available to presidents, and we can observe the majority/
minority status of cabinets. Thus, one testable hypothesis
of the parties-for-hire argument is that all else equal, the
greater the legislative representation of particularistic
parties, the lower the probability of majority cabinets in
presidential systems.
Coalitional flexibility may also appear in more frequent
cabinet changes. Commitment problems could arise if presidents promise to reward political parties with perks and
other government resources that require the involvement
of a cabinet minister who is not a co-partisan. While some
particularistic parties may be satisfied with the transfer of
resources that are under the president’s control, other particularistic parties may demand cabinet portfolios with large
budgets to ensure that the disbursement of perks is under
their control. If so, competition among parties should
increase cabinet flux as parties jockey for places in the cabinet and presidents seek the cheapest coalition partners
across different votes on their agendas. But even without
joining the government, particularistic parties may influence cabinet stability. By giving a president an outside
option for the votes she needs to pass particular legislation,
the presence of these parties strengthens a president’s bargaining position vis-à-vis her coalition partners. In these
situations, a president can demand legislative outcomes
closer to her own ideal policy positions. If a president
demands more than her coalition partners are willing to
concede on that issue, the coalition is likely to break down
and the president can instead hire the votes of particularistic parties. If presidents dismiss cabinet ministers when
their parties refuse their support or if parties resign as a
result of programmatic disagreements, we will see more
cabinet change in these situations. If we define presidential
cabinets by their partisan composition, then the parties-forhire argument outlined above implies that, all else equal,
the greater the legislative representation of particularistic
parties, the shorter the tenure of presidential cabinets.
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Party Politics
Table 1. Particularistic parties in Latin American legislatures.
% Seats
Country
Argentina
Bolivia
Brazil I
Brazil II
Chile I
Chile II
Colombia
Costa Rica
Ecuador
Peru
Uruguay
Venezuela
TOTAL
Years
1983–2003
1982–2005
1946–1964
1986–2002
1933–1973
1990–2000
1978–2002
1953–2002
1979–2005
1980–1992
1985–2005
1959–2000
Mean
St. Dev.
5.75
15.53
5.80
19.00
25.33
1.97
3.94
20.62
27.49
8.37
0.00
10.83
14.49
1.92
13.54
3.48
15.54
10.97
1.32
3.83
17.14
12.13
11.12
0.00
10.99
13.82
Empirical analysis
I test empirical implications of the ‘parties-for-hire’ argument with presidential cabinet data from 10 Latin American
counties.2 In the first analysis, I predict the probability of
majority governments. In the second, I model the duration
of presidential cabinets. Both are pooled analyses across
countries, in which the unit of observation is the cabinet.
I define new cabinets as a change in party composition or
a change in the president.
I examine cabinets from the beginning of the current
democratic period in each country through the most recent
completed presidential term as of 31 December 2005. I also
examine earlier periods of democracy in Brazil and Chile.3
I exclude cabinets that served during presidential terms that
lasted less than one year and cabinets that lasted less than
one month. I restrict my analysis to cabinets formed by
minority presidents only, resulting in 136 cabinets across
62 presidencies.
Coding particularistic parties
The primary explanatory variable in both analyses is the
Seat Share of Particularistic Parties in the legislature.
Although most – if not all – Latin American parties seek
patronage, pork or other office benefits, this does not mean
that they are particularistic parties, as I use the term here. In
classifying parties, I treat particularistic parties as a residual category. In other words, I classify particularistic parties by identifying those parties that are not programmatic.
A party does not have a particularistic orientation if it
takes a position along the standard left–right policy dimension. This standard left–right classification refers to parties’
positions regarding the redistribution of wealth and the
interests of social classes which parties represent. Even if
personalism, populism or clientelism make their ideological purity questionable, Coppedge (1997) asserts that most
parties are roughly classifiable as Left, Center-Left, Center,
Center-Right or Right.
Yet, some political parties are not classifiable in left–
right terms, even by country experts. Some political parties
promote a single issue or the interests of a particular region
or social group. They are parties which represent voters that
care most, or exclusively, about regional or group benefits
that are not relevant to other voters. The careers of politicians in these parties, consequently, are not tied to government performance on left–right public policy-making.
