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Rethinking Presidentialism: Challenges and Presidential Falls in Author(s): Kathryn Hochstetler Reviewed work(s): Source: Comparative , Vol. 38, No. 4 (Jul., 2006), pp. 401-418 Published by: Ph.D. Program in of the City University of New York Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20434009 . Accessed: 16/07/2012 17:27

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http://www.jstor.org RethinkingPresidentialism

Challenges and Presidential Falls in SouthAmerica

Kathryn Hochstetler

Since the South American countries returned to civilian in the 1970s and 1980s, twenty-threepercent of theirelected presidentshave been forced to leaveoffice before the end of their terms. This striking rate of early presidential exits has received little systematic attention, although it should be central in debates about the quality of and possible instability in presidential systems. Why and how do South Americans demand theirpresidents leave office early? Since 1978 themost serious challenges have come from civilian actors, in the , on the streets, or both together.The challenged presidentswere more likely to be personally implicated in scandal, to pursue neoliberal , and to lack a congressional majority than their unchallenged counterparts. The presence or absence of street protests then played a cen tral role in determining which presidents actually fell.

Presidentialism and Presidential Fails

The contrast between presidential and parliamentary regimes is one of the fundamental dichotomiesof comparativedemocratic politics, with perennialdebates aboutwhich is more stable or more democratic.' This article looks only at presidential regimes, since its central dilemma of early ends to terms is only possible in presidentialism. It departs from Sartori's classic definition that a regime is presidential "if and only if the head of i) results from popular , ii) during his or her pre-established tenure cannot be discharged by a parliamentary vote, and iii) heads or otherwise directs the that he or she appoints."2 Linz points out two features that are common to all presidential systems: a directly elected president enjoys individual democratic legiti macy and is elected for a rigidly fixed term.3 These definitions form the consensual foundation formost ensuing investigations of presidentialism and its effects. In contradictionto theseexpectations, the regularemergence of challengersdemand ing that presidents leave office early suggests that direct in South America do not consistently give presidents legitimacy that lasts as long as it should. This study con siders only presidents who were selected by a popular vote of their populations and thus at one time possessed evidence of their individual electoral legitimacy to be the head of

401 Comparative Politics July 2006 state and government. Of the forty such presidents whose terms were over by the end of 2003, sixteenof them (fortypercent) faced challenges to their remainingin office for theirfull terms,and nine (twenty-threepercent) of their"fixed" termsended early (see Table 1). Presidents in and have also fallen since 2003, and President Chavez inVenezuela has narrowly survived challenges to his government. Given these developments, it is obvious that South American presidents can not assume they will hold a given and fixed term of office. The term "presidential fall" is used here to identify all the times elected presidents leftoffice before theirterms were completed,whether they resignedor were impeached or otherwise forced out of office. "Challenges" involve concrete action to convince the president to resign or to force him out early. The various challenges and falls are consid ered together on the theoretical ground that they are all equally deviations from the expected fixed termof presidentialism. All these cases resulted in new civilian presidents in short order. Presidential falls as discussed here are changes within the regime, not regime breakdowns. Uniformly, vice presidentsand legislativeleaders took constitutionalterms as presidentsafter presiden tial falls. Two challenges did include military protagonists Ecuador in 2000 and in 2002 but they also quickly resulted in civilian regimes. The civilian natureof presidentialfalls is especiallynotable sincenoncivilian actors also ineffective ly threatened presidents during this time. Linz's expectation that themilitary would step in as a moderating power to handle conflicts between the executive and legislature is ratherdramatically disproved.4 Consequently, the focus is on challenges to presidents from civilian actors, in the leg islature or in . Many studies of presidential falls in South America have focused on elite negotiations that bring down presidents in one country, treating street protests as background pressure on elites.5 Others, however, give central place to the role of mass protest in a specific presidential fall.6While these articles provide valuable information about the unfolding of crisis moments, the study of presidential falls needs to be advanced in two ways in order to understand the general phenomenon in South America and perhaps beyond. First, all of these studies suffer from the methodological error of selecting on the dependent variable from the standpoint of understanding the causes of presidential falls. They select cases because the presidents fell and lack corresponding cases where presi dents remain in office whole terms despite efforts to throw them out. This article uses a tool from studies of social movements, protest event analysis, to correct this method ological problem. Protest event analysis uses media sources to document the occurrence of unconventional forms of collective action as a first step in assessing the causes or consequences of that action.7 This technique is used to document all of the sixteen times since 1978 that South American mass publics or congressional elites have moved to demand early ends to presidential terms (see Table 2). Most of the failed efforts are largely forgotten since they did not succeed, but they are as crucial in understanding

