Agency Loss and the Strategic Redesign of the Presidential Office in Colombia

Abstract

There is a relative consensus in the literature around the fact that Latin American Presidents use cabinet appointments as currency to build coalitions, strengthen their government, and get their policy agenda implemented. However these partisan appointees may have their own political incentives that do not align with those of the President. This situation raises the question of how Presidents can ensure that ministers remain faithful agents or at least how to reduce the information asymmetries between Presidents and ministers. One such tool is the strategic redesign of the presidential office. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed 93 organizations established between 1931 and 2015 that constitute the set of agencies under direct control and supervision of the Colombian President. Using time series analysis, we find that the change in the percentage of ministers affiliated to other parties has a positive effect on the number of agencies that constitute the presidential center in Colombia.

Too Legit to Quit? Analyzing the Effect of No-Confidence Motions on Cabinet Members’ Instability in Presidential Systems: The Cases of Colombia and Peru

“…However, considering the regime-type setting in which the NCM is proposed, it is relevant to include some analytical elements of presidential systems that might affect the oversight relationship between Congress and the executive power. These are the time constraints (Linz 1990) reflected in the honeymoon period and the electoral calendar (Chaisty et al 2014), and the strength of the ruling party coalition in Congress, built on a strategy of the cabinet portfolio location (Shugart and Carey 1992;Mainwaring and Shugart 1997;Amorim Neto 2006;Cheibub 2007;Alemán and Tsebelis 2011;Kellam 2015;Mejía-Guinand et al 2018;Silva and Medina 2022). In that sense, I derive the following hypotheses: H2.…”

“…Cabinet portfolio allocation is strictly the president’s decision, following a “bait and switch” logic (Guinand and Botero 2017). The president allocates portfolios to cabinet members of their party coalition to ensure their power in Congress and limits partisan ministers’ abilities to affect policy by modifying their office, mitigating agency loss risk (Mejía-Guinand et al 2018). This partisan allocation is generally a successful strategy for the executive power to advance its legislative initiatives 11…”

Mapping the center of government in Latin America and the Caribbean: a typology

“…Whereas the presidential center may refer to the creation of new organizations, as discussed by Painter (1981) when analyzing central agencies, that term is often linked to the inner circle of the presidential office (Mejía-Guinand, Botero & Solano, 2018). In this sense, Bonvecchi and Scartascini (2014, p. 147) define the presidential center as the "closer group of advisers with no necessary departmental responsibilities who work under their most direct supervision.…”

“…Yet, most countries have specific agencies for at least one of these sectors. Many authors tend to include these structures in the concept of CoG (Alessandro et al, 2014), while, as already argued, these may be left out by those who exclusively discuss the presidential center (Mejía-Guinand et al, 2018).…”

“…I refer to them as inner circle, independent, and auxiliary. The first category is aligned with studies that discuss the presidential center (Bonvecchi & Scartascini, 2014;Mejía-Guinand et al, 2018). These organizations differ from those which I call independent since they do not have their portfolio.…”