(Political parties can, of course, be ideologically oriented
and still reflect different responses across regions or social
groups to national policy debates, and thus can clearly
be placed on the left or the right.) While these kinds of
political parties are not programmatic in standard macroeconomic policy terms, this does not mean that they are
opportunistic or unprincipled. These parties take positions
along orthogonal dimensions, but not along the primary
policy dimension relevant to the presidential agenda. Thus,
in terms of the presidential agenda, the principle or interest that they represent can be seen as particularistic. Also,
classifying a party as particularistic is not the same thing
as classifying a party as clientelist. Parties can serve special interests and provide particularistic goods in a nonclientelist manner (Kitschelt, 2000: 850).
Other political parties cultivate reputations solely as
providers of particularistic benefits, instead of advancing
policy platforms or ideological reputations. They represent
voters who want jobs and benefits delivered to their neighbourhoods or villages. The delivery of individual benefits
(from t-shirts to jobs) and local pork (like roads or bilingual
education) can be thought of as an orthogonal policy
dimension in Latin America. For some parties, this is the
dimension of politics that matters most. Some particularistic political parties are electoral vehicles that offer vague
principles or inconsistent platforms, but they cannot plausibly be classified in left–right terms. What ties members of
these parties together is simply an interest in getting into
government to access particularistic benefits. Often these
kinds of parties have reputations of pragmatism or political
opportunism.
To identify parties’ positions, and those parties that
cannot be classified in left–right terms, I primarily used
Coppedge’s (1997) classification of Latin American
parties and Pop-Eleches’s (2009) updates to these data.4
Table 1 gives averages by country for the percentage of
seats won by particularistic-oriented parties in the lower
chamber.
Majority government
The latent dependent variable of interest in testing the first
implication of my argument is the underlying propensity
of minority presidents to form majority cabinets. The
observed dependent variable codes whether the combined
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Kellam
7
Table 2. Analysis of majority cabinets under minority presidents.
Probit coefficient
(Robust Std. Err.)
Effective no. of parties
Left–right distance
Left–right distance squared
Particularistic parties (% seats)
Personal vote electoral system
Part. parties personal vote
Veto powers
Decree powers
Constant
Observations (cabinets)
Log pseudo-likelihood
0.30**
(0.12)
0.94
(1.03)
–9.53***
(2.51)
–0.04***
(0.01)
0.87
(0.61)
0.03**
(0.02)
–0.01
(0.06)
–0.25
(0.16)
–0.33
(0.77)
136
–62.13
*Significant at 10%, **significant at 5%, ***significant at 1%.
legislative contingents of parties with ministerial appointments constitute a majority (1) in the lower chamber or
not (0). When I examine presidential parties and cabinets
across the 10 countries, I find that minority and majority
governments are both common under minority presidents.
Of the 75 percent who were minority presidents, 27 percent
maintained majority cabinets throughout their terms. An
additional 21 percent governed with majority cabinets during some portion of their administration, while 52 percent
of these minority presidents consistently had minority
governments.
Using a probit model, I predict the probability of majority governments based on the Seat Share of Particularistic
Parties and other variables discussed in the literature
review above.5 I include the Left–Right Distance (and Distance Squared) between the position of the president’s
party and the mean position in the legislature, and the
Effective Number of Parties in the legislature. I also control
for the Veto Powers and Decree Powers held by the president. Additionally, I include a dummy variable indicating
Personal Vote electoral systems, which I interact with the
seat-share held by particularistic parties. The interaction
allows for the possibility that particularistic parties have
different or smaller effects under electoral rules that tend
to produce less disciplined parties.
As presented in Table 2, the percent of seats held by particularistic parties has a significant negative effect on the
probability of majority cabinets under minority presidents.6
The interaction with the personal vote electoral system is
also significant, but in an opposing direction. These results
suggest that particularistic party representation influences
majority cabinet formation only in non-personal vote systems. In non-personal vote systems, when all other variables
are held at their means, an increase in the legislative representation of particularistic parties from 6 percent (1 standard
deviation below the mean) to 21 percent (the mean) reduces
the predicted probability of a majority cabinet by 22 percent
(with a 95 percent confidence interval of –36 to –1). The left
panel of Figure 1 shows how the probability of majority
cabinets declines with increases in the share of seats held
by particularistic parties in partisan (as opposed to personal)
vote systems for mean levels of all other covariates.
