Executive-Legislative Deadlocks in the Dominican Republic

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

METHOD

This case study combines the use of simple statistical techniques and qualitative methods. Due to a lack of data on the number of initiated bills and the persons who initiated the bills, the most commonly used measure of executive-legislative relations, the box score, cannot be applied. This study therefore uses two different operationalizations of the dependent variable as crude proxies to study executive-legislative relations. The first is to count the number of relevant laws passed per legislature. This is, admittedly, a variable with low validity, and is basically a measure of legislative productivity. Therefore, for this case and considering the data at our disposal, a dichotomization of executivelegislative relations is preferable. The second operationalization is to calculate the production of laws compared to a benchmark number based on the average number (mean) of relevant laws passed by the different parties in government. Because data are lacking on the complete legislative process, however, the bulk of this analysis of deadlocks is a qualitative process tracing that complements the statistical technique. It is used to adjudicate between the different hypotheses on their capability of explaining the causal mechanism of the identified deadlocks. Thus the qualitative analysis serves to illuminate the deadlock crises and to identify which of the four hypotheses might explain the occurrence of deadlocks in our case.

Executive-Legislative Relations as a Continuous Variable

The key element of the concept of deadlocks is that they occur if there is a conflict between Congress and the president that paralyzes the legislative process. A deadlock is an executive-legislative conflict in which the president vetoes legislation initiated by Congress, or Congress does not pass legislative initiatives initiated by the president.10 Thus, the institution causing the deadlock can equally well be the president or the congress.

Sadly for the Dominican case, two important sets of data are missing that could have improved the operationalizations of deadlocks. Data are lacking on presidential vetoes. The research for this study, however, included a six-month stay in the Dominican Republic, studying legislative and newspaper archives, conducting more than 20 interviews of central political actors (not all cited here), and reviewing the secondary literature. All this investigating turned up no evidence that the presidents of the Dominican Republic have used the veto extensively.11 Therefore, there is no reason to believe that the lack of data on presidential vetoes hampers the analysis.

The other important lack of data is the number of initiated bills, and consequently information on who initiates the bills. This makes the use of the box score as an indicator of deadlocks impossible. The box score, or "batting average," is the proportion of government-initiated legislation that passes in Congress or the lower chamber of Congress (see, e.g., Cheibub 2007; Cheibub et al. 2004). The advantage of the box score is that one can easily compare the legislative success of different governments that vary in their level of legislative activity, and one can measure numerically the degree of a government's legislative success.