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partisan ministers and appoint majority cabinets. Such approach to policy-making and
government formation is certainly better particularly for the fledgling Latin American
democracies because it enhances the role of legislatures and political parties in the policy
process.
However, if presidents have the constitutional alternative of issuing decree-laws
and hold an extensive veto power, they are tempted to staff their cabinets mostly with
technocrats and cronies. Note, though, that the grant of decree-law authority to the
executive is not associated with minority cabinets. Yet, while in the short run the
appointment of non-partisan ministers may be optimal for the chief executive, in the long
run, however, this ministerial selection pattern may dangerously alienate parties and the
legislature, which is always a risk for political stability. The cases of Brazil’s Collor and
Peru’s Fujimori are very illustrative in this regard. Both appointed minority cabinets
staffed mostly with cronies and technocrats. Collor was impeached, and Fujimori staged a
so-called self-coup.
So, in terms of constitutional engineering, this paper corroborates the view
advocated by Mainwaring and Shugart (1997a) that presidential regimes in which the
chief executive is endowed with limited legislative powers and the party systems is
compact (thus making room for bigger presidential parties) generates stronger incentives
for inter-branch cooperation than regimes that grant extensive legislative prerogatives to
the president and feature a dispersed party system (thus making room for smaller
presidential parties).
In addition, the findings of this paper give us a solid empirical basis to pin down
new differences between presidentialism and parliamentarism and connect the
Eurocentric scholarship on cabinet formation with the study of presidentialism. As far as
cabinet formation is concerned, the main difference between the two systems of
government is the constant and heavy weight placed on legislative parties in
parliamentary regimes as opposed to the varying weight placed on parties in presidential
regimes. While in parliamentary systems most cabinets, except for caretaker
administrations, tend to be staffed mostly by partisan ministers, in presidential systems
the presence of the latter varies substantially. Yet, it remains to be seen the policy effects
of the cabinet formation patterns observed in presidential regimes.
Convention