From Hegemony to Disarray: Building (and Re-building) Governing Coalitions in the Kirchners’

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.

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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.”

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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 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 to collect tax revenues from throughout the national territory, and then disburse funds back to the provinces. Historically, this has been carried out through two political negotiation processes: first the budget, in which the executive proposes spending programs, and second through the legislative negotiation and voting process, in which members of congress can propose amendments and redirect funding toward their home provinces and away from rivals. Provincial governors have frequently played a large role in the first process, lobbying the executive for transfers and promising political support or opposition in

future electoral cycles. Legislators have traditionally taken up the second process, exercising both oversight on the budget and making changes to it.

However, Nestor Kirchner was able to capitalize on the economic crisis of 2001-2002 to win unprecedented legislative authority to emit “decrees of necessity and urgency” (DNUs). While these

DNUs were legally subject to congressional review, until 2007 the Peronist-dominated Congress never acted to assemble an oversight committee. The popular cry of “ que se vayan todos,” directed in particular at legislators, made for a timid Congress and bolstered Kirchner’s sense of a popular mandate in governing by decree (Godio 2006). Later, Kirchner was granted further budgetary

“superpowers,” allowing him to modify the budget at will after its approval, and thus target spending in such a way as to maintain his coalition of supporters. He benefited from rising commodity prices for Argentina’s exports, especially soya, which provided him with surging state revenues; he complemented this with an undervalued exchange rate that facilitated sales overseas. The largesse helped the government cultivate a coalition made up of two sets of actors with very different economic interests: poor urban sectors that depend mainly on social programs and public employment, and rural and industrial sectors that depend mainly on subsidies, the exchange rate, and a favorable international context for export sales. In short, control of the fiscal reins gave

Kirchner unrivaled power over governors and legislators linked to these constituencies.

The fate of Cristina Kirchner, who succeeded her husband in the presidency, has been quite different.

The worldwide economic crisis of 2008 undercut state revenues from exports, and she has had to turn to other sources for revenues in order to maintain her coalition. Her first target was the agricultural export sector, for whom she raised export taxes, prompting protests and work stoppages. Next, she turned to the nation’s private pension system, choosing to nationalize its assets and thus fill the government’s coffers with years of workers’ savings. Finally, she promoted a capital repatriation bill, offering a tax amnesty for persons who repatriate undeclared offshore assets during

a six-month period, in an effort to reverse capital flight and inject new cash into the economy. Each of these moves proved controversial, and taken together they have reanimated challenges to the executive. After years in which presidential decrees were not only not voted upon, but were not even analyzed by the legislature, 2007 saw the return of highly contested legislative votes with uncertain outcomes. Cristina Kirchner discovered that while it was relatively easy to maintain a coalition of diverse economic groups under a favorable economic context, it was barely possible under an adverse one. And an even greater challenge has come from actors that see themselves as losers, who have sought to create new political alternatives, encouraging former Kirchner allies to defect and represent their interests.

To summarize, we argue that while the economic growth of 2003-2007 allowed federal largesse and induced legislative quiescence, the post-2007 period has made choices about coalition membership more complicated. Our theory seeks to elaborate the various strategies of both Peronist and opposition politicians.

We hold that Peronist politicians had many reasons to join and remain in the governing coalition under Nestor Kirchner. Even members of factions not aligned with Kirchner found their personal and provincial interests in sync: they could ensure transfers of resources from the generous state to their home provinces, avoiding haggling in Congress by bargaining directly with the president. And simultaneously they could advance their political careers by cultivating ties through loyal voting on the powerful President’s initiatives, especially given that Kirchner seemed likely to remain in office over an expanding time horizon.

However, three factors shaped desertions from the Kirchner coalition. First, the international economic decline meant that fewer resources were available for the provinces, and the executive had to choose which sectors to privilege. This immediately created some sectors that were more

likely to gain and others to lose. To the extent that these sectors of losers are able to mobilize, they will be able to induce their representatives to defect from the official coalition. Second, the

Kirchners decided to target the agricultural export sector to provide much-needed state revenues.

Thus, we expect legislators from agricultural provinces to have incentives to oppose the Kirchners, especially on initiatives that threaten their home exporters. Finally, the long-term designs of the

Kirchners to remain in office, alternating the executive between themselves, became not only increasingly clear but also increasingly uncertain. If in 2004 the Kirchners seemed undefeatable, by

2007 it was no longer clear that their dominance would be either tolerated or successful. In this context, we expect self-interested politicians with desires for the presidency or other national offices to look for opportunities to establish independent reputations and bases of support for electoral challenges. Where all three of these factors coincide – adversely affected provinces, with important export sectors, and nationally ambitious politicians – we should see the largest numbers of desertions from the Kirchner coalition.

