The Missing Link: Presidents, governors and party discipline

At least since Juan Linz (1990) inaugurated the first wave of presidential studies, scholars have argued that disciplined and cohesive parties are less likely to emerge and consolidate in presidential democracies . In this article, we claim that conventional arguments about the effects of separate origin and separate survival of the executive branch on legislative party discipline are limited and incomplete. In particular, in countries where elected subnational governments are valuable political prizes that may provide substantial rewards in terms of policy, office and/or votes, party organizations will often need to accommodate potentially contradictory goals pursued by politicians at distinct levels of government. Not unusually, parties deal with these internal tensions by developing decentralized organizations that grant substantial autonomy to regional party branches. In this scenario, lower levels of legislative discipline can be expected in the legislature. We argue that these effects are magnified in presidential countries, because the direct election of subnational executives favors the establishment of personalistic party factions (or regional parties) around popular governors. Based on these claims, we propose two hypotheses: (i) parties will be less disciplined the greater the level of political decentralization; (ii) the negative effect of political decentralization on party discipline will be larger in countries with popularly elected executives as compared to parliamentary countries. To test these hypotheses, we build a large data set with pooled observations for over 60 countries and various years, ranging from the 1950s to the 2010s, relying on the V-Dem dataset and on the Regional Authority Index (RAI) project.

Borges André /Universidad de Brasília
Pedro Ribeiro Floriano /Universidad Federal de São Carlos