The distance between the Left–Right position of the
president (operationalized by the position of her party) and
the mean Left–Right position in the legislature, also affects
the probability of majority cabinets under minority presidents. Consistent with the literature on coalition strategies
of minority presidents, I find that majority cabinets are
less likely when there are either small or large policy distances between the president’s party and the mean position in the legislature. The right panel of Figure 1 shows
how increases in the absolute value of this Left–Right distance affect the probability of majority cabinets when all
other covariates are held at their means.
The results show that greater party fragmentation in the
legislature increases the probability of majority cabinets.
Given mean levels on all other variables, an increase of 2
effective parties in the legislature (about 1 standard deviation) from 3 to the mean of 5 increases the probability of
majority government by about 12 percent (with a 95 percent confidence interval of 4 to 19). Other control variables
do not have statistical significant effects.
Cabinet duration
In testing the second implication of my argument, I analyse
the duration of presidential cabinets cross-nationally under
different legislative circumstances using event history analysis. Changes in the party composition of the cabinet or the
end of the presidential term (as a result of elections, resignation, impeachment or death) define the end of one cabinet and the beginning of another. However, given the fixed
terms in office (that vary by country and time), it does not
make sense to treat the change in the president brought
about by an exogenous election or other event in the same
way as an endogenous change in party composition of the
cabinet during the president’s term. When a cabinet ends
because the presidential term ends, I consider the cabinet
as ‘censored’. Had the president’s term continued, it is possible that the cabinet would have lasted for a longer period
than we actually observe. On the other hand, when a president alters the party composition of her cabinet during the
course of her term, I consider the cabinet under the previous
party composition to have ‘failed’. Of the 136 cabinets that
were formed by minority presidents in my dataset, 75
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8
Party Politics
1
1
Personal Vote Systems
.9
.9
Probability of Majority Cabinet
Probabiliy of Majority Cabinet
.8
.7
.6
.5
.4
.3
.8
.7
.6
.5
.4
.3
.2
.2
.1
.1
Partisan Vote Systems
0
0
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
0
50
.1
.2
.3
.4
.5
.6
.7
.8
.9
1
Absolute Distance between Presidential Party
and Mean Left−Right Position of the Legislature
Particularistic Parties (% Seats)
Figure 1. The probability of majority cabinets under minority presidents.
Table 3. Cabinet change under minority presidents in Latin America.
Non-censored cabinets
Country
Argentina
Bolivia
Brazil I
Brazil II
Chile I
Chile II
Colombia
Costa Rica
Ecuador
Peru
Uruguay
Venezuela
TOTAL
Years
Pres term
(years)
1983–2003
1980–2005
1945–1964
1986–2002
1932–1973
1990–2000
1978–2002
1953–2002
1979–2005
1980–1992
1985–2005
1959–2000
6/4
4/5
5
5/4
6
6/4
4
4
5/4
5
5
5
Avg.
duration
(months)
Included
part. party
(fraction)
Avg.
duration
(months)
Add or drop
prog. party
(fraction)
Add or drop
part. party
(fraction)
30.9
18.5
13.2
18.5
11.3
60.0
36.0
48.0
15.3
20.0
40.0
21.7
20.2
0
0.36
0.42
0.91
0.63
0
0
0.14
0.37
1
0
0.25
0.42
11.5
7.4
9.7
15.8
11.7
1
0.71
0.43
0.83
0.73
0
0.29
0.86
0.33
0.50
23.0
1
0
8.8
0.70
0.30
41.0
11.6
11.9
1
0.89
0.75
0
0.22
0.40
*Non-censored cabinets are those that change before the president leaves office. All cabinets in Chile II, Costa Rica and Peru survived until the end of the
president terms.
