Cross-Avenue Politics: The Case of Colombia and Brazil
My objective with this dissertation was to show that the concept of cross-avenue politics is useful to understand the real balance of power between branches in presidential systems. While most studies look at the statutory avenue in isolation, the three papers in this dissertation are an attempt to show the significant effect of the interrelation of the different avenues available over the policy-making process. I have focused in particular on how weakening executive decree power affects statutory politics; and on how entrenching more policy in the constitution affects statutory (and decree) politics in Brazil and Colombia.
My results suggest that these reactive assemblies are more powerful when looking at cross avenue politics, even in presidential systems which have usually been considered to have the most dominant presidents of the region. Further research is required to analyze how these interrelation plays with other mechanisms such as referendums, and how does this influence translate into policy outcomes.
Limiting Presidential Decree Power: The Effect of the Constitutional Reform 32/2001 in Brazil
Abstract
Most presidents in Latin America are recognized for being proactive legislator and for having a variety of avenues to implement their policies. In the literature, the decree power is considered as one of the most effective instruments to act unilaterally establishing a new status quo. However, is all decree power equal? Recent literature has suggested that changes in their procedure make a significant difference for the executive’s capacity to avoid legislative assertion. Taking advantage of the constitutional reform No. 32 enacted in Brazil in 2001, this paper contributes to this debate by showing how the change to explicit approval of decrees made a significant difference impeding the president from avoiding negotiations in the floor. By analyzing the House legislative agenda from 1999 – 2005, I show how the reform made a substantial increase in the percentage of executive agenda items, and a dramatic shift in the type of legislation being discussed in Congress. While decrees were rarely considered in the floor previous to the reform, in the post-reform period they accounted for about 65% of the agenda items. Consequently, circumventing the floor this is no longer a possibility. The description of negotiations of the minimum wage from 1995 – 2004 is used as an example to show how the requirement for a vote had also a substantial effect, making the policy outcome closer to the preferences of the majority of legislators.
Presidential Dominance sans Formal Power? Amending the Constitution in Brazil
Most presidents in Latin America are recognized for having great constitutional powers which allow them to control the legislative agenda. In contrast, whenever they use constitutional amendments, presidents no longer have veto power, and also need to have the support of a supermajority of the assembly to get proposals enacted. Despite having weak powers, presidents make frequent use of constitutional amendments and succeed. Furthermore, they not only modify but systematically add clauses to the constitution. Why would presidents use constitutional amendments if using them puts them at a procedural disadvantage relative to using states or decrees? Using data from Brazil (1991 – 2004), I show that presidents use constitutional amendments because they must to enact some of their key policy proposals, and they add clauses to the Constitution as a means to strike deals with legislators to overcome their procedural disadvantages. Analyzing the legislative output in constitutional amendments, I show how by introducing legislation, amending and delaying executive proposals, legislators take full advantage of their institutional powers. Thus, the frequent use of constitutional amendments to enact policy in the case of Brazil provides legislators with important powers vis-à-vis the executive, not usually considered when looking only at the policy-making process on ordinary legislation.
Electoral Incentives versus Presidential Powers: The Effect of the Constitutional Reform of 1991 on the Plenary Agenda in Colombia
Shugart (1998) illustrated the existence of a negative correlation between the constitutional and partisan powers of the president, and suggested that executive constitutional power was endogenous to the legislature’s electoral incentives. But what happens when the constitutional powers of the president change while the electoral incentives remain the same? Analyzing the effect of the 1991 Colombian reform – which heavily decreased presidential powers but did not change its personalistic electoral system– the objective of this paper is to test the opposite causal relationship and see whether the reduction in the president’s ability to use decree power transformed the parochial Colombian legislature into a more pro-active and workable one, despite the lack of changes in the electoral system. Analyzing the composition of the agenda from 1979 to 1998, the results show that the limitation of decree power had an initial effect in legislators’ incentives, changing the proportion of agenda items dedicated to national policy from an average of 57% of nationally-oriented bills to 73% in the post-reform period. Nonetheless, from the analysis of the two presidential periods after the reform, it would seem that the initial push for a more national agenda decreased over time, due to the increasing fragmentation and lack of incentives to work programmatically in the electoral arena.