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Table 1 Fates of Popularly Elected South American Presidents, 1978-2003

Country President Term Minority Scandal Neoliberal Outcome Alfonsin 1983-1989 Yes No No Resigned Menem I 1989-1995 Yes No Yes Completed MenemII 1995-1999 Yes Yes Yes Completed De laRia 1999-2001 Yes No Yes Resigned Bolivia PazEstenssoro 1985-1989 Yes No Yes Completed PazZamora 1989-1993 Yes Yes Yes Completed Sanchezde Lozada 1993-1997 Yes Yes Yes Completed Sanchezde Lozada 2002-2003 Yes No Yes Resigned Collorde Mello 1990-1992 Yes Yes Yes Impeached;resigned; convicted CardosoI 1995-1998 Yes No Yes Challenged;completed CardosoII 1999-2002 Yes No Yes Challenged;completed Aylwin 1990-1994 Yes No Yes Completed Frei 1994-2000 Yes No Yes Completed Turbay 1979-1982 No No No Completed Betancur 1982-1986 Yes No Yes Completed Barco 1986-1990 Yes No No Completed Gaviria 1990-1994 No No Yes Completed Samper 1994-1998 No Yes No Challenged;completed Pastrana 1998-2002 Yes Yes Yes Completed Ecuador FebresCordero 1984-1988 Yes No Yes Challenged;completed Borja 1988-1992 Yes No Yes Challenged;completed DurdnBallen 1992-1996 Yes Yes Yes Completed Bucaram 1996-1997 Yes Yes Yes Voted"incapable" Mahuad 1998-2000 Yes Yes Yes Civil/militarycoup; voted "desertion" Rodriguez 1989-1993 No No Yes Completed Wasmosy 1993-1998 Yes Yes Yes Challenged;completed Cubas 1998-1999 No Yes Yes Resignedfacing Belainde 1980-1985 No No Yes Completed Garcia 1985-1990 No Yes No Completed FujimoriI 1990-1995 Yes No Yes Impeached;completed FujimoriII 1995-2000 No No Yes Completed FujimoriIII 2000-2000 Yes Yes Yes Resigned,voted "incapable" SanguinettiI 1985-1990 Yes No No Completed Lacalle 1990-1995 Yes No Yes Completed SanguinettiII 1995-2000 Yes No Yes Completed Venezuela HerreraCampins 1979-1984 Yes No No Completed Lusinchi 1984-1989 No No No Completed Perez 1989-1993 Yes Yes Yes Impeached;voted "desertion" Caldera 1994-1999 Yes No Yes Completed Chavez 1999-2000 Yes No No Completed

Note:This listdoes not includepresidents whose termsended early for reasons of illnessor death, nor presidents whose termshad not ended by 2003. The textand notes in thesection "Why Presidents are Challenged" explains how thecases were coded. presidential falls as the successful ones. There are three inductively identified reasons for challenges: the president's neoliberal economic policies, his personal involvement in scandal, and his minority status. In all forty presidencies, each of these is a risk factor for presidents who want to complete their terms, as challenged and fallen presidents dis proportionately shared these characteristics compared to the full set of presidents. Second, the presence or absence of street protests is central for the challenge out comes. While both political elites and mass publics have tried to remove presidents early, all successful mobilizations for presidential falls have included civil society actors demanding in the streets that presidents go.8 As Table 2 shows with its empty quadrant, all five efforts to remove presidents that took place exclusively in the legislature failed. These observations suggest that street protest is decisive at least in the final stages of presidential falls. Street protests by civil society actors, with or without parallel legisla tive action, appear to be the poder moderador (moderating power) of the new civilian regimes. They mark a reversal of earlier patterns, when the military played this role in the region, with its interventions often triggered by mass street protests.