‘failed’ and 67 were ‘censored’. Table 3 lists average cabinet duration for each country-period, along with the fraction of cabinets that included a particularistic party. The
table also indicates whether cabinet ‘failures’ resulted from
adding or dropping programmatic and/or particularistic
parties.
I estimate a Cox proportional hazards model. I model
the hazard rate of cabinets as a function of the Seat Share
of Particularistic Parties and several other covariates that
capture the bargaining environment faced by presidents,
as discussed in the literature review above. Again, I control
for the effect of the Personal Vote electoral systems, and its
interactive effect with particularistic party representation.
In this model, I control for the Majority Status of the cabinet. I also include Ideological Polarization and the Effective Number of Parties in both the legislature and the
cabinet. I again take into account Veto Powers and Decree
Powers. In addition, I control for Economic Growth and a
linear spline function that measures the Months Until the
Term Ends, with yearly subintervals. Many of these factors
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Kellam
9
Table 4. Analysis of cabinet duration under minority presidents.
Hazard ratio
(Std. Err.)
Majority cabinet
Majority cabinet ln(time)
Cabinet ideological polarization
0.37
(0.33)
1.34
(0.51)
1.02*
(0.01)
Effective no. of parties in cabinet
Ideological polarization
Effective no. of parties
Particularistic parties (% seats)
Personal vote electoral system
Part. parties personal vote
Veto powers
Decree powers
Economic growth
Months until term ends: Spline 1
Splines 2–6 also included
Log likelihood
Observations (months)
Subjects (cabinets)
1.05***
(0.02)
1.07
(0.11)
1.04**
(0.02)
2.53
(2.10)
0.95**
(0.03)
0.89
(0.08)
0.84
(0.14)
0.95
(0.04)
1.34**
(0.17)
–309.74
2701
136
0.33
(0.31)
1.36
(0.52)
1.62**
(0.32)
1.06***
(0.02)
1.00
(0.11)
1.05***
(0.02)
3.72
(3.35)
0.93**
(0.03)
0.87*
(0.07)
0.74*
(0.13)
0.94
(0.04)
1.33**
(0.17)
–308.98
2701
136
*Significant at 10%, **significant at 5%, ***significant at 1%.
depend on institutional arrangements that remain constant
over the life of a government. However, mid-term and
non-concurrent legislative elections in some countries alter
the bargaining context of governments while in office.
Party-switching by individual legislators can affect attributes of the cabinet prior to an intervening election if deputies switch in or out of parties in the cabinet once it has
formed.7 Other external factors also change over the course
of the presidential term. Such ‘time-varying covariates’ are
easily incorporated into the duration model.
The critical assumption of the Cox proportional hazard
model is precisely that the hazard ratios are proportional
over time (Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn, 2001). Tests for
non-proportionality indicate deviation from this assumption for the majority cabinet indicator; this variable makes
less of a difference for the cabinet’s chances of survival the
longer that a cabinet is in office. Thus, I follow common
procedure and include an interaction between the nonproportional variable and the natural log of duration time.8
The results in Table 4 are reported as hazard ratios. They
show that the legislative presence of particularistic parties
is destabilizing for cabinets, and that this effect is conditional on the type of electoral system. In non-personal vote
systems, the model indicates that the effect of a 1 percent
increase in the share of seats held by these parties is a 4 percent increase in the odds of cabinet change. If particularistic parties hold 10 percent of the seats in such systems, the
party composition of a cabinet is about 1.5 times more
likely to change in any given month than a cabinet of the
same duration in a system where such parties are not represented.9 Cabinets may not be particularly long-lived on
average in personal vote systems; the results simply indicate that in these systems particularistic party representation does not make much of a difference.
Additionally, the results show that ideological polarization in the legislature has a destabilizing effect on presidential cabinets. A 10-point increase in ideological polarization
is associated with a 60 percent increase in the odds of cabinet change. Greater ideological polarization within the
cabinet itself is also destabilizing. A 20-point increase in
the index (representing just over 1 standard deviation)
would make cabinet change almost two times more likely.
