Summary of Mainwaring and Shugart: Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America -- Adam Brown, BYU Political Science

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Mainwaring and Shugart: Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America

Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.

Mainwaring and Shugart. 1997. Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In Brief

Place in Literature

Generally, a reiteration of the arguments in Shugart and Carey (1992), with responses to objections made by Linz (1994) and Stepan and Skach (1994) in "The Failure of Presidential Democracy."

Main Argument

(1) Constitutional/legislative provisions regarding the president, elections, and party laws determine (2) the president's formal powers and the nature of party system, influencing (3) the president's ability to implement his agenda (his "strength"). In this process, the timing of assembly elections relative to executive elections strongly affects the number of political parties and their internal discipline.

Two key themes:

Presidentialism has important institutional variations, so it should not be compared dichotomously against parliamentarism. It is not a homogenous regime type. The most important variations among presidential regimes are (a) how closely they approximate "pure" presidentialism, (b) the president's legislative powers, (c) party system fragmentation, and (d) party discipline.
These institutional variations have consequences for how well presidents can implement their agenda and how well the regime functions.

Research by the same authors

Research on similar subjects

Cheibub: Presidentialism and democratic performance (4 shared tags)
Cox: Making votes count (4 shared tags)
Figueiredo and Limongi: Presidential power, legislative organization, and party behavior in Brazil (4 shared tags)
Hicken: Engineering aggregation (4 shared tags)
Levitsky and Cameron: Political parties and regime change in Fujimori's Peru (4 shared tags)
Shugart and Carey: Presidents and Assemblies (4 shared tags)
Desposato: The impact of electoral rules on legislative parties (3 shared tags)
Lijphart: Patterns of democracy (3 shared tags)

Tags

Mainwaring, Scott (author) • Shugart, Matthew (author) • Comparative Politics • Presidentialism • Democracy • Regime Type • Elections • Parties

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