Chavez’s Referendum Defeated

The article posted below discusses Hugo Chavez’s defeated initiatives in the December 2007 referendum. Chavez’s initiatives included lowering the voting age, extending social security benefits, cutting the work day, and most importantly (in terms of electoral rules) indefinite presidential reelection and increasing the term for presidency.

The main question that I considered while reviewing this article was:

Does this defeat reinforce Venezuela’s democratic system or does it simply mean that free elections can take place in an authoritarian regime?

Whatever happens in the next election and how Chavez reacts to the results of that election will get us closer to answering this question.

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7124313.stm

 - Venezuela Group

Brazil: Electoral Process

President · Term: 4 years · Election: majority run-off when below 50% + 1 Re-election: one successive term

Congress · Elections considered concurrent with presidential elections · Senate: 81 seats w/3 seats per state; elected for 4 year terms on an alternating basis (1/3 to 2/3 of the Senate); majority run-off elections · Lower house: 513 seats, 4 year terms and elected by PR (large districts) Over 20 parties in Congress and politicians can switch parties once in office so proportion of seats held by each party changes regularly

States · Have a lot of autonomy · 27 governors directly elected for 4 year terms; majority run-off Elections are concurrent with presidential and congressional elections

General · Median DoM: 11 · Lower house ENP, since 1945 for all democratic elections: 6.3 (from David J. Samuels “The Gubernatorial Coattails Effect) · 1963: Constitutional referendum passed that changed regime from presidentialism to parliamentarism to reduce the president’s power. Military coup in ’64 would disable this though · Constitution of 1988 resulted in a turn away from military dictatorship to more democratic institutions · 1993: The corruption shakedown of Fernando Collor led to a referendum on changing the regime yet again, and by a majority Brazil chose a presidential republic. This legitimized the Brazilian regime.

Brazil’s voters are automatically registered and voting is compulsory for all literate adults from 18-70 years old and optional for 16-17y/o and those older than 70.Typically, concurrent elections make the number of parties go down, but it is interesting to note that Brazil experiences party fragmentation despite having concurrent elections. For example, there are currently over 20 parties in Congress. It seems that having an open-list system, high district of magnitude, low voter party affiliation and politicians’ ability to switch parties once in office makes a vote more personal than partisan in Brazil. Furthermore, each state is eligible for 8-70 seats in the lower house, and this empowers smaller states and smaller parties. Brazil is very decentralized and a lot of power lies in the hands of the states. In addition, legislators consistently vie for state-based issues rather than national agenda because their incentives are aligned with the state that elected them. Legislators from large districts are elected by proportional representation, which reduces their respective individual electoral accountability.

Elections and Costa Rica – trending to fit the theory

As you might imagine there’s not a lot of hot news on Costa Rican Elections, Electoral Systems or Executive-Legislative Relations (aside from the CAFTA referendum). However there have been some interesting trends in the party system and presidential elections in the last decade. The 2002 presidential election of Abel Pacheco (a famous Costa Rican Poet) was the first election since the founding of Costa Rica’s democracy (in 1946) that a run-off election was required for a candidate to obtain the 40% plurality required to win presidential election. That same year the Supreme Court ruled the ban on presidential re-election was unconstitutional. Presidents can now run for re-election after sitting out for 2 election cycles. This opened the door for Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias’s 2006 re-election (his first term was 1986-1990). His victory was the closest first round victory in Costa Rica’s history. A big factor in the closeness of his victory was the rise of several small party candidates. Below is a table of the 2006 presidential elections.

Summary of the 5 February 2006 Costa Rica presidential election results
Candidates                                                                                                                                                     Votes             %
Óscar Arias – National Liberation Party (Partido Liberación Nacional)                         664,551     40.92                              Ottón Solís – Citizens’ Action Party (Partido Acción Ciudadana)                                       646,382     39.80                             Otto Guevara – Libertarian Movement Party (Partido Movimiento Libertario)         137,710     8.48                         Ricardo Toledo – Social Christian Unity Party (Partido de Unidad Socialcristiana)             57,655        3.55                      Antonio Álvarez Desanti – Union for Change Party (Partido Unión para el Cambio)         39,557         2.44                             Jose Manuel Echandi Meza – National Union Party (Partido Unión Nacional)             26,593         1.64                             Juan Jose Vargas Fallas – Homeland First Party (Partido Patria Primero)                  17,594          1.08                             Other parties                                                                                                                                              33,950         2.09                          Total (Turnout 65.4 %)                                                                                                                   1,623,992     100.0

