When do coalitions form under presidentialism, and why does it matter? A configurational analysis from Latin America
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395720950134 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Author | Adrián Albala |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720950134
Politics
2021, Vol. 41(3) 351 –370
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0263395720950134
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
When do coalitions form
under presidentialism,
and why does it matter?
A configurational analysis
from Latin America
Adrián Albala
Universidade de Brasíla, Brazil
Abstract
This article proposes a new approach to the study of coalition formation in presidential regimes.
Drawing on a dataset covering 33 Latin American governments, the article shows that coalition
cabinets are, mostly, the product of pre-electoral agreements. I present a six-stage timing of
coalition agreements, including four degrees of earliness. Then, I challenge this consideration with
the most common – institutional – arguments from the literature about the survival of coalitions in
presidential regimes. The findings are quite interesting since they point out that earlier agreements
are relevant conditions for enduring coalitions. Moreover, and surprisingly, I show that the
institutional argument seems to have been overrated by the literature.
Keywords
coalition cabinets, electoral coalitions, Latin America, presidentialism, QCA
Received: 29th March 2019; Revised version received: 19th July 2020; Accepted: 23rd July 2020
In recent years, there has been a marked increase – both in terms of quality and diversity
of topics – in political science work dealing with coalition cabinets in presidential regimes.
This extensive literature has significantly improved our understanding of how and why
coalition cabinets form in multiparty presidential regimes. While most of these studies
have dealt with explaining the duration or survival of coalition agreements, using survival
analysis, very few have focused on the timing of coalition cabinets’ formation. This issue
is significant, however, because presidential systems make election results highly visible
and predictable.
When explaining the phenomenon of coalition cabinets, the most common observa-
tion made is that they happen ‘when the president’s party does not hold a majority of
seats i n the legislature and thus has to cross party lines to search support to implement
the government’s agenda’ (Martínez-Gallardo, 2012: 64). This statement assumes that
Corresponding author:
Adrián Albala, Instituto de Ciência Política – IPOL, Universidade de Brasíla, Brasilia 70910-900, Brazil.
Email: aalbala@unb.br
950134POL0010.1177/0263395720950134PoliticsAlbala
research-article2020
Article
352 Politics 41(3)
coalitions are a product of post-electoral agreements whose objective is to confer to the
president a majority that could not be obtained in the election. The main evidence to sup-
port this argument consists in highlighting the minority status of the president-elect’s party.
These statements do not consider more complex situations, in which presidential can-
didates co-ordinate pre-electoral strategies with one or more parties. In these agreements,
the coalition partners receive payback in the form of electoral support in other elections,
mostly at the legislative level (merging of electoral lists, withdrawal of candidatures in
some districts so as to facilitate the election of the coalition partners, etc.). In other words,
the president’s party may have failed to win a majority in parliament because it made pre-
electoral agreements with another party or parties (Carroll, 2007; Freudenreich, 2016;
Spoon and West, 2015; Kellam, 2017).
In this article, I find that pre-electoral coalitions are in fact the norm for Latin American
presidential regimes. I find that more than 90% of the coalition cabinets formed in the
period under consideration originated at an early pre-electoral stage. In addition, using an
original dataset covering 33 Latin American coalition governments and a Qualitative
Comparative Analysis (QCA) research design, I find that when coalition cabinets are
crafted earlier, they last longer. This finding challenges the dominant assumption in the
existing literature – that institutional factors are the primary drivers of coalition
duration.
Conceptualizing the timing of coalition formation under
presidential regimes
My first contention is that students of electoral coalitions should adopt broader time hori-
zons. The coalition life cycle does not begin on election day, but on the day the election
campaign kicks off (Carroll and Cox, 2007: 301). In Figure 1, I identify five points in time
at which coalition agreements can in principle be formed. Three of these take place before
the moment of election itself (‘t0’); early pre-electoral agreements (‘t–2’), late pre-
electoral agreements (‘t–1’), and run-off agreements (‘t–0.5’). The other two take place
after the moment of election; post-electoral agreements (‘t+1’) and ad hoc agreements
(‘t+2’). A handful of existing works consider run-off agreements (Chasquetti, 2008;
McClintock, 2018) and almost none have considered agreements formed at earlier stages
of the electoral cycle. This article aims to close this gap.
A coalition cabinet is considered post-electoral (‘t+1’) when the timing of its forma-
tion and formalization occurs as a result of interparty bargaining in the period between
the final results of the election (or after a run-off if the election needed two rounds) and
Figure 1. Time-line of coalition formation.
To continue reading
Request your trial