Political parties throughout Latin America rely increasingly on primary elections to select candidates for public office. Where they are adopted, primaries are generally touted as moves toward openness and internal party democracy. Yet politicians and party leaders are concerned with winning elections, and there are reasons to expect that primaries select candidates who are weaker in general election competition than other methods. Using data from every democratic presidential election in Latin America since the late 1970s, we test whether primaries systematically affect candidate strength. We find evidence of a primary bonus-that is, other things equal, primary-selected candidates are stronger than those selected by other procedures.

Bureaucratic reforms worldwide seek to improve the quality of governance. In this article, we argue that the major governance failures are political, not bureaucratic, and the first step to better governance is to recognize the underlying political causes. Using illustrations from throughout the world, we contend that political institutions fail to provide clear policy goals, rarely allocate adequate resources to deal with the scope of the problems, and do not allow the bureaucracy sufficient autonomy in implementation. Rational bureaucratic responses to these problems, in turn, create additional governance problems that could have been avoided if political institutions perform their primary functions.

Comparative constitutional studies rank the US president as relatively weak and most Latin American presidents as strong. However, specialized studies suggest that US presidents have great abilities to implement their agendas. We argue that presidents with weak formal powers "reinforce" their ability to impose an agenda (scope), as well as their ability to make those decisions stick (force). These reinforced powers, however, have diminishing returns as formal powers rise. As a result, the sum of presidential powers ranges from high (the US) to very high (Latin America).

Under free list proportional representation voters can: (a) cast preference votes for candidates; (b) cast multiple preferences; and (c) distribute preferences across multiple lists. Alternatively, they can cast a list vote. Our theory shows that office-seeking candidates face incentives to pursue the personal vote, while non-candidate partisans seek the party vote. Voters are in the cross-currents of these forces. Also, since preference voting is so cognitively and informationally demanding, voters have incentives to use shortcuts, especially (a) list voting; (b) casting fewer than their allotment of preferences; and (c) preference voting for well-known or highly placed candidates. We find support for our expectations using linear mixed-effects regression of the proportion of preference votes in candidate-level electoral data from Ecuador. Personal voting is more prevalent as magnitude increases, where the local party is strong, and for candidates that are incumbents, male, high on the list, and in the position of first loser.

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This article advances the idea that coalition formation and maintenance in highly fragmented presidential regimes is not only crucial to overcoming policy deadlock, but in some cases, critical to ensuring government survival. To advance this argument, the article looks at the formation and demise of legislative coalitions in Ecuador between 1979 and 2006. The empirical data suggest that paradoxically, government coalitions became more difficult to sustain after the adoption of institutional reforms intended to strengthen the president's legislative powers. The adoption of those reforms, it is argued, undermined the legislative incentives to cooperate with the government and helped to accelerate coalition erosion. Not only did the reforms fail significantly to avoid policy deadlock, but in some cases they contributed to the early termination of presidential mandates. This article contributes to the study of coalition survival and how it is linked to policymaking.

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While judicial turnover in Latin American high courts is often the result of political realignments within the executive branch, the judiciary may also be sensitive to realignments in the legislative branch. The authors use data from the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court to show that under some circumstances, congressional deputies will seek to remove judges further from their own ideal points as the composition of the legislative coalition changes. This provides some of the first empirical evidence of the role legislatures play in Latin American judicial instability and may be broadly generalizable to other countries with similar institutional profiles and rates of interbranch crisis.