When I include the effective number of parties in the cabinet in place of ideological polarization in the cabinet, I find
that the addition of one effective party to the cabinet leads
to a 62 percent increase in the odds of cabinet change. Note
that cabinet ideological polarization is correlated with the
effective number of parties in the cabinet (0.75); neither
coefficient is significant when included together.
Consistent with previous research, I find that presidents
with greater decree and veto powers tend to have more stable cabinets. According to the model estimates, even weak
decree power (a score of 1 on the index) reduces the odds of
cabinet change by 26 percent, as compared to systems that
do not give presidents any decree power. The strongest
level of decree authority (a score of 4) would reduce the
odds by 70 percent. A 3-point (1 standard deviation) increase
in the presidential veto powers index reduces the odds of
cabinet change by 34 percent. The analysis also suggests
that presidential coalitions are more likely to change as the
end of the presidential term approaches. Presumably, parties weigh electoral concerns more heavily during the final
year in office and begin thinking about their chances of
securing a place in the future administration. The first
spline indicates that cabinets are less stable during the final
12 months of the presidential term. However, a joint test
indicates that we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no
effect for all the splines.
Conclusion
This article explains how parties with particularistic orientations influence coalitional politics in presidential systems. These parties put their blocs of votes up for hire on
presidents’ initiatives in exchange for the pork, patronage
and/or approval of local-oriented policies requested by
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10
Party Politics
their constituents. This makes them relatively cheap coalition partners in policy terms when presidents face programmatic disagreements with other parties. The result
of particularistic party representation in the legislature is
greater flexibility in presidents’ choices of coalition partners and their governing strategies. The parties-for-hire
argument identifies conditions that increase the likelihood
that minority presidents will govern without forming
majority cabinets and that shorten the lifespan of presidential cabinets.
While the empirical evidence indicates that the presence
of particularistic parties encourages minority government
in presidential systems, the theoretical mechanism I offer
to link such parties to this outcome does not imply legislative immobilism or democratic breakdown. Particularistic
parties may allow presidents to build majorities in the legislature without corresponding majority governments. If so,
minority government should appear neither abnormal nor
necessarily problematic in Latin America once we take into
account the types of interests represented within these
countries’ party systems.
Likewise, by re-characterizing coalition instability as
flexibility, we challenge the conclusion that presidential
systems face a trade-off between governability and representation (Cheibub, 2002: 305 f.). Perhaps more easily than
prime ministers, presidents are free to form and change
government coalitions. As Faundez (1997: 307) argues in
the case of Chile’s previous democratic period:
These coalitions were often short-lived, but – contrary to
Linz and Valenzuela’s model of presidentialism – the president of the day always managed to form another coalition
to replace the old one. The winner-takes-all factor does not
seem to have affected the capacity of political parties to
make the system work in a flexible and fairly efficient
manner.
I argue that it is particularistic party representation that generates such flexibility in presidential coalition dynamics.
Latin Americanists have long recognized that party systems in some countries are more inclined to articulate particularistic interests than they are to aggregate interests into
broader ideologies, and that legislative majorities often arise
out of opportunism and pragmatism, rather than organizing
around policy programmes. To be sure, shared ideologies
and policy accords do generate legislative cooperation in
Latin America (Morgenstern, 2004). But minority presidents also rule successfully by cobbling together one agreement after another based on single, transient issues or
regional log-rolls with various parochial and particularistic
interests (McDonald, 1971; Shugart and Carey, 1992). It is
not that presidents face either a ‘workable’ legislature or a
‘parochial/venal’ legislature, as Cox and Morgenstern
(2001) have suggested, but rather that Latin American presidents often face a multiplicity of interests represented by
different parties. Where some partisan interests focus on
policy and others on parochial payoffs, coalitional presidentialism is workable. Consistent with the parties-forhire argument presented in this article, the combination
of particularistic party representation and presidentialism
can lead to coherent policy-making in which coalitional
flexibility prevails over immobilism.
