Governments and coalitions – 06/04/2023 – Marcus Melo

The qualification “coalition” in presidentialism refers to multipartyism. Which, in turn, is a product of the adoption of proportional representation. Its first impact on the country was felt in the elections of 1945. It generated astonishment.

President Dutra reacted to the “paradox of the same elections originating Executives and Legislatures with different partialities”. An “anomaly” that he believed could be eliminated with a “careful electoral law”.

Afonso Arinos, on the contrary, welcomed its effects: they were precisely the anticipated objectives and aimed at the hyper-presidentialism of the Old Republic. Unanimous chambers gradually disappeared. The president now had to “bargain to form a majority”, as I have shown here. Thirty years later, Sérgio Abranches would define our variety of presidentialism with analytical rigor.

Different parties occupying the Executive and Legislative branches result from their electoral bases being different, and the structure of incentives they face, radically different. For deputies, political survival is a function of the resources that feed local networks via ministries, second-level positions and budget amendments. For the president, it is national and of another nature: he/she is punished or rewarded for economic performance and redistributive policies.

What ensures alignment between disparate incentives? The parties. In parliamentarism, with strong and disciplined acronyms, the survival of the government is confused with that of the individual parliamentarian. Under multi-party presidentialism with non-programmatic parties, alignment is not organic: it is based on the Executive sharing the flow of localist benefits, ministries and positions. There is room for exchange gains, although the net social result is marked by great allocative inefficiency. And it can degenerate into confrontations and predatory behavior depending on the management style and the distribution of political preferences among the actors.

The balance of the New Republic exhibited an asymmetrical pattern, “Strong Executive and weak Legislative”, but it has been undergoing transformations due to the loss of budgetary powers by the Executive, the strengthening of parties (due to the campaign fund and less fragmentation) and the new protagonism of the STF .

The weakening of the Executive has systemic consequences, because the President and his party are the only actors who have incentives (which may, of course, be based on unfounded beliefs) to internalize the consequences of the government’s overall poor performance, especially in the fiscal area. The larger and more heterogeneous the coalition, the lower the cohesion and the degree of commitment of the parties to the government.

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