Further, we expect a cascading pattern of defections. As the possibility of the government’s electoral defeat increases, Peronist governors and mayors will defect from the Kirchner coalition to support the competing candidates that seem to have the best chances in national elections. Recognizing that earlier supporters get better promises and rewards, the Kirchners will seek to give greater benefits to legislators who remain loyal, and impose higher costs on those who leave their coalition, in a bid to prevent massive defections. Competing dissident Peronist figures likewise will make promises to future allies if they will join them.

These dynamics can only be understood in the context of a very weakly institutionalized party. The

Kirchners were able to control the Peronist party, imposing discipline on its members without any control from above by party leadership. But since their resources shrank, they have lost this dominance and the party has split into two competitive factions – each claiming to be the true heirs

of Peron’s legacy. The side that emerges victorious will have to seek control through the only existing source of discipline in the Peronist party: cash (and of course cash itself is in short supply at this point).

Similar provincial and political dynamics existed for the group of politicians known as “Radicales-K,” members of the Radical party who had aligned themselves with Nestor, and later Cristina, Kirchner.

To the extent that their home regions saw resources from the central government and were not brutally targeted for agricultural export taxation, they had strong incentives to remain in the Kirchner coalition. In addition, the Radicales-K had undertaken a costly choice in aligning themselves with the

Kirchners, effectively joining their fates to that of Nestor and Cristina, and jeopardizing their ties to their political party base. Thus, we expect them to be less likely to defect from the Kirchner coalition.

Finally, long-standing members of the Kirchners’ opposition have few incentives to change from their political strategy, especially given the weakened financial status of the federal government and the growing tenuousness of the Kirchners’ hold on power. Nevertheless, we predict that the defections into the Kirchner coalition will occur when credible promises can be made that home regions of these legislators will remain priorities for the state’s transfer of resources, or alternatively when new regional or provincial coalitions form that would benefit from ties to the Kirchner machine.

In short, our theory suggests that Argentina’s system of fiscal federalism created incentives and opportunities for a growing Kirchner coalition during the flush years of economic growth, and that increased presidential powers provided the possibility to overcome problems of legislative bargaining by concentrating budgetary discretion in the executive. However, the changed economic situation of

2007 and beyond has meant that a generous state can no longer underwrite the coalition. The

Kirchners’ decisions to turn to the agricultural export sector for resources, and to seek further continuation in office with Nestor likely to run as a candidate for senator in the province of Buenos

Aires, present threats to the financial and political interests of many politicians. The following sections seek to test these hypotheses with data on legislative votes during the government of

Cristina Kirchner.

Understanding the Kirchner Hegemony in 2007-2008 Argentina

In 2007, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner won the Presidential election with more than 45 percent of the votes. Since the gap with the second candidate3 was greater than ten percent, she did not even need a second round to achieve victory. In addition to winning the national election, she also achieved a clear majority in both legislative chambers. In contrast with her husband’s electoral victory in 2002, which he won with only 22 percent of the votes (because Menem – the nearest competitor – withdrew from the second round), Cristina came to power with a far greater level of support and legitimacy than had her husband. Her victory was seen as the cornerstone for the growing Kirchners’ hegemony. It was a hegemony confirmed by the weakness of the opposition parties – none of them won more than 24 percent of the votes – and in particular of the Radicals

(UCR), who for the first time in their history were not even able to present a candidate.

In the chamber of deputies, the Kirchners clearly had dominance. They had 150 of the 257 representatives; but with allies such as the so-called “Radicales-K,” they could count on the support of more than 160 representatives to pass their legislative bills. These were very comfortable numbers for the governing party, given that only 129 representatives are necessary for a majority. In the Senate, their hegemony was also very clear, as the Kirchners could count on the support of 46 out of 72 senators.

3 Elisa Carrió of the Coalición Cívica won 23 percent of the votes.

Given this Congressional make-up, Cristina Kirchner was initially able to pass important laws with no real bargaining, and to use decrees without complaint from Congress. From the beginning of her term until July 2008, she could count on any bill she proposed to win, on average, the support of 155 representatives and 46 senators. Only one week after assuming power, she was even able to get approval for the controversial Law of Economic Emergency, which, paradoxically, she had opposed while she was a senator. In the chamber of deputies, the controversial law received 134 votes in favor and 95 against, and in the senate, after a failed first attempt, the law received 47 votes in favor and only 20 against.

