Informal Coalitions and Policymaking in Latin America: Ecuador in Comparative Perspective by Andrés Mejía Acosta

Author:Andrés Mejía Acosta [Acosta, Andrés Mejía]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, Political Parties, General, American Government, Executive Branch, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781135849320
Google: MqKRAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17526446
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Electoral Calendar and “Ghost Coalitions”

Were legislators more likely to vote with the president during his honeymoon period—right after elections take place—but less likely to do so as new elections approached? Model findings show that the proximity of new elections coincided with lower party unity scores, and wider ideological differences between the median legislative party and the president’s policy position.

Model D reports that the number of elapsed months since the beginning of the legislative term has a negative and significant impact over the percentage of government voting in parties. This finding is consistent with the notion that the “tyranny” of the electoral calendar affects the president’s ability to gather legislative support in Congress (Altman 2000; Amorim Neto 2001). Descriptive statistics show that pro-government voting among parties occurs during the first or honeymoon year, rather than during the last year of the mandate. This finding is not corroborated by the statistical analysis, however. The evolution of the presidential mandate—and the proximity of new elections—does not appear to be related with decreasing job approval rates, either. In other words, the evaluations of political reputation did not have any significant impact on the degree of government voting inside parties. While this finding goes against the conventional wisdom that legislators avoid voting for bills presented by unpopular presidents, it is consistent with the fundamental logic of ghost coalitions. Presidents and parties maintained an important degree of legislative cooperation through the exchange of votes and concessions, but these alliances were concealed from the public scrutiny to preserve the legislators’ electoral liability of collaborating with unpopular presidents.

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