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serve few terms, they may be less worried about re-election and making unpopular
policy.
Therefore, presidents with strong constitutional powers should be able to advance
structural reform more so than presidents with weak constitutional powers. First:
Hypothesis 6: The strength of the president's veto powers has a positive effect on
structural reforms
Since proactive powers allow presidents to change the status quo, and since there
is some variation among decree powers, we should see a higher level of reform with
stronger proactive powers:
Hypothesis 7: The strength of the president's decree powers has a positive effect
on structural reforms
Interaction Effects
The effect of some of the institutional variables may also be conditioned by partisan
variables. Furthermore, there may be an interaction effect among partisan variables.
First, since both presidential-legislative congruence and legislative cohesion are
hypothesized to positively affect reforms, their interaction should be positive as well. A
high degree of presidential-legislative congruence combined with a high level of
cohesion in the legislature should lead to greater reforms:
Hypothesis 8: The interaction of presidential-legislative congruence and
legislative cohesion has a positive effect on structural reforms
Convention