The president holds a lot of power in Costa Rica, his election is concurrent with the unicameral legislature. He appoints the 8 state governors and his cabinet (including 2 vice presidents). This coupled with the plurality nature of the presidential elections has lead to a historically 2 party system (the effective number of legislative and presidental parties is just above 2, but rising). However, in recent years new parties are gaining ground in legislative and presidential elections. This could be for a number of reasons. First, presidentially elections are now being decided during run-off or close first round elections. If a run-off is expected small parties have greater incentive to compete in elections. Legislative elections are closed, blocked list proportional and the district magnitude is 8.1. Leading us to expect a higher number of effective parties. Finally, referendums are becoming more common and have been heavily influenced by smaller parties. Below is the 2006 legislative election results.

Summary of the 5 February 2006 Costa Rica legislative election results

Candidates	Votes	%	Seats
National Liberation Party (Partido Liberación Nacional)	589,731	36.54	25
Citizens’ Action Party (Partido Acción Ciudadana)	409,030	25.34	17
Libertarian Movement Party (Partido Movimiento Libertario)	147,934	9.17	6
Social Christian Unity Party (Partido de Unidad Socialcristiana)	126,284	7.82	5
Costa Rican Renovation Party (Partido Renovación Costariccense)	55,798	3.46	0
National Union Party (Partido Unión Nacional)	40,280	2.5	1
Union for Change Party (Partido Unión para el Cambio)	37,994	2.35	0
Homeland First Party (Partido Patria Primero)	26,438	1.64	0
National Rescue Party (Partido Rescate Nacional)	32,909	2.04	1
Access without Exclusion (Accesibilidad sin Exclusión)	25,690	1.59	1
Broad Front (Frente Amplio)	17,751	1.10	1
Other parties	104,122	6.45	0
Total (Turnout 65.2 %)	1,613,961	100.0	57

As you can see several still small parties are winning a not-insignificant portion of the vote.

Electoral Reform and Party Systems in Chile

Looking at the elements of electoral reform and existing party systems to Chile led us to look again to longer term evidence than current news articles.  We noted Peter Siavelis’ research on Chile’s party system which brings up the effect of a 1989 change from multiple member districts to two member districts.  Applicable to the discussion on the endogenous relationship between electoral reform and party systems, he uses the 1989 electoral reform in Chile as a useful example for analysts because electoral reform was made by the outgoing military regime, not from bargaining between political parties. 

On the effect of electoral reform in Chile, he says

 “In Chile, limited electoral reform has had, and will continue to have, limited effects on the party system depending on the dynamic interaction of the incentives and drives operating within the party system, a few of which has been described here.  Given the elements of continuity within the party system, the continued ability of parties to form joint lists, and the existence of a PR electoral system for municipal elections, it is doubtful that the binomial system will discourage party system fragmentation or necessarily lead to a pattern of centripetal competition as many scholars have suggested.  The question for the long term, as the shadow of the authoritarian regime fades, is whether the incentives for the maintenance of coalitions are stronger than those produced by the elements of continuity within the party system.”  

In the decade since this article was written we see that the two main coalitions in Chile, Concertacion and Alianza, remain intact and dominating politics.  For presidential elections, the vote split has been more characteristically bipolar, with the two major coalitions collectively getting above 80% in the 1989, 1993 and 1999 elections, whereas in legislative elections there has been a much clearer ideological split between three forces of the left, center, and right parties.  But, as seen in the 2005 Presidential elections, two parties from the same Alianza coalition offered different Presidential candidates to voters, indicating the difficulty in keeping the coalition intact. 

It is difficult to answer the question Siavelis poses at the end of the above paragraph above in a single blog entry, about whether the coalition’s importance has trumped the party importance since 1997.  However, looking at the political divisions mentioned above seems clear that support for the two coalitions have not made the component individual parties redundant.

