The success of presidentialism?: breaking gridlock in presidential regimes

Abstract

Despite the pessimistic forecast of the advocates of parliamentarism, in the last fifteen years Latin American democracies have shown that presidential regimes can sustain themselves and even progress towards consolidation. This paper asks what the pessimists neglected from their analyses. In particular, we ask how various presidential regimes have generally avoided one particular problem ─the possibility or even probability of gridlock─ that Linz and others discuss. The paper is divided into three sections. The first examines briefly the state of the literature on the debate between parliamentarism and presidentialism. The debate centres predominantly on institutional-constitutional factors which define the workings of presidential and parliamentary forms of government. The first section will also, however, point out those conditions beyond the institutional make-up of a regime which will either hamper or be conducive to democratic successes The second section addresses the recent evidence for success and failure of presidential democracies, drawing from the experience of divided government in Latin America in the last wave of democratisation The third section then examines those incentives and institutional mechanisms by which gridlock is either dealt with, overcome, or circumvented Here the paper also draws on the us presidential experience, which has been much neglected in the comparative studies of Latin American presidential systems.