Executive-Legislative Deadlocks in the Dominican Republic

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

Another deadlock occurred during the second legislature of 2002. President Mejia's PRD had lost its majority in the lower chamber in the May elections, so the deadlock occurred during a potential deadlock period. Figure 1, however, shows six important laws passed, putting it above the threshold(s) defined, demonstrating that our indicator of deadlocks should be accompanied by a qualitative case analysis to increase the numerical indicator's validity.

The second legislature of 2002 is considered a deadlock because only two important laws passed in the ordinary (and prolonged) legislature (Law 183/02, Codigo Monetario y Financiero; and Law 184/02, which modified the tourist law). The remaining four laws passed in an extraordinary legislature in January 2003. Another reason Congress passed so few laws was that the opposition majority (PLD and PRSC) retired from the lower chamber for a month to protest the PRD administration's naming of the judges of the Central Electoral Board. The media coverage of this crisis was enormous.19 Therefore, in addition to the deadlocks reported in table 2, the deadlock legislature of fall 2002 is important to analyze.

The deadlock precision rate in table 2 is interesting because it shows that deadlocks occur in less than 20 percent of the periods when the hypotheses predict them. Together with the results reported in table 1, this confirms that deadlocks are not pervasive in the Dominican Republic. The hypotheses can still be defended, because the authors generally claim that these potential deadlock situations only increase the probability of deadlocks and because Linz's and Cheibub's hypotheses all pinpoint the vast majority of the deadlocks; the data in table 2 support their claims. Deadlocks in the Dominican Republic generally occur when predicted. We can conclude that based on the two operationalizations of executive-legislative relations, there is little support for Mainwaring's hypothesis, but also that the case does not offer a full test of his hypothesis.

It is nonetheless difficult to evaluate which of the other hypotheses have more explanatory power. This is due to the similarity of the various hypotheses; their respective independent variables all correlate significantly.20 Cheibub's veto hypothesis, and partly his instability hypothesis, are basically a subset of Linz's minority thesis.

Furthermore, in a qualitative study, a precision rate below 0.2 is unsatisfactory. The goal of qualitative research is to explain as much as possible of the variance in the dependent variable and to provide complex explanations. Institutions might take us a long way toward explaining why deadlocks can occur, indicating that potential deadlock situations-that is, when the hypotheses predict deadlocks-might be a necessary cause for a deadlock conflict.21 But the institutional hypotheses are less helpful in explaining when in the potential deadlock situations an actual deadlock occurs; that is, the additional sufficient factors or triggering events directly causing the deadlocks, and why so few potential deadlocks become actual deadlocks.