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I. INTRODUCTION
The recent scholarly literature on presidentialism has mostly analyzed the
relationship between institutional design and democratic stability (Cheibub and Limongi
2002; Cheibub, Przeworski, and Saiegh 2002; Jones 1995; Lijphart 1992; Linz and
Valenzuela 1994; Mainwaring 1993; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997a; 1997b; Sartori
1997; Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, and Limongi 2000, Power and Gasiorowski 1997;
Shugart and Carey 1992; Shugart and Mainwaring 1997; Von Mettenheim 1997). The
key independent variable in these studies is a dummy – “presidential versus parliamentary
government” – and the dependent variable is either the duration or survival of democratic
constitutions. Looming large in this literature is the contention that presidentialism is
inferior to parliamentarism, based on claims about regime stability, a position strongly
advocated by Linz (1994).
Those works have definitely broadened our knowledge of the political
consequences of different executive types and our understanding of the role of institutions
in shaping political outcomes. Yet if political scientists wish to deepen their
understanding of presidential government, they must focus on new questions. In
particular, scholars need to be concerned with more precise, smaller issues than the big
question whether presidentialism is less conducive to democratic stability than
parliamentarism. Hence, much remains to be done. This paper endeavors to further the
analysis of comparative presidentialism by focusing on how presidents use their cabinet
appointment powers to implement their policy-making strategies.
Presidents play a pivotal policy-making role in pure presidential systems such as
those found in Latin America and the US. Expectations about government performance,
therefore, center on the president’s ability to achieve his policy goals. So the first task
awaiting a president is to choose a strategy to attain these goals. Typically, presidential
constitutions offer chief executives two basic strategies: they can seek their policy goals
either through statutes or through executive prerogatives. Intimately linked to this task is
the choice of the best means available for the tactical implementation of such strategies.
To implement their policy-making strategies, presidents resort to constitutional powers –
one of the most important of which is their appointment powers – and para-constitutional
devices (Riggs 1988), such as party, ideology and cooperation agreements. In this paper I
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