Acknowledegements
A much earlier version of this paper won the ‘Best Student Paper’
award from the Latin American Political Institutions Section of
the Latin American Studies Association. For assistance and comments at various stages of this research project, I thank Barbara
Geddes, Jeff Lewis, Mike Thies, Liz Stein, Cesar Zucco, Mar
Martı́nez Rosón, Manuel Alcántara, Thiago Mattos, Acir
Almeida, Octavio Amorim Neto, Andrés Mejı́a Acosta, Tom
Mustillo, Jorge Domı́nguez, Gabriel Negretto, Maria EscobarLemmon, Misha Taylor-Robinson and Kim Yi Dionne. For helpful feedback, I also thank participants of the Regional Latin Americanist Conference at Texas A&M University, the Latin
Americanist Workshop of the Department of Political Science
at the University of Houston, and the Comparative Politics seminar at the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda
University and anonymous reviewers. I am grateful that Michael
Coppedge makes his party classifications publicly available and I
thank Acir Almeida and Grigore Pop Eleches for kindly sharing
data with me.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency
in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Note the distinction from Brazil scholars’ term ‘parties for rent’
(Desposato, 2006). Brazilianists refer to party-switching by individual candidates who ‘rent’ parties from which they can best
pursue their own political ambitions. I refer to parties that are
‘hired’ by president to support their legislative agenda.
2. I gratefully use Acir Almeida’s (2003) cabinet dataset for Latin
America, which I augment with information from Keesing’s
Record of World Events, the Latin American Weekly Report
and Barbara Geddes’s (1994) data on Latin American cabinets.
I used Figueiredo (2007) for Brazilian cabinets and Burbano de
Lara and Garcı́a (1998) for Ecuadorian cabinets.
3. I do not include Peruvian cabinets following Fujimori’s autogolpe. I do not examine Uruguay’s earlier democratic period
under a collective executive.
4. I provide further details on the party classifications, sources used
and supplementary analyses of party subtypes in the appendix.
5. See appendix for variable operationalization.
6. I also considered a probit model with random effects for
country-periods to account for any unobserved factors that
would make majority cabinets more or less likely in any particular country. The results from the random-effects probit model
are similar to those presented in Table 2. A likelihood ratio test
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Kellam
11
fails to reject the null hypothesis that the proportion of the total
variance contributed by the country variance component is zero.
7. I take party-switching into account whenever possible in measuring the size of the president’s party, cabinet majority status,
the effective number of parties in the cabinet and the ideological polarization of the cabinet. In studying the effects of the
legislative arena, on the other hand, I consider the seat-share
of particularistic parties, party fragmentation and ideological
polarization at the time of the legislative election.
8. I tested for omitted interaction effects (Keele, 2010); a Wald
test did not support the inclusion of an interaction between the
offending covariate and the seat-share of Particularistic Parties. I also estimated a parametric Weibull survival model that
does not assume proportional hazards. The shape parameter is
significantly different from 1, indicating rising hazards. This is
consistent with the estimated baseline hazard from the Cox
model. The estimated hazard ratio associated with the percentage of seats held by particularistic parties is the same as the
Cox estimate.
9. I have examined the robustness of my finding to country
effects. When I exclude each country and re-run the model, I
consistently find a destabilizing effect of particularistic parties.
The estimated hazard ratio remains greater than 1 but is not
significant only when Chile is excluded, which reduces the
number of observations considerably. I have also considered
an alternative model specification that takes the presidentlegislative term as the unit of observation, rather than each
presidential cabinet. I estimate a negative binomial regression
of the count of the total number of cabinet changes during the
term, using random effects to allow the dispersion to vary for
unidentified country/period-specific reasons. The estimated
incidence rate ratio for the percentage of seats held by particularistic parties is 1.06 and statistically significant, indicating
that their legislative representation is associated with an
increase in the total number of cabinet changes that occur during the president’s term in office.
Online appendix
Parties for hire: How particularistic parties influence
presidents’ governing strategies
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Author biography
Dr. Marisa Kellam is Associate Professor at Waseda University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Best described as comparative
presidentialism, her research focuses on the interaction of political
representation and political institutions to understand how multiparty presidential systems are governed. She is also engaged in
research that explores how political parties and the media jointly
influence presidential accountability and policy performance in
Latin America’s presidential democracies. Her work is published
or forthcoming in Electoral Studies, Political Communication,
and Latin American Politics & Society.
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