Siavelis, Peter.  Transformational Effects of Electoral Reform Continuity and Change in the Chilean Party System.  Comparative Political Studies 1997; 30; 651

Montes, Esteban. Mainwaring, Scott, Ortega, Eugenio. Rethinking the Chilean Party System. Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3. (Oct., 2000), pp. 795-824. 

By: Chile Group

Mexico’s presidential election and run-off system

I want to bring up the issue of the introduction of the run-off system in Mexico’s presidential election, especially to solve the problem in this article.

Mexico’s presidential election has no run-off system and is held with congressional election concurrently. From these electoral rules, we can make two expectations. First, the no run-off system would make it difficult to give a majority victory to the winner. Second, congressional elections will enjoy a honeymoon effect with the presidential election. It will be beneficial for forming a majority or at least larger share in congressional level. Therefore, the reality will be the combination of these two conflicting effects.

According to this article, 2006 presidential election in Mexico showed that the gap between two top rival candidates was too narrow and finally it went to the legal judgments. That process had caused the enormous political instability at that time. In fact, there is always a possibility of such an extreme competition in any election.

However, in case of Mexico, I think this extreme competition, even though it is not frequently occurred, could be avoided by the introduction of run-off system. Given that Mexico’s party system is composed of 3 main parties which are PRI, PAN, PRD, the run-off system could deter this extreme competition by increasing the possibility of the coalition among two of them at the final stage. Not only for this purpose, the run-off system will contribute to form a majority government and therefore increase the governability in Mexico’s politics.

However, we have a consideration when we try to introduce the run-off system. This is the effect of current concurrent election system. Concurrent election system plays an important role to reduce the post-presidential election turmoil by making voters give their support to the winnable party and therefore the candidate could have stable support in congress. Parties also have an incentive to form coalition to obtain voters’ support which will concentrate on the winnable party in the presidential election. In reality, PAN had a largest share in congress in 2006 congressional election, which the system intends to work even though there was a legal debate about the result of the presidential election itself and more fundamental problem that PAN still had not a majority.

We need to think of the combination effect between the run-off system and concurrent election. I think both system could be somewhat conflicting in terms of coalition formation. The run-off system will not be effective in coalition formation at the first stage because most candidates have an incentive to run in the first run, which could reduce the effect of coalition formation from the concurrent election. I want to bring up this matter to discuss. How do you think of it?

Related article

http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7887909

Executive-Legislative relations in Colombia

 According to Cox  (et al. 2001), legislators’ responsiveness to presidents depends, primarily, on the limitations to career development (whether or not legislators can be reelected) and secondly, on partisan ideology (the more distant from the president’s ideology, the more reactive legislators tend to be). This might be true for Colombia where legislators can be re-elected and thus, have an incentive to block the President’s proposals if that translates into political capital for the next electoral race. Not surprisingly, the Colombian president utilizes his decree-power very often. Executive-Legislative relations in Colombia are, therefore, quite tense.

 

However, the most recent law on forestal resources  not only demonstrates that legislators can cooperate with the Executive, but also that they do not necessarily approve proposals that maximize their chances for reelection. The law -aimed at allowing massive commercialization of forestal resources- was presented by the president and received an unusual expedite approval from the Congress, but later the President and other sectors of the society opposed it. Last week, the law was finally declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (http://www.cambio.com.co/paiscambio/761/ARTICULO-WEB-NOTA_INTERIOR_CAMBIO-3939296.html). 

 

Why did the president withdraw his support from his own initiative and why did the legislators support the same proposal despite their inclination to blockade the President? From the legislators’ perspective it might have to do with economic incentives: they might have expected considerable rewards from multinational companies for “speeding” the  legislative process up. But the way they did it -by ignoring the constitutional provision to convoke public hearings among the affected population (mostly indigenous and afro-colombian people)- irritated environmentalists and indigenous groups. That in turn gave Uribe an exceptional opportunity to expose the undemocratic ways of his opponents, and at the same time increase his popularity. 

 

These cases are not very common in Colombia, but might be illustrative of how pecuniary incentives may alter the hypothetical outcomes of  the Executive-Legislative relations.