Besides being able to get Congress to approve whatever she needed, Cristina Kirchner was able to govern by decree without raising many critiques. In 2008 the President issued over 1,900 decrees and 3 DNUs. Many of those decrees were used to assign funds to the Provinces as the Law of

Economic Emergency allowed. The main Argentine newspapers, La Nación and Clarín , repeatedly warned of the risks of the growing Kirchner hegemony, and of a Congress that lacked any real role at all (La Nación , 20 November 2007, 25 November 2007, 12 December 2007, Clarín 15 November

2007).

This seemingly unbreakable Kirchner hegemony was built on fiscal largesse made possible by high international prices for Argentina’s export commodities. The ample fiscal surplus allowed the

Kirchners to carry on expansive policies, increase spending, and maintain an artificially undervalued exchange rate, and thus bringing into their broad coalition different social sectors. By subsidizing food and transportation prices, forcing merchants to abide by official prices, and transferring resources to the unemployed, the Kirchners won the support of the CGT (the largest confederation of labor unions) and formal workers, the piqueteros movement, and the unemployed. By keeping an undervalued exchange rate, they were able to also cultivate the allegiance of the national export sectors such as the UIA (the largest union of industrial producers) and the rural sector.

Neal Richardson (2009) labels this coalition as a “new populist” one and accurately explains that while the old populism implied export restrictions, this new type is based on taxing exportation. A key element in this new type is the rising importance of soybean exportation. In contrast to beef and wheat, soybeans are not consumed in the domestic market, so their price increase does not affect the purchasing power of domestic workers. Revenues from soybean exportation thus allowed

Kirchner to subsidize the prices of wage goods and to increase fiscal spending. Rural sectors supported the system because the high international prices and the undervalued exchange rate allowed them to make large profits despite heavy taxation (soybean exports were eventually taxed at a rate of 35 percent).

Conscious of this broad coalition and dependent on discretionary transfers from the national executive, governors and mayors did not hesitate to show loyalty and support the President, and to push their representatives and senators to do the same. The budgetary superpowers that were granted to the executive with the Law of Economic Emergency allowed the government to spend 27 billion pesos, 25 percent more than the approved budget, without any legislative oversight or control

(La Nación , 31 January 2008). The normal method employed by the government was to underestimate the total tax income in the budget, thus allowing the executive to handle the

“surplus” in a discretionary way. This produced a long queue of governors and mayors at the Casa

Rosada begging for funds, which have traditionally been granted on the basis of demonstrated loyalty to the executive. The lack of an appropriate law of co-participation to regulate the flow of funds from the nation to the provinces, the fact that export taxes are not part of the federal funds sharing agreement (they are not “co-participables”), and the fiscal crisis of the provinces, all contributed to accentuate the situation. At the end of 2008, the provinces accumulated a debt of more than 93 billion pesos, three times the debt at the time of the economic debacle in 2001.

Four Critical Votes as the Turning Point for the Coalition

We employ data on four controversial votes as evidence of defections from party alignments.

Because voting for or against a legislative measure is a publicly observable signal of policy preferences, it represents potential costs (and benefits) to the individual politician. Public statements of support or opposition do not have the same force, and do not incur the same political costs or benefits, that votes do. Further, while politicians can remain silent on many policy issues in the press, their votes provide a measuring stick for their positions and political alignments. 4

We concentrate on four particularly controversial initiatives of the Cristina Kirchner government. 5

The first of these, and the only one in which she eventually lost, was Resolution 125, which dealt with agricultural retentions – taxes on export products, especially soya, that reached as high as 45 percent. Although the bill passed in the Chamber of Deputies, albeit with many defections from the

Kirchner coalition, it failed in the deadlocked Senate, where the deciding vote was cast by Julio

Cobos, Kirchner’s vice-president (a Radical-K, who effectively signaled his defection by this vote). In the weeks leading up to the vote on 17 July 2008, it provoked massive protests by agricultural producers and served as a focal point for opposition to Kirchner’s government.

