The Presidency and the Executive Branch in Latin America: What We Know and What We Need to Know

The presidential politics literature depicts presidents either as all- powerful actors or figureheads and seeks to explain outcomes accordingly. Th e president and the executive branch are nonetheless usually treated as black boxes, particularly i n developing countries, even though the presidency has evolved into an extremely complex branch of government. While these developments have been studied in the U nited States, far less i s known in other countries, particularly in Latin America, where presi dential systems have been considered the source of all goods and evils. To help close the knowledge gap and explore differences in policymaking characteristics not only between Latin America and the US but also across Latin American countries, this paper s ummarizes the vast literature on the organization and resources of the Executive Branch in the Americas and sets a research agenda for the study of Latin American presidencies.Fil: Bonvecchi, Alejandro. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Departamento de Ciencia Política y Estudios Internacionales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Scartascini, Juan Carlos. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo; Estados Unido

The Political Economy of Fiscal Reform in Latin America: The Case of Argentina

This paper investigates the political economy of fiscal reform activism in Argentina since the late 1980s. Between 1988 and 2008, tax legislation was changed 83 times, fiscal federal rules 14 times, and budgetary institutions sixteen times. Tax and budgetary reforms moved from centralizing revenue sources and spending authority in the federal government to mild decentralization lately. Fiscal federal rules combined centralization of revenues and management in the federal government with short-term compensations for the provinces. This paper contends that reform activism can be explained by the recurrence of economic and policy shocks while reform patterns may be accounted for as consequences of the decreasing political integration of national parties in a polity whose decisionmaking rules encourage the formation of oversized coalitions. The decrease in political integration weakened the national party leaderships ability to coordinate intergovernmental bargaining, and strengthened the local bosses and factions needed to form oversized coalitions

Is Latin America on the Right Track? An Analysis of Medium-Term Frameworks and the Budget Process

Medium Term Fiscal Frameworks (MTFs) have become one of the most popular reforms to the budgetary process in Latin America during the last decade, and introducing MTFs seemed to be the magic solution for most fiscal ailments. Nonetheless, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of their impact. This document discusses the normative merits of using MTFs, provides a characterization of the different types of MTF, and describes their development in the Latin American region based on extensive field work. As a first approximation for understanding how they are working, this document explores in detail the cases of Argentina, Colombia and Peru. While an unambiguous diagnosis is not possible, this document lays the groundwork for progress toward comprehensive impact evaluations and, eventually, to the consolidation of MTFs in the region

Institutional constraints on profligate politicians: the conditional effect of partisan fragmentation on budget deficits

The literature on the common pool resource problem in budgeting has thus far not explored the likely interaction between size fragmentation (the number of decision makers) and procedural fragmentation (the structure of the process in which they interact).The argument put forward in this article is that the effects of these two types of fragmentation should not be additive, but multiplicative, because theory suggests that the impact of size fragmentation on fiscal policy is conditional on the extent of procedural fragmentation. Using panel data for 57 countries over the period of 1975 to 1998, the author empirically investigates this interaction in the legislative context and finds strong evidence that partisan fragmentation is associated with higher deficits only when it is not moderated by limits on parliamentary amendment authority

How Populist are the People? Measuring Populist Attitudes in Voters

Contains fulltext : 120643.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)The sudden and perhaps unexpected appearance of populist parties in the 1990s shows no sign of immediately vanishing. The lion’s share of the research on populism has focused on defining populism, on the causes for its rise and continued success, and more recently on its influence on government and on public policy. Less research has, however, been conducted on measuring populist attitudes among voters. In this article, we seek to fill this gap by measuring populist attitudes and to investigate whether these attitudes can be linked with party preferences. We distinguish three political attitudes: (1) populist attitudes, (2) pluralist attitudes, and (3) elitist attitudes. We devise a measurement of these attitudes and explore their validity by way of using a principal component analysis on a representative Dutch data set (N = 600). We indeed find three statistically separate scales of political attitudes. We further validated the scales by testing whether they are linked to party preferences and find that voters who score high on the populist scale have a significantly higher preference for the Dutch populist parties, the Party for Freedom, and the Socialist Party.17 maart 201430 p