Governing Coalitions in the Kirchners' Argentina

From Hegemony to Disarray: Building (and Re-building) Governing Coalitions in the Kirchners’ Argentina Matthew E. Carnes and Rodrigo Zarazaga Working Paper # 14 Presented at the 2009 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil June 11-14, 2009. 1 Since 2003, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner have catapulted to the head of the Peronist party in Argentina, enjoying consecutive electoral victories to the nation’s presidency and as recently as 2007 seeming unrivaled for power. However, in the past year, their hegemony underwent a surprising reversal; their super-majority in the congress saw unprecedented defections, culminating in a loss on a crucial vote on agricultural export taxes in July 2008. Subsequently, defectors have begun organizing for upcoming mid-term congressional elections in an effort to unseat the Kirchners. However, a countervailing trend has seen a new group of congressional leaders “defect-into” the Kirchner coalition. 1 What explains the meteoric rise and seeming fall of the Kirchner coalition? When do congressional politicians cede nearly all legislative power to the presidency – as the Argentine congress did in the years 2004-2007, by allowing Nestor to govern by decree and granting him budgetary “superpowers” – and when do politicians choose to defect or vote contrary to the presidency – as has occurred in increasingly under Cristina Kirchner in the past year? This paper seeks to build a political explanation of both Congressional acquiescence to strong presidential leadership and defection from those presidents’ coalitions. It uses legislative votes on controversial measures as a hard test of coalition membership, and thus examines the dynamics of coalition formation and defection. 2 The case of Argentina is viewed by scholars as an example of “weak institutionalization” of both democratic and party structures (Levitsky 2003; Levitsky and Murillo 2005). The Argentine executive 1 We use the term “coalition” here in a loose sense, meaning the group of legislators upon whom the executive can rely for support on votes taken in the Congress. Argentina has a presidential system, obviating the need for essential coalition- building to form a government as occurs in parliamentary democracies. Nevertheless, given the many divisions in Argentine politics, including within the governing Peronist party, executives rarely enjoy absolute majorities in the Congress, and thus must seek to cultivate a “coalition” of loyal legislators in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. 2 Recent research by Jones, Hwang, and Micozzi (2009) also employs roll-call voting data to study the Argentine congress. It finds that these votes “can be successfully accounted for by a one-dimensional spatial model,” with voting separating “deputies into government and opposition camps based on their partisan affiliation, with the governing party (also the majority in the Chamber) functioning as a cartel that effectively controls the agenda in both a negative and positive manner” (75-76). Typically, the governing party does so alone – without allied parties in a formally-pacted coalition (92). Yet, examining particular votes reveals that individual opposition-party legislators have chosen to ally themselves repeatedly with the governing party – an outcome largely ignored by Jones et al. This paper seeks to explain why individual legislators choose to make such a decision to join or defect from the governing party’s “coalition.” 1 has long exercised strong dominance over the legislative branch (Zarazaga 2004). In more recent years, particularly since the return of democracy in 1983, successive presidents have accrued additional constitutional powers, first as a means to deal with economic emergencies, and later as a more regular means of manipulating the federal budget. Despite post-authoritarian reluctance to give strong powers to the presidency, diverse leaders from Carlos Menem to Nestor Kirchner have successfully acquired concessions from congress that gave them near complete control over the nation (Carnes and Zarazaga 2007; Ferreira and Goretti 1996). The Argentine federal system, in which taxes are collected by the federal government and disbursed to the provinces, with significant central government discretion, further enhances the power of the presidency. This concentration of power in the presidency has been characterized by O’Donnell (1992) as “delegative democracy,” and Carlos Nino (1992) has argued that Argentina has the most extreme form of Presidentialism in the world. Several authors have questioned the consequences of such strong, unbridled presidentialism for the functioning of democracy (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997, Linz and Valenzuela 1994). Similarly, the Peronist party – from which both Menem and Kirchner come – is also weakly institutionalized. It has been subject to dominance by charismatic leaders, on the one hand, and has cultivated a remarkably shifting set of supporters during its history, on the other. Traditionally elected by unionized industrial workers and rural agricultural sectors, it has in more recent years sought to attract the urban poor through clientelistic vote-buying (Levitsky 2003) as well as the unemployed and piqueteros through direct social transfer programs. In addition, it has been shifting its relationship to the rural sectors; where before it sought to support them with subsidies for exports, now it seeks to tax them to increase central revenues. Studying the changing relationship between the presidency and congressional coalitions in Argentina thus promises to enhance our knowledge of processes of democratic consolidation in contexts of weak institutions and party membership. We employ a hard measure of congressional support or opposition to the president – votes on controversial bills before the congress – as a test of coalition membership. This allows us to detect ongoing membership changes, and directs our attention to the particular calculus of those congressional leaders who make the costly political decision to join or defect from the coalition. In addition, it shows when a legislator’s party label may obscure more than it reveals – for the Kirchners have been weakened as nominally PJ legislators abandon them on votes and strengthened when members of other parties join them (such as the so-called “Radicales- K”). The fact that some legislators choose to do so repeatedly, effectively joining the Kirchner coalition, is at the heart of the puzzle that motivates this paper. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it offers a theory of coalition formation based on the competing political interests of coalition members seeking to further their individual political careers, on the one hand, and in pursuing transfers of revenues to their home provinces, which are centrally-determined in Argentina’s federal system, on the other. Second, it describes the Kirchner strategy of coalition- building and maintenance that led to the couple’s hegemonic dominance of both the Peronist party and Argentine politics between 2003 and 2007. Third, it employs roll-call data on four politically salient votes in the past year, in order to test the theory and chart the challenge faced by the Kirchners since the desertions began next year. It highlights the political calculations of the various defectors (and new members) of the Kirchner coalition. Fourth, it returns to an analytic narrative to further explicate the process of political change in Argentina during the presidency of Cristina Kirchner, the period in which the critical defections have occurred. This permits finer-grained analysis of the particular legislative initiatives and the interests and behavior of defectors and potential defectors. The paper concludes with a final, fifth section that points to the implications of this project for presidential-legislative relations in cases beyond that of Argentina, as well as the future prospects for democracy in Argentina. A Theory of Presidential-Legislative Coalition Building When will legislators choose to forego exercising their legislative authority – as occurred increasingly between 2003 and 2007 under Nestor Kirchner – and when will they choose to re-assert their authority to block presidential initiatives – as has happened more recently under Cristina Kirchner? How can we understand coalition-joining and desertion under strong presidencies in weakly- institutionalized democracies? We locate the answer to these questions in fiscal federalism (and the manipulations that can occur under it when presidents achieve expanded budgetary powers) and the concentration of political opportunities in the focal-point figure of the president. The crucial feature of our theory is the ability of the executive to deliver an acceptable combination of financial resources to coalition members’ home provinces and political resources to the member to ensure re-election or further advancement in their political career. Strong identification with the president by a particular legislator can attract significant support and resources, but also may come at a political cost if the president takes actions that anger the representatives’ constituencies. We focus our attention on the interests and behaviors of legislators, given different strategies pursued by the executive. We understand legislators as individually rational and self-interested, seeking to maximize their likelihood of re- election or further advancing their political careers. Fiscal federalism in Argentina gives the central government the authority

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