| The conventional wisdom portrays Latin American legislatures as ineffective checks and unable to balance presidential power. This contradicts the basic premises of separation of powers, and check and balances. Under what conditions do legislatures willingly cede their institutional power to the president? Under what conditions do they tolerate the usurpation of power by the president?;This dissertation proposes a comparative theory of presidential power vis-a-vis the legislature , where the allocation of authority across branches of government is endogenous to the broader institutional structure and incentives. The theoretical argument focuses on the distribution of power within the president's party, particularly in the relation between the president and the party bosses at the district level. Presidents with influence in the nomination of candidates to the legislature are able to break down cooperation among fellow legislators and therefore obtain presidential discretion. The main implication of the formal model of candidate nomination is that presidential discretion is greater in proportional electoral systems. Instead, in plurality systems, presidential discretion depends on the relative power between the president and a majority of local party bosses.;Empirically, the dissertation makes two main contributions. First, it proposes an indicator of presidential discretion vis-a-vis the legislature, which can be easily adopted in comparative studies: the degree of detail in budget bills. The lumpier the allocation of funds is, the more leeway the president will have at the time of administering it and therefore the higher levels of discretion it indicates. Second, the empirical implications of the theory are tested on an original data set of budget bills for Argentina during the period between 1900 and 2005. The data analysis shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Argentine legislature has been an effective check to the executive power for most of the century. Moreover, the data analysis confirms the predictions of the theory. First, an increase in presidential discretion is associated with the electoral system changing from plurality to proportionality in 1962. Second, partisan majorities in the legislature are only associated to presidential discretion under proportional electoral systems. |
