Executive-Legislative Deadlocks in the Dominican Republic

Latin American Politics and Society, Summer 2008 by Marsteintredet, Leiv

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the causes of executive-legislative deadlocks in the Dominican Republic in the period 1978-2005. Deadlocks are considered a pernicious element in (presidential) democracies. The study applies a combination of simple statistical techniques and process tracing to test four institutional hypotheses, which argue that certain institutional and party system constellations increase the probability of deadlocks. The hypotheses point to necessary causes of deadlocks, but their predictions are imprecise. Presidents' persuasive powers and coalition building have helped alleviate the deadlock problem. Analysis of the deadlock periods shows that the additional triggering or sufficient causes for deadlocks are either exogenous to the political institutions or related to the instability of coalitions in the nation's nonideological party system, which consists of three almost equal-sized parties.

Since Juan J. Linz's seminal articles on presidentialism and democracy (1990, 1994), a debate has persisted about institutions' effect on democracy, especially in Latin America.1 This article deals with the causes of executive-legislative deadlocks and tests four institutional hypotheses with respect to deadlocks in the case of the Dominican Republic between 1978 and 2005.

A deadlock is an executive-legislative conflict that hampers the legislative process. Deadlocks are held to be a cause for democratic breakdown. As a variable, nevertheless, they have often been ignored in studies of presidentialism and democracy. Therefore, this article focuses on deadlocks and seeks to determine whether different party system arrangements in a presidential regime affect their occurrence. The article analyzes both the causes of deadlocks and why and how deadlocks have been avoided. Due to insufficient legislative data, however, it is unable to determine statistically which of the four hypotheses best explains the occurrence of deadlocks. Consequently, the study uses process tracing as a further test to identify causal mechanisms and intervening causes (George and Bennett 2005, 205-7). The research questions are, What creates deadlocks? When or under what circumstances do they occur? What prevents deadlocks?

The evidence suggests that deadlocks occur during minority governments and that minority government is a necessary condition for the occurrence of deadlocks, but also that other factors are needed to explain fully their occurrence. Endogenous institutional explanations are not always sufficient; in the Dominican Republic, deadlocks seem to occur as a reaction to crises external to the institutions. In 1986 and 1990, economic crises triggered the deadlocks, and in 1994 it was electoral fraud. The second factor is endogenous to the institutions; namely, the instability of coalitions. Yet this does not seem to be the result of a weak party system, as Linz posits, but of a combination of nonprogrammatic parties in a party system with three almost equal-sized parties, supporting Cheibub's 2002 theory.

INSTITUTIONAL THEORIES AND EXECUTIVE-LEGISLATIVE DEADLOCKS

The underlying assumption for the institutional theories is that institutions matter for (the survival of) democracy. Here, we focus more specifically on four hypotheses that discuss how different party system arrangements in presidentialism affect democracy through the intervening, variable executive-legislative relations.

1. Minority governments experience more deadlocks than majority governments (e.g., Linz 1994).

2. Deadlocks occur more frequently when a minority president's veto cannot be overruled by the congress (Cheibub 2002, 2007).

3. The number of deadlocks increases with the number of parties (Mainwaring 1993).

4. Deadlocks occur more often when there are three more or less equal-sized parties in the congress and any two parties can form a majority (Cheibub 2002, 2007).2

There are two ways to investigate which of the hypotheses are better at predicting and explaining the occurrence of deadlocks in our case. First, we study which of the hypotheses can predict the deadlocks; and if that is not sufficient, we study which of the hypotheses best explains the causal mechanism behind the deadlocks. In this case, these hypotheses make the same predictions of when a deadlock normally occurs, but they differ in their explanations of why deadlocks occur. The hypotheses, nevertheless, fall short of explaining fully the occurrences of deadlocks, because in this case, some deadlocks were triggered by causes exogenous to the political institutions. Furthermore, these theories and hypotheses do not focus on the equally important question of why and how deadlocks can be avoided in presidential regimes.

Institutional theories treat institutions as autonomous factors in political systems and not just as results of social or economic forces (March and Olsen 1984). Therefore, the explanation of the occurrence of deadlocks is endogenous to the institutional and party system. The endogenous explanations of the occurrence of deadlocks can, however, be a serious problem (Cheibub 2007; Munck 2004). Crises that end in deadlocks might be caused by factors exogenous to the political institutions; and consequently, what matters is how the institutions handle these external crises. Cheibub (2007, 136-64) lists income, wealth, size, location, and military legacy as factors potentially detrimental to democratic survival, and other factors abound. Several of these factors are constant for our case, but we look at the annual inflation level in order to investigate whether the economy has contributed to the occurrence of deadlocks in the Dominican Republic.