Second, the privatization of Aerolineas represented a re-orientation of the nation’s recent market-oriented economic policy. Approved with an ample majority in the Senate, 46 to 20, on 3

September 2008 (Ybarra 2008), it was one of two measures undertaken in direct response to the struggling economy due to the worldwide crisis. Third, the re-nationalization of the country’s private pension system (a measure that at the time of its implementation under President Carlos Menem was seen as irreversible) proved equally controversial, passing with 46 votes in favor and 18 against

4 Abstentions and absences send a more ambiguous message; because they are harder to interpret, we choose to omit them from our analysis. 5 Her husband’s government governed nearly completely by decree (Carnes and Zarazaga 2007), so it does not provide comparable evidence of voting behavior by legislators.

in the Senate (and 160-75 in the Chamber of Deputies). Although justified by Cristina Kirchner as re- asserting state responsibility for pensioners who saw their retirements jeopardized by the economic crisis, the measure was also seen as a political move to bring in resources to the central government’s coffers. Finally, the capital repatriation bill sought to bring funds lost through capital flight back into the economy without penalty. Many portrayed this as granting immunity to tax- cheats and economic traitors, but the measure passed 42 to 27 in the Senate on 17 December 2008.

Thus, while Kirchner has not met with another legislative defeat, as she did on the bill for capital retentions, she still has faced significant challenges from the legislature, and defections have proliferated.

The pattern of defections is largely consistent with the theory presented above. We examine the major trends in defections by each of the types of legislator detailed in the previous section. Table 1 presents the vote totals on each of the controversial bills, while Tables 2 and 3 present the lists of defectors from both chambers of the Argentine congress. As can be seen, the defections by previously loyal Peronists happened most often on the capital retentions bill, but also with significant frequency on the capital repatriation measure. Two patterns stand out for this group. First, there is a geographic component to the Peronist defections, with the both senators from Santa Fe and Salta, and single senators from Neuquen, La Rioja, La Palma, Córdoba, and Catamarca abandoning the coalition on the agricultural tax initiative. All are provinces with significant rural agricultural production, which were likely to be hurt disproportionately by the new law. The defections by deputies have a similar pattern, with only one coming from the city of Buenos Aires. And further, among the defectors are politicians such as Reutemann and Sola, who have expressed their interest in contending for the presidency (Bullrich 2009). Thus, we see both the regional fiscal concerns and individual political concerns playing a role in these defections.

The second group of defectors, the Radicales-K who voted against the coalition, is made up of three senators, all from agricultural states.

The third salient group for analysis is the legislators who defected into the Kirchner coalition. The largest set of defections occurs around the two votes on nationalizations – of Aerolineas Argentina and the private pension system. The defectors-in come from the extreme south, and the City and

Province of Buenos Aires; the former because the rely on the national airlines to stay in contact with the country’s north, and the latter because the city of Buenos Aires is home to the non-unionized workers who would most benefit from the pension plan nationalization. Previously unincorporated into the pension system, but frequently attracted to the Peronists through their network of urban clientelism, these workers formed a support base for the measure. In addition, opportunistic politicians saw it as a moment to seize some of the Peronists’ support among this population by jumping on-board with the Kirchners’ initiative.

Thus, the voting evidence lends initial support to the hypotheses spelled out in the theory section of this paper. The next section of the paper presents an analytic narrative of the rise and fall of Cristina

Kirchner’s hegemony over the Argentine congress.

Detailing the Collapse of the Coalition – Defections and New Entrants

As described in section 2, the Kirchners’ solid coalition seemed to give them an unthreatened hegemony at the time Cristina became President. Congress’ behavior was taken as a reflection of their political dominance; the press often referred to the legislative branch as “just the secretary of the National Executive.” However, their political hegemony was based on an economic foundation that was more fragile than previously predicted. For example, while the undervalued exchange rate increases revenue for the state via taxes on exportation, it also increases the likelihood of inflation, and thus presents a threat to workers’ real income. The system also requires high international prices for commodities, especially for soybeans, to work. The advent of lower prices meant that the

government would have either to tax the rural sector more heavily (as they tried with resolution 125, regarding export retentions) and incur the risk of inviting its resistance, or to reduce fiscal spending, especially subsidies, at the risk of triggering popular social unrest.

When in 2008 Cristina Kichner was forced to accept a new international economic scenario with soaring commodities prices and increasing inflation, she opted to increase taxation on the rural sector instead of cutting fiscal spending. The dramatic image of President De la Rúa leaving the Casa

Rosada by helicopter in the middle of social unrest in 2001 was probably too fresh for her to try any kind of cut that could deprive the Kirchners of support from the lower classes and the mayors of

Greater Buenos Aires. However, the decision to tax rural exportation produced sustained protest and mobilization by the rural sector, and it was accompanied by unexpectedly broad social support.

Quite simply, the rural sector did not accept the tax increase and paralyzed the country–even put it on the edge of social clash. The government found itself in the awkward situation of excluding an actor that was part of the Kirchners’ social base of support. The majority of small rural producers had voted for Cristina Kirchner in 2007; while she lost in all the major cities, she was mainly elected with the vote of the urban lower classes and the rural sectors from the provinces. Yet, the new economic situation forced her to heavily tax her own constituency. In doing so, she was fracturing her coalition and threatening her hegemony - and the votes in Congress would soon show this.

When the rural sector mobilized against Resolution 125, which raised taxation on rural exportation to as high as 45 percent in certain cases, it complained that the measure was unconstitutional as it exceeded the powers granted to the executive. Cristina thus sent the resolution to Congress, which up to that point had always remained docile to her, in an effort to legitimize it. The Kirchners felt confident that they could count on loyal members in Congress to convert the ministerial resolution into law. However, for the first time during their two terms in office, that support would not be enough. The law failed after an agonizing tie-break vote in the Senate by the vice president, signaling

the beginning of a less docile Congress. Paradoxically, when the Kirchners finally needed the support of the Congress to counter accusations of anti-democratic maneuvering and rural mobilization, they found that Congress was now ready to exercise forcefully its democratic role.

Representatives and senators that supported the government found themselves between a rock and a hard place, especially those representing the provinces whose economies were dependent on rural production. If they voted for the Kirchner initiative, they would likely pay a high cost in term of voters hurt by the new taxation, but if they voted against, then they could suffer the effects of

Kirchner retaliation. The President tried to garner support from the senators by offering political and economic favors, and by promising important positions on the ballot for the next election to those whose terms were about to end. For example, Senator Silvia Gallegos changed her previous opinion to a favorable vote, apparently after receiving the promise that she would be a candidate for her province. Another curious case was that of Isabel Viudes, an opposition member from Corrientes who turned into a supporter when offered a Peronist candidacy. In addition, governors allied with the government used all possible means to exert pressure on their provincial representatives, to ensure that the flow of funds to their provinces would not be cut. The governor of Formosa, Gildo

Insfrán, was able to convince Senator Bortolozzi to cast a positive vote. Another example was

Senator Ada Maza, whose brother, the ex-governor of La Rioja, was implicated in a lawsuit. She switched to a positive vote after meeting Minister Alberto Fernandez.

However, if funds, legal help, and political promises made good rewards for loyal legislators, the costs of aligning with the Kirchners were also high. The mobilization of rural producers – supported by other social sectors – quickly resulted in some cases in large protests in front of the houses of

Kirchner coalition members from rural provinces. In short, if being loyal to the government meant resources and candidacies, it could also mean the end of a political career. Many representatives came to fear that that a favorable vote would impede them from ever coming back to their

hometowns and cities. For example, the Kirchnerist Senator Teresita Quintela voted against, since a favorable vote threatened to end both her career and that of her brother, who is a mayor of a rural producers´ city in La Rioja. Senator Rached from Santiago del Estero also voted against, as he intended to stand for election in his hometown in Santiago del Estero to be a mayor. The senators from Santa Fe, Reutemann and Latorre, abandoned the official bloc and voted against, because they represent the third largest agricultural producer province in the country and they have political aspirations. Proof of how unpopular it was to vote in favor of this bill was that most of the representatives and senators who did so needed police protection to go back to their provinces and to protect their houses. In Tucumán, Alberto Herrera, Alfredo Dato, and Germán Alfaro, all parliament members who voted in favor, were received with “escraches” (social protests against a particular politician). Díaz Bancalari in San Nicolás and Kunkel in Carhué, from agricultural cities in

Buenos Aires province, also suffered violent “escraches.” In Córdoba and Santa Fe, rural protesters threw paint and eggs at representatives’ and senators’ houses. The president of the Peronist bloc of representatives was received with a rain of eggs in his home province.

The defeat of Resolution 125 thus signaled the end of the easy times for the Cristina Kirchner administration. With growing popular discontent complicating recourse to executive decrees, and without the subservient Congress of the past, the Kirchner hegemony was at stake. Some representatives and senators seized the chance generated by the conflict with rural producers to abandon the official party and launch their own races for the presidency. The two most important cases were those of Senator and Representative Felipe Solá, who, after defecting from the official party, voted against the President on many other important issues, such as the law of capital repatriation and the nationalization of pension funds, and started their own blocs. Other senators and representatives with presidential aspirations, such as Senator Romero from Salta and

Senator Marin from La Pampa, also abandoned the official ranks. Following these principal figures,

many others defected to be part of new emerging dissident blocs that looked more promising than the Kirchners. The remaining Kirchner loyalists began to worry that they might be on a sinking ship.

In addition, the representatives for Santa Fe, Jorge Obeid, Walter Agosto, and Ariel Dalla Fontana can be considered recent defectors even though they did not vote against the government on any of the crucial bills considered here. In the case of these three representatives from the third largest agro- export province, their absences during the key votes can be taken as signaling their defection. In fact, on 24 February 2009 they announced that they were leaving the official bloc in the Chamber of

Deputies to join Reutemann’s dissident Federal bloc. 6 Senator Ramon Saadi is another case of a defector that never voted against the government but that clearly abandoned the official coalition after the Kirchner’s candidate’s defeat in the Catamarca governor’s election. Saadi obviously became aware of the political costs in his province of being part of the Kirchners’ coalition and jumped ship to join the dissident .

Interestingly enough, as many legislators defected out, some started to defect in. Since Kirchner could not resort to decrees as she and her husband had before (for fear of being branded

“undemocratic”), and she was losing the support of many of the Peronist members, she started to make more concessions to other members. Nine representatives, previously members of the ARI, formed a new bloc called “Solidaridad e Igualdad,” and decided to vote with Kirchner on several initiatives. While the government could not take their support for granted, they voted in favor of important laws such as the nationalizations of the pension funds and of Aerolineas Argentinas. And more recently, Cristina Kirchner issued a decree for 30 percent of the revenues from soybean exportation taxes to be distributed among the provinces–a measure that has long been requested and that was taken before the upcoming congressional elections, but only when the support from provinces was clearly vanishing.

6 Without similarly clear signs of political conflict, we do not interpret other abstentions or absences as a sign of defection.

The incorporation of new allies was crucial in allowing the government to pass all its initiatives in the chamber of deputies. Despite numerous defections, the official party can still count on the vote of

128 representatives. However, this is one less than a majority, and clearly a less comfortable margin for a government that used to count on 160 votes only two years ago. In the senate, the numbers were left even more tenuous after the terrible defeat of the taxation proposal. The Kirchners can only count on 36 votes now, ten less than two years ago. Seeking to preserve at least a minimal majority in the legislature before all state resources are depleted, Cristina Kirchner moved elections from November to June of 2009, ostensibly to better deal with the worldwide economic crisis. Her husband stated the situation even more clearly: if Cristina does not win a majority, she will not be able to govern, and the nation “will fall once again into the void and crisis of 2001” ( La Nación , 28

April 2009). Invoking the threat of chaos, the Kirchners seek to both stave off defections by legislators and encourage voters to elect representatives that will support Cristina’s government’s initiatives.

In prosperous times, the superpowers effectively functioned as a recruitment tool of different sectors and their representatives, and that made the congress submissive body to the executive. The end of such times threatens the “coalition of the abundance,” reactivating the congress as an arena of active political debate. While the Kirchners have been able to get most of their important initiatives passed, as the economic situation deteriorates, it seems very likely that they will find it even harder to keep their coalition of exporter interests and lower classes cemented. The fragmentation of such interests is going to be increasingly reflected in the congress over the next two years, as presidential elections approach and no politician wants to irritate her own constituency and much less be part of the losing party.

Conclusion

This paper has presented a theory of presidential-legislative coalition-building in weakly- institutionalized democracies. As a result, we have been able to better explain the pattern of defections and new memberships from the coalition supporting Cristina (and implicitly, Nestor)

Kirchner in Argentina. The crucial feature of the model 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.

This study suggests that the critical turning-point in the Kirchner coalition was the winning of budgetary superpowers. In the short-term, these financial powers won the Kirchners the complete quiescence of the legislature as government was carried out almost completely by executive decrees.

As long as they could channel resources to their supporters, they faced no significant challenge to their governance. However, when the prices of export commodities began to fall, they had access to fewer resources, and chose to begin taxing agricultural exporters to pay for their other spending.

This led coalition members from agricultural provinces to defect, as they sought to preserve their local electoral support. Budgetary superpowers had made the Kirchners the exclusive suppliers of state resources; they also made them the main target for dissatisfaction when they could no longer provide sufficient benefits to all.

In short, this paper suggests that the arrogation of legislative powers to the executive is a risky strategy, even in the strong presidential systems of Latin America. Coalitions built in this way are sensitive to changing availability of resources, and to the diverse demands of regions within federal systems. Without the ability to dole out both economic and political patronage, presidencies are vulnerable to defection and electoral defeat. The fate of the Kirchners in Argentina remains to be

seen, but the problems they have faced in recent months suggest that their desire to create a supermajority that would remain docile to their direction may have backfired.

Table 1: Voting on Key Legislative Measures, Argentine Legislature 2007-2008

125 Aerolineas AFJP Capital Retenciones Argentinas Nationalization Repatriation

Senate For 36 46 46 42 Against 36 20 18 27 Abstain 0 0 1 1 Absent 0 5 7 3

Defectors 12 0 3 7 Defectors-IN 1 2 3 1

Chamber For 131 152 160 131 of Against 122 84 75 104 Deputies Abstain 2 1 2 0 Absent 3 7 19 20

Defectors 23 3 8 16 Defectors-IN 3 9 7 2

Sources: Author’s calculations based on La Nación (various dates) and roll call voting records from the Argentine Congress, obtained from http://www.diputados.gov.ar/ and http://www.senado.gov.ar/ .

Table 2: Defections Out From and Into the Kirchner Coalition (Senate)

Senators FPV Defectors Out (voted UCR-K Defectors Out Defectors - IN (voted Vote against) (voted against) for)

125 Retenciones Corregido (Catamarca), Sanchez (Corrientes), Viudes (Corrientes) Urquia (Cordoba), Marín Verani (Rio Negro), (La Palma), Quintela (La Rached (Santiago del Rioja), Lores (Neuquen), Estero) Escudero (Salta), Romero (Salta), La Torre (Santa Fe), Reutemann (Santa Fe)

Aerolineas Viudes, Diaz (Tierra Argentinas del Fuego), Martinez (Tierra del Fuego)

AFJP Escudero, Romero Sanchez Viudes, Diaz, Martinez Nationalization

Capital Repatriation Corregido, Escudero, Sanchez, Rached Viudes Romero, La Torre, Reutemann

Source: Roll call voting records from http://www.senado.gov.ar/ .

Table 3: Defections Out From and Into the Kirchner Coalition (Deputies)

Diputados Vote FPV Defectors Out (voted against) Defectors IN (voted for) 125 Retenciones Acuña (Neuquén), Albarracin (Mendoza), Viudes (Corrientes), Baladron (La Pampa), Barrionuevo Lorenzo (Cd de BA), (Catamarca), Brillo (Neuquen), Camaño Macaluse (Buenos Aires) (Buenos Aires), Comelli (Neuquen), Daher (Salta), Garcia (La Pampa), Halak (Cordoba), Heredia (Cordoba), Katz (Buenos Aires), Lozano (Cd de BA), Montero (Mendoza), Montoya (Cordoba), Oliva (Santiago del Estero), Patoriza (Catamarca), Petit (Entre Rios), Sola (Buenos Aires), Thomas (Mendoza), Velarde (Santiago del Estero), Villaverde (Buenos Aires), Zavallo (Entre Rios) Aerolineas Barrionuevo, Oliva, Velarde Belous (Tierra del Fuego), Argentinas Benas (Santa Fe), Bisutti (Cd de BA), Garcia Mendez (Cd de BA), Gonzalez (Cd de BA), Gorbacz (Tierra del Fuego), Lorenzo, Naim (Buenos Aires), Raimundi (Buenos Aires) AFJP Arriaga (Rio Negro), Halak, Montero, Belous, Benas, Bisutti, Nationalization Pastoriza, Rossi (Rio Negro), Sola, Gonzalez, Gorbacz, Thomas, Velarde Lorenzo, Raimundi Capital Repatriation Albarracin, Barrionuevo, Bonasso (Cd de Lorenzo, Macaluse BA), Camaño, Daher, Garcia, Halak, Katz, Lozano, Montero, Montoya, Rossi, Sola, Thomas, Velarde, Villaverde

Source: Roll call voting records from http://www.diputados.gov.ar/ .

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