Congressional Proceedings and the Proposer's Advantage,
Co-authored with Professor Eduardo Alemán, forthcoming in Política y Gobierno, Vol XV, núm. 1, primer semestre de 2008.
Abstract
In this paper we examine how congressional rules, committee appointments, and presidential prerogatives interact to affect decision-making inside Colombian and Chilean conference committees. We show that conferees are afforded important discretion to affect policymaking. Although conference committees lack negative agenda-setting power (i.e.,gatekeeping power), they enjoy significant positive power to shape legislative outcomes. This allows strategic conference committees to make policy gains even in the in the face of powerful presidents. The final stage of the lawmaking process reveals quite a lot about the consequences of delegation inside legislatures as well as the balance of power between both branches of government. Our analysis also shows how the selection of conferees gives chamber authorities the power to influence committee proposals and, more surprisingly in Colombia, the power to bias committee composition to favor a particular chamber.
Political Institutions and Policy Outcomes in Colombia: The effects of the 1991 Constitution (2008),
Co-authored with Mauricio Cardenas and Roberto Junguito, in Policymaking In Latin America: How Politics Shape Policies.
Check out the website!
About the book: What determines the capacity of countries to design, approve, and implement effective public policies? To address this issue, this book builds on the results of a comparative study of political institutions, policymaking processes, and policy outcomes in eight Latin American countries. The volume benefits from both micro detail on the intricacies of policymaking in individual countries and a broad cross-country interdisciplinary analysis of the process in the region.
The country studies demonstrate a deep knowledge of the specific historical dynamics and idiosyncratic structural factors at play in each case, while focusing on the effects of political institutions as viewed through a common analytical lens founded in game theory and institutional analysis. This book should become a staple on the syllabus of any class on Latin American politics or institutional politics and important background reading in many classes on development economics.
"Sistema Democrático" en República de Colombia, Evaluación de la Gobernabilidad Democrática (2007),
In Serie de Estudios Económicos y Sectoriales, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, RE3-07-007.
How parties create electoral democracy, chapter 2,
With Royce Carroll and Professor Gary Cox, in Legislative Studies Quarterly 2006
Abstract
Parties neither cease to exist nor cease to compete for office when the general election is over. Instead, a new round of competition begins, with legislators as voters and party leaders as candidates. The offices at stake are what we call “mega-seats.” We consider the selection of three different types of mega-seats—cabinet portfolios, seats on directing boards, and permanent committee chairs—in 57 democratic assemblies. If winning parties select the rules by which mega-seats are chosen and those rules affect which parties can attain mega-seats (one important payoff of “winning”), then parties and rules should coevolve in the long run. We find two main patterns relating to legislative party systems and a country’s length of experience with democratic governance
A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 2-5, 2004. It has been pusblished in LSQ.
LINK TO LSQ, Legislative Studies Quarterly XXXI: 153-74
Challenges in Ensuring Democratic Survival, an Overview (2006)
From Fortalezas de Colombia (Fernando Cepeda, Editor)
This book chapter is an attempt to unite all the various dimensions which compose the democratic system to offer an overview of the performance and challenges that exist for Colombian democratic institutions today.
Congress and Political Parties in Colombia (2004, 2006)
From Fortalezas de Colombia (Fernando Cepeda, Editor)
This essay purports to link the study of Colombian parties in Congress to an agenda of comparative politics, so as to compare the Colombian case with those of other countries, and with its own path, from a historical perspective. There are several reasons why this is beneficial for the Colombian case. First, the observation of parties in an isolated manner has led to an extremely negative and chaotic picture, in which there do not exist regularities, patterns that may be identified and compared in order to assess “how badly or how well” we are doing. Colombia is not the only system in the world with clientelism, corruption or fragile party organizations. Observing the experiences of other countries with similar features enables us to elaborate hypothesis that may be helpful to understand our own political process. Second, because –at is has been pointed out more recently-, assessments of the Colombian case that lack historical perspective have nourished myths which are not yet the object of investigation nor of empirical validation.
You can have access to the Spanish version of the paper here.
Political Institutions and Policy Outcomes in Colombia: The effects of the 1991 Constitution (2005),
Co-authored with Mauricio Cardenas and Roberto Junguito,
in Coyuntura Económica, First Semester 2006, Vol. XVI, No. 1, pp. 61- 114
Abstract :
The purpose of this paper is to understand how changes in the political institutions established in the 1991 Constitution affected policy formulation and policy outcomes for the case of Colombia. According to our analysis, the central implication of the reform is that the president lost significant capacity as an agenda setter. In contrast, Congress, the Constitutional Court, and the board of the central bank have gained relative power. As a consequence, political transaction costs for the executive increased in several policy areas: macro-economic policy and fiscal policy. To illustrate the generalized decline in the president’s legislative success, we constructed an original database covering the period previous and after the reform, with a sample of four legislative years before the reform, and all bills introduced in the House of Representatives after 1992.