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Table 2 Civilian Challenges to Popularly Elected South American Presidents, 1978-2003

Location of action Street Street and Legislature Outcome legislature President fell 1989 Argentina 1992 Brazil 1999-2000 Ecuador 1992-93 Venezuela 2001 Argentina 1997 Ecuador 2003 Bolivia 1998-99 Paraguay 2000 Peru President remained 1995 Brazil 1999 Brazil 1987 Ecuador in office 1991-92 Peru 1992 Ecuador 1994 Paraguay 1995-96 Colombia

The central role of mass protest in presidential falls suggests a need for further reflec tionon the roleof thepublic inpresidentialism. Studies of democraticconsolidation gen erally have been too quick to turn to institutions rather than state-society relations to explain political outcomes.9 Studies of presidentialism have been as well, despite the fact that one of the core features of presidential systems is the mandate the president receives from the populationin electoral form.10Discussions of presidentalismhave overlooked the ways that populations evidently can remove their mandate, a phenomenon that is becomingmore ratherthan less common furtherinto democratic consolidation. Most studies of presidentialism have departed from Juan Linz's classic work compar ing presidentialismand parliamnentarism.When Linz helped launchcomparative study of these systems in the 1980s, he was right to argue that institutions had been understud ied and needed to be given careful weight. 1 The ensuing institutional studies brought many insights. Elite institutional factors are clearly central in routine politics (seventy seven percent of recent presidents in South America did not fall) and numerous articles continue tomap out interesting areas of inquiry for this kind of politics. 12For nonroutine politics, however, institutionalanalyses are less helpful.l3Society-based challenges to presidentspresent a dilemma for routineinstitutional analysis, playing havocwith what Barbara Geddes identifies as the two standard simplifying assumptions for understand ingpolitics in democraticregimes: "first, thatofficials want to remainin office; second, that the best strategy for doing so is to give constituents what they want." 14 The explana tions for extraordinarypolitical outcomes such as presidential fallsmust include the public as an active participant, especially in resolving this contradiction.

Protest Event Analysis of Challenges to Presidents

Challenges are identified here through protest event analysis, which uses print media sources to track protest event occurrences, using standardized coding procedures.15 The challenge data presented here are based on twenty-five years of the newsletter Latin

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AmericanWeekly Report (LAWR).The WeeklyReport bills itself as providing"timely and concise risk-oriented briefing."'6 Thus, LAWR is very alert to protest events as well as to unusual elite activities such as impeachment processes. Because of its weekly for mat, it reports only the most important events, creating the usual event dataset biases toward more dramatic events. Since the topic of interest here is efforts to overturn presi dents, LAWR catches the relevant events. One issue in protest event analysis is determination of what counts as protest or, here, challenge.For civil society actors, this study focuses on reportedmass mobiliza tions that put crowds in the street. 17For congressional actions, it draws on reports of the schedulingof formal impeachmentproceedings or other concrete efforts to remove presidents.To determinewhether a given protestor congressionalaction actuallyaimed to eject a president, the reported aim in LAWR is taken. LAWR always stated straightfor wardly what the aim was, whether agrarian reform, higher wages, or, the demand of interest here, the president's fall. Observers of protest marches of thousands of people will understand that such characterizations inevitably brush over the different reasons why individuals take to the streets, but there is usually a preponderance of evidence about what brings the group together.

Why PresidentsAre Challenged

What characteristics separate the challenged presidents from their regional counter parts? An inductive assessment of the actual challenges shows that three themes moti vated virtually all of the campaigns to remove presidents early. For civil society actors, dissatisfaction with economic policies was the most common reason to challenge presi dents. Accusations of corruption, when linked to the figure of the president himself, were important to both sets of actors. who faced minority presidents also used challenges to fight out interbranch relations following the many formal changes in during this period. Predicted probabilities resulting from a logit model of the dependent variables show that the presence or absence of scandal has the largest impact on the probability of both a challenge to a president and a fall.

Economic Policies The regionalspread of market-orientedpolicies during this time period generated intense political and economic conflicts.'8 While some welcomed neoliberal policies, protests against them filled the streets of South American capitals repeatedly. Most of these protests did not become protests against presidents remaining in power. In all but two of the street-based challenging coalitions (Paraguay in 1998-99 and Peru in 2000) protest against the presidents' economic policies followed a charac teristic pattern in which months of antieconomic protests suddenly exploded into insis tence that the president must go. Thus seven months of continuous protests against De

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la Rua's economic policies in Argentina culminated in two weeks of calls for him to leavebefore he resigned.Ten presidents followingneoliberal policies were targetedby street-basedchallenges, while only one nonneoliberalpresident in thedataset (Alfonsin inArgentina in 1989) faced streetchallenges. In these challenges, the scale of the demand appears to be related to the actors involved.The street-basedmovements against presidents on economic groundswere most commonlyorganized by existing civil society organizations.Unions and students formed a core of all these mobilizations, with peak union organizations repeatedly in the forefront.When protests involvedonly unions and students,they focused on more specific economic demands.Broader mobilizations that actually insistedpresidents leave early always had additional participants, including individual citizens who were moved to join. Additional organizations varied by country, but other common partici pants were peasants, church organizations, and neighborhood groups. In Ecuador and Bolivia indigenous groups have been central players, while Brazil and Venezuela some times had professional associations. Business groups also supported all of the civil soci ety mobilizations up to and including the effort to remove Bucaram in 1997; since then they have only been a part of the challenges to Chavez inVenezuela. Challenged presidents were far more likely to follow neoliberal economic policies than security or populist policies by ten versus one.19This disproportionateresult is somewhat ameliorated by inclusion of the full set of presidents after 1978, as many more presidentsfollowed such policies. Of the thirty-oneneoliberal presidents, fourteen were challenged (forty-fivepercent), and eight fell (thirty-onepercent). These numbers are higher than the thirty-three percent of security-oriented presidents (three of nine) who were challenged and the eleven percent (one) who fell, but many presidents sur vived this risk factor. To complete the picture, there have also been antipresident protests in the one country of the region that has most clearly broken with neoliberal ism,Venezuela.

Corruption and Other Scandals and civil society actors often joined to challenge presidents when there was good evidence of corruption or scandal that involved the presidenthimself. Congresses initiatednumerous investigationsin such cases, using the resources and procedures of their branch of government. For the most part, legislators limited themselves to legal processes in their efforts to remove presi dents for corruption, and citizens supported their efforts. The formal impeachment process was the most common, initiated in nine of the eleven legislative challenges to presidents and threatened many more times.20 Yet most have and eventually used a variety of more or less constitutional removal procedures in these cases. Only the near-textbook Brazilian impeachment in 1992 actu ally went through all of the legal steps of impeachment, from investigation to impeach ment by one body to a final judgment by another. In several cases, congresses eventual

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ly chose removal processes that did not require the of impeachment, removingpresidents for desertion (Venezuelain 1993, Ecuador in 2000), mental inca pacity (Ecuador in 1997), and moral incapacity (Peru in 2000). The use of these kinds of procedures may seem quite removed from impeachment, which is often considered a specialnonpartisan legal removalprocess for specialpresidential wrongdoing. However, impeachment has always been "fundamentally a political process from beginning to end," making the distinctions among these kinds of removal less central.21 The Spanish translationof impeachment,juicio politico (literally,political judgment),makes the word's double meaning clear. Juicio politico can mean either the constitutional instruc tion that a political body, the legislature, judge the extraordinary case of legal removal of a political figure or judgments that are politically motivated. Bothmeanings are relevantto the recent legislativechallenges topresidents inSouth America. The Brazilian impeachment of Collor in 1992 is the best example of a fully constitutional process. The removal of Venezuela's Perez illustrates both meanings: while he was appropriately impeached and removed from office for his shady use of a $17 million slush fund, this impeachment was simply the last of five attempts made by a hostile to removehim over an eighteen-monthperiod. In addition,after Perez stepped down to wait for his trial, congress removed him permanently before it began, on the questionable ground that he had abandoned his office.22 Citizens often staged demonstrationsin supportof these congressionalefforts on corruption grounds. In the largest, millions of Brazilians insisted that Collor go. On the basis of unsystematic evidence from the Weekly Reports, evidence of personal corrup tion also seems to be related to low public opinion approval ratings, which contributed to streetprotests. Only eightpercent of Braziliansconsidered Collor's regime tobe good as he began his year of decline, while the Venezuelan Perez dropped to the historic low of six percent approval.23 Ecuador's Mahaud holds the bottom, with just two percent approval ratings as he was being challenged.24 The quick impact of corruption on public opinion can be seen in Peru, where Fujimori's approval rating dropped from forty-three to sixteen percent after a video showed clear corruption in his administration, despite the Peruvian public's long willingness to accept his abuses of power.25 It is challenging for analysts and for South American citizens to assess the overall incidence of corruption and scandal among the region's presidents. Accusations are nearly constant, and court action against a president is neither necessary nor sufficient to prove wrongdoing. The research strategy used here, which marks a president as per sonally corrupt when the charges are credible enough to appear as the major news story of the week in LMAWR,approximates the domestic level of belief that the president is cor rupt.26This belief, whether trueor not, is the possible foundationof challenges.The absence of reported corruption does seem to shield presidents. Only eight of twenty-six such presidents (thirty-one percent) were challenged, and only three presumably non corrupt presidents actually fell.27 Conversely, while action against corrupt presidents is sometimes swift, the larger set of cases shows thatmany presidents survive serious alle

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gationsof personalcorruption. Six of fourteen(forty-three percent) were not challenged at all during their terms, and only six were removed from office early.

Minority Presidents In legislatures,challenges were largelydirected at minority pres idents.Fourteen minority and twomajority presidentswere challenged.Opposition leg islatorswere eager to bring corruptioncharges against presidents who were personally implicated, as just discussed. In the absence of such reports, they usually invoked some kind of claim aboutunconstitutional presidential behavior with respect to congress or other institutions of government (Ecuador in 1987 and 1992; Peru in 1991-92; Paraguay in 1998-99). Many of these challenges tominority presidentswere clearly politically motivated. Ecuador provided several notable examples.An impeachmentattempt in 1992, for example, was justified by congressional objections to a on monetary reform and on Borja's reference to members of Congress as "layabouts."28 Ecuador's presidents were also notably unrestrained in their dealings with congress. Febres Cordero, who faced down a removal effort in 1987, had his congress tear-gassed and brought tanks to the court building to block several congressionally appointed judges.29 Publics were often indifferent to this kind of congressional challenge. A sharp rise in public approval after Fujimori's coup in 1992 was the most striking example.30 The dis banded congress' vote to impeach him was completely ignored. Paraguayans in 1999 did agree that Cubas had overstepped the boundaries of constitutional behavior, especially after the assassination of his vice president, and gathered "to protect the Congress build ing".3' Overall, presidents whose parties held a minority of congressional seats were more likely both to be challenged by civilian actors and to fall.32 This relationship holds even if themuch larger number of minority presidents in the region is considered. Of the thir ty-oneminority presidents in this study, fourteen (forty-fivepercent) were challenged and eight (twenty-six percent) fell. Of the rarer nine majority presidents, only two (twenty-two percent) were challenged, and only one (eleven-percent) fell. Fallen presi dent Cubas in Paraguay was the only president challenged by his own party's legislators from the outset, but the Colorado Party is so dominant there that politics often pits the party against itself.33 The other challenge was to Samper in Colombia in 1995-96; his party's majority control of congress and especially the investigative committee was cru cial in his remaining in office.34 In addition, three ex-presidents who were eventually tried for crimes committed during their presidencies-Garcia and Fujimori in Peru and Lusinchi inVenezuela-may have been able to avoid formal challenges while in office because theyhad congressionalmajorities. These experiences suggest thatpresidential challenge and fall are related to themajority or minority position of the president's party in the legislature and support arguments about the problematic and unstable intersection between presidential and multiparty systems.35 Nevertheless, it is not the only factor, as some majority presidents were challenged, and many minority presidents were not. The

408 KathrynHochstetler only two countries that had no challenges to presidents, Uruguay and Chile, also had no majoritypresidents.

Summary Neoliberal economicpolicies, personalcorruption, and minority statusall representrisk factorsfor SouthAmerican presidentswho want to complete theirterms in office. Table 3 summarizesthe predicted probabilities resulting from a logitmodel of the dependentvariables, challenge and presidential fall,which were calculatedusing CLARIFY36 Table 3 reports first differences in predicted probability on the dependent variables, which are calculated by varying the variables of interest from zero to one while holding the other independent variables at their modal values. The modal presi dent in the region during these years was a minority president who followed neoliberal economic policies and was not personally implicated in scandal. Such a president faced a 38.6 percent predicted probability of being challenged and a 16.5 percent predicted probability of falling.37 Presidents with a legislative majority or who did not follow neoliberal policies could count on a small reduction in their risk of being challenged. Forpresidents personally implicatedin scandal, in contrast,the predicted probability of facing a challenge jumped to 63 percent (38.6 plus 24.4). Scandal also greatly increased the predicted probability that a president would actually fall early, with the probability climbing to 48.4 percent (16.5 plus 31.9). The other independent variables vary in the predicted direction but do not have a large impact on the predicted probability of falls.

From Challenge to Fall: The Roles of Street Protest

As Table 2 indicates, the presence of a mobilized population demanding in the streets that the president leave appears to be a crucial determinant of the success of challenges. Legislators acting on their own were unable or unwilling to remove presidents. Street protest accompanied legislative action and, increasingly, was a phenomenon on its own inpresidential falls.

Street Protests and Legislative Challenges Mass protest played a central role in the outcomes of congressional challenges to presidents after 1978 in South America. As these challengesunfolded, legislatorsappeared to calculatewhether populationswere more likely to punish them for action or inaction against presidents who at one point commanded enough popular support to be elected to the highest office in the land. Large-scalestreet protests clamoring for the removalof presidentspersuaded legislators to act against them. Most important, they could move erstwhile supporters of the presi dent into the opposition. The driving force of the fear of punishment from voters was especially evident in Collor's impeachment in Brazil, where looming subnational elec tions sealed his fate. Members of congress not only voted to impeach, but hurried to do so before theelection.38

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Institutional action or inaction can also shape whether or not the public moves. In the same Brazilian case, a key supreme court vote required votes be made public, reducing Collor's ability to buy secretsupport, and congressionalinvestigations uncovered impor tant information that helped mobilize citizens.39 Other actors, such as themedia, can play the investigativerole, but institutionsretain key controlover theirown internalprocesses. In several other cases Venezuela in 1992-93, Ecuador in 1997, Paraguay in 1998-99, and Peru in 2000-street mobilizations also pushed legislatures to take action against presidents who had fairly clearly violated on the scale of the ' language of high crimes and misdemeanors. These examples illustrate the rise of meaningful politi cal accountability that can restrain South America's historically over-strong presidents. At the same time, some of the developments of this time period have primarily spot lightedthe ongoing weaknesses of democraticnorms, constitutionallanguage, and judi cial and investigative systems. In several cases where challenges failed Ecuador in 1987, Peru in 1991-92, and Paraguay in 1994-civil society failed to join the call to remove presidents who had almost certainly engaged in illegal behavior. More than fifty Colombian nongovernmental organizations put together a respected civil commission to accompany the attempted impeachment of Samper in 1995-1996, and business leaders tried to organize opposition, but they were unable to move people to the streets.40 In this case, Samper's majority party was able to stifle a congressional investigation, and the population never heard much of the evidence against him.4' The final image that emerges from these challenges is of a dialectical interaction between the challenges of legislatures and populations. This process could spiral into mutually reinforcing collaborative action that frequently was able to push presidents out of power, especially in response to scandal. When legislative action found no popular reaction, the challenge failed. In contrast, when popular outrage at presidents met no institutionalsupport, street-based challenges to presidentscould continueon theirown and often did so successfully.

Street-based Challenges to Presidents A second kind of challenge to presidents has taken place largely in the streets, although itmay include party allies in noninstitutional roles. This kind of challenge shows little attention to constitutional procedures and is settled throughdirect mediation between presidents and citizens. These challenges come from societies that are polarized against the state and result in academic studies

Table 3 Predicted Probabilities of Challenges and Falls

Challenge Fall Predicted probability of modal case 38.6 16.5 First differences in probability of a challenge varying: Neoliberal -11.3 -1.0 Scandal 24.4 31.9 Minority -15.7 -5.0

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that are similarly polarized. They are polarized in part because these protests have been driven largely by demands and accusations that do not clearly rise to the standard of impeachableoffenses. Unpopular and ineffectivepolicies arenot illegal. Street challenges to presidents provide some of the most striking images in recent South American politics. Television channels have shown continuous coverage of large crowds camped outside presidentialpalaces, demanding the president's resignation. Civil society challenges that were large enough to warrant notice in LAWR had at least thousands of participants, and no president fell in response to street mobilizations of less than 10,000. Yet some quite largemobilizations failed to remove presidents, although the largest failed protests were against Chaivez inVenezuela and may yet suc ceed.42 The more consistent requirement was persistence. No single day's outburst of protest persuaded a president to leave. Instead, protesters needed the conviction and organization to press presidents for days in a row, or sometimes at intervals for months. All the challenged presidents had time to respond by offering concessions or by hardeningtheir stances. Numerous presidentschose to defend theirpresidencies fromwhat they considered the blackmail of protesters. After minimal negotiations, they sent in police or even mili tary forces to clear the streets. The prevalence of violence on both sides is an important feature of these challenges and appears related to their success, negatively for presidents andpositively forprotesters. Most of the millions of street protesters over the decades marched peacefully. Nonetheless, incivility has been a regular part of civil society mobilizations, with most including violent acts. Leaders of all kinds lost control of most of the protests at some point. The Brazilian impeachment process stands out again as unusual, as it was the only one of nine successful challenges to presidents that did not involve violence of any kind. Riots, looting, and arson marred nearly all the others. Roadblocks, not usually legal but not inherently violent, were also regular parts of protest mobilizations in Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador. In several cases, violence went much further, as in the use of nail bombs in Bolivia in 2003 that killed several soldiers.43 The short-lived coups in Ecuador in 2000 and Venezuela in 2002 also were obvious peaks of unconstitutionali ty,with some actors in civil society showing a worrisome willingness to jettison civility altogether and to enlist military allies to push presidents out. The violence of protesters does not exist in a vacuum. Incivility was inflamed by state violence and repression. The levels of protester violence and the number of protesters killed by security forces clearly were associated. So far, Brazil and Ecuador have had unusually nonviolent challenges on the part of both protesters and security forces. During fivemobilizations forpresidential falls in the two countries,street protesters were violent only in Ecuador in 1997, and that challenge also involved the only protester death. The key role of security forces in determining levels of violence can be seen in the Ecuadorian coup in 2000. Itwas bloodless in large part because soldiers actually encour aged protesters to occupy the congressional building.44 At the other end of the spectrum,

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Argentina and Venezuela have had themost consistently deadly repression over this time period, with twenty-five killed in the Argentine mobilizations against De la Rula and up to forty-sixreported dead followingthe Venezuelan civil/military coup attemptin 2002.45 Earlier street challenges in 1989 (Argentina)and 1992-93 (Venezuela)also involved numerous injuries to protesters and sixteen deaths inVenezuela. Venezuela and Paraguay sharethe unhappy distinction of being the two locationswhere presidents'supporters and challengers clashed in the street, raising levels of violence in both. Paraguayan civil soci ety's challenge to Cubas in 1999 would otherwise have probably been peaceful. The largest number of deaths reported was in Bolivia in 2003, with as many as one hundred killed.46Only Chavez inVenezuela has surviveda challenge inwhich security forces respondedto protesters with significantuse of forceand numerous deaths. Presidents'other option is to negotiate and offer policy concessions. Such negotia tionswere difficult.Because of the amorphousnature of the streetprotests, presidents rarely found interlocutorswho could guaranteetheir followers' response to particular offers. Consequently, negotiations often proceeded by trial and error and were rarely successful. Cardoso in Brazil successfully made very minimal responses to the nonvio lent protests against him and waited for them to fizzle. The most striking instance of "negotiation" with the street came after De la Rua fell in Argentina, when protesters also were able to reject his first real successor, Rodriguez Saa. In subsequent months, many an was "openly assessed by the politicians in terms of its poten tial to provoke a caceroleo [peaceful protest of banging pots and pans]."47 Parties and legislatures play one of two roles in these scenarios. Many traditional parties seem to have concluded that their open support for street protests will under mine the challenges. In 2002 Paraguayan Colorado politicians trying to remove Cubas' replacement orchestrated protests that were purported to be by civil society organizations, only to have those organizations expose the protesters as fakes.48 Similarly, while Peronist party members in Argentina openly took credit for neigh borhood food riots, the Peronist leadership only secretly supported national chal lenges to De la Rua and found itself also under attack from the streets after replacing him.49Nonetheless, street-basedprotests by civil society often cruciallydepended on legislative inaction for success, as was also true in Argentina.50 In Bolivia, as well, Sanchez de Lozada reluctantly resigned only after his vice president and then parties in his governing coalition indicated that they could not support him.5' Street protesters often worked closely with new parties to which they had strong ties. The earliest prototypes were the 1995 and 1999 challenges to Cardoso in Brazil, led by theWorkers' Party (PT) and Democratic Labor Party (PDT). Both of these parties have ties to unions, and the PT has also had strong relationships with social movements. These mobilizations with their strong party orientation were able tomobilize less than a tenth of the participants of the cross-party mobilizations of 1992, however, and were unsuccessful in their aim of presidential fall. Similarly, there are now parties or party

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equivalents in Ecuador and Bolivia that are linked to indigenous, union, and other civil societyorganizations.52 They have beenmore successful.Despite thepresence of politi cal parties and even some congressional representatives, party and electoral logics are not dominant inmost of these protests. None of the challenges took place in the final year of a president's term. It is also worth noting that only three protest leaders Gutierrez in Ecuador, Lula in Brazil, and Toledo in Peru-eventually became presi dents, and all did so by standing in elections. Street challenges are problematic for democracy because of the levels of protester violence and the rare targeting of impeachable behaviors. Thus, Roberto Laserna, writ ing on the protest movements that removed Sanchez de Lozada in Bolivia in 2003, criti cizes "a populist conservative movement that articulates communitarian and statist nos talgias" and laments that democratic citizenship is seen as all rights and no responsibili ties.53 Valenzuela also worries that protests against presidents can lead to crises that threatenthe whole constitutionalorder.54 Most authors, including Valenzuela, emphasize that such protest movements arise out of the frustrations of what are now several decades of problematic and incomplete democracy.55 Also writing about Bolivia, but before the fall of Sanchez de Lozada, Laurence Whitehead summarizes a litany of concerns that lie behind many interpreta tions of this new round of challenges to presidents.

Behind thewhole movement lay the conviction thata generationof liberalizingreforms had failed to deliver tangible benefits to the majority of the people; that political parties of all stripes had become self-servingcliques incapableof solvingnational problems; that only direct action in defiance of pub lic authoritycould deliver anyworthwhile changes in governