Failed Presidencies: Identifying and Explaining a South American Anomaly

Abstract

Are presidential democracies inherently unstable and prone to breakdown? Recent work on Latin America suggests that the region has seen the emergence of a new kind of instability, where individual presidents do not manage to stay in office to the end of their terms, but the regime itself continues. This article places the Latin American experiences in a global context, and finds that the Latin American literature helps to predict the fates of presidents in other regions. The first stage of a selection model shows that presidents who are personally corrupt and preside over economic decline in contexts where democracy is paired with lower levels of GDP/capita are more likely to face challenges to their remaining in office for their entire terms. For the challenged presidents in this set, the risk of early termination increases when they use lethal force against their challengers, but decreases if they are corrupt. These factors help account for the disproportionately large number of South American presidents who have actually been forced from office, the "South American anomaly" of the title.

A Two-Level Theory of Presidential Instability

“…Second, the framework implies that statistical analyses of presidential interruptions must model the interaction of street protests and legislative politics in a systematic manner. Previous quantitative studies have typically estimated the net effects of those variables without considering their conditional effects (Alvarez and Marsteintredet 2010;Hochstetler and Edwards 2009;Hochstetler 2006;Kim and Bahry 2008;Pérez-Liñán 2007). This article has relied on multiple-comparison tests to reinterpret previous findings about the legislative shield in this light.…”

“…Paradoxically, such strategic behavior may conceal the power of legislators in empirical research, because congressional challenges will often occur in conjunction with demonstrations against the executive. Given the small number of events, this problem is hard to address using selection models (Hochstetler and Edwards 2009), and it may require a careful use of process tracing in order to document the timing of legislative challenges.…”

“…Violent protests that compromise public order present incumbents with the choice of repressing demonstrators or relinquishing power. Incumbents' choices are limited because repression-unless the government has the capacity and the will to exercise extensive and sustained violence-will usually accelerate their downfall (Hochstetler and Edwards 2009). However, a large core of committed legislators may help deflect the impact of mass mobilizations at an earlier stage.…”

Democratic Tradition and the Failed Presidency ofLucioGutierrez inEcuador

“…Several studies have found that economic development, recessions, economic mismanagement and the adoption of market‐oriented policies all affect presidential survival (Hochstetler, ; Hochstetler and Edwards, ; Marsteintredet, ; Llanos and Marsteintredet, ; Edwards, ). Regarding inflation, most studies have not found a significant effect on presidential failures (Kim and Bahry, ; Hochstetler and Edwards, ; Marsteintredet, ; Kim, ; Llanos and Marsteintredet, ; Martínez, ).…”

Understanding Presidential Failure in South America

“…Although legislatures and mass publics have used different means across the cases to actually remove the presidents, there is sufficient conceptual common ground to justify viewing presidential failure as a general phenomenon worthy of further inquiry. 2 This article examines only presidential failure in South America, where the phenomenon appears to be occurring at a higher rate than in presidential regimes in other parts of the globe (Hochstetler and Edwards 2009). Hochstetler and Edwards find that South American presidents exhibit more of the risk factors for presidential challenge and failure than their global counterparts, and this anomaly drives this investigation toward further understanding of presidential instability in the region.…”