2
Despite the fact that these actors’ greatly need one another to succeed, collaboration
between them is not straightforward. Consider, for instance, the case of market reforms in
the early 1990s in Latin America. While Presidents such as Carlos Menem of Argentina and
Carlos Salinas of Mexico were able to get the endorsement of their parties, the PJ and the
PRI respectively, to many of their reforms, others, such as Carlos Andrés Pérez of
Venezuela and Fernando Collor de Mello of Brazil, were unable to obtain their parties’ help to
liberalize their countries’ economies. When and how should we expect parties to support
their presidents?
The existing literature has not provided a systematic answer to this question. At this
moment we do not have a theory explaining how presidents are related to their political
parties and the circumstances under which presidents are able to get their parties’
endorsement to change the status quo. Existing work on presidential decision-making has
centered on studying presidents’ relation with legislatures (Kiewiet and McCubbins, 1991;
Shugart and Carey, 1992; Shugart, 1998; Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997; Cameron, 2000;
Morgenstern and Nacif, 2002) and bureaucracies (Moe, 1989; Wilson, 1989; Wood and
Waterman; 1991), but we still do not have an explanation of how and when executives’
choices are constrained by their own political parties.
5
As a matter of fact, it is commonly assumed that presidents will automatically receive
their parties’ support. For instance, some works consider that if the same party holds the
presidency and the legislative, a presidential system equates a parliamentary regime (e.g.
Duverger, 1979:422) and the effective number of veto players is reduced (e.g. Tsebelis,
2002:78-81). Even if it is true that, under certain circumstances, transaction costs tend to be
5
Few exceptions exist in the literature that deal with specific aspects of the relationship between presidents and
their parties, such as Corrales (2000), Harpel (1984), Milkis (2000), and Shugart (1998), but none presents a
general theory applicable to these two political actors.
Convention