Autor: Anibal Pérez Liñán

Between 1980 and 2007, 18 Latin American presidents were impeached or forced to resign. What factors explain the debacle of these administrations? I hypothesize that social and institutional factors interact to destabilize elected governments, and that broad popular protests may be necessary but they are not sufficient for the collapse of elected governments. A two-level theory combines a discussion of concept-formation with causal assessment. The concept-formation component determines how to define the presence of a “broad” social coalition against the president, and how to define the structure of a “legislative shield.” The causal assessment tests the proposition that street politics and legislative politics interact to undermine presidential stability. Because the number of events is small but the number of negative cases is large, my discussion of two-level theories emphasizes the need to rely on a logical framework that can link small-N qualitative research and large-N statistical analysis. An analysis of 116 Latin American presidents over 28 years shows that popular protests can be neutralized by the presence of strong support in Congress. I test the argument using rare event and random effect logistic models.

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Autor: José Antonio Cheibub

The  presidential‐parliamentary distinction is a foundational one in the comparative study of law and politics, at the center of a large theoretical and empirical literature. This paper examines the categories themselves and their internal coherence.Though some debate has concerned the conceptualization of presidentialism, parliamentarism and semi‐presidentialism, relatively little attention has focused on measurement. We use new data from a comprehensive survey of constitutions to develop measures of similarity across constitutions. We then examine whether provisions on executive‐legislative relations are similar for constitutions within each of the classic categories.Although we find that within‐type cohesion is low (at least by our expectations) for all three categories, we find measureable variation in cohesion across type, with presidentialist constitutions being the least cohesive of the three categories. The results also tell us a great deal about the structure of semi‐presidentialism, a highly suspect intermediate category in some quarters of the literature. We find semi‐ presidentialism to be as internally consistent as parliamentarism, but also learn that constitutions in the semi‐presidential category bear no noticeable difference from those in the parliamentary category. The measurement exercise thus has important implications for the conceptualization of political systems.

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Autor: Gabriel Negretto

De 1978 a 2008, todos los países de América Latina han reemplazado o reformado, muchas veces en forma drástica, sus constituciones. Lo mismo ha ocurrido con leyes secundarias que regulan aspectos fundamentales del régimen político, como es el sistema electoral. El propósito de este ensayo es analizar el contenido y dirección de las reformas constitucionales realizadas durante las últimas tres décadas y sus posibles efectos sobre la calidad y desempeño de las democracias presidenciales en la región.

Las reformas introducidas a los regímenes presidenciales en América Latina presentan varias paradojas y contradicciones. Desde el punto de vista de su contenido, muchos cambios buscan fortalecer la ciudadanía y promover el ejercicio compartido y consensual del poder. Tal es el caso de la expansión de los derechos individuales y colectivos, la adopción de reglas electorales pluralistas, y el intento de atenuar los poderes de gobierno de los presidentes. Al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, existen cambios que buscan centralizar el poder, como es el aumento de los poderes legislativos de los presidentes y las normas que facilitan la reelección presidencial.

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Abstract

In recent years there has been growing interest and a related literature on hybrid regimes. Is there a good definition of such an institutional arrangement? Are there actually sets of stabilized, political institutions that can be labelled in this way? Is it possible that within the widespread process of democracy diffusion these are only ‘transitional’ regimes and the most suitable distinction is still the old one, suggested by Linz and traditionally accepted, between democracy and authoritarianism? This article addresses and responds to these questions by pinpointing the pertinent analytic dimensions, starting with definitions of ‘regime’, ‘authoritarianism’, and ‘democracy’; by defining what a ‘hybrid regime’ is; by trying to answer the key question posed in the title; by disentangling the cases of proper hybrid regimes from the cases of transitional phases; and by proposing a typology of hybrid regimes. Some of the main findings and conclusions refer to the lack of institutions capable of performing their functions as well as the key elements for achieving possible changes towards democracy.

Keywords: regime; democracy; authoritarianism; hybrid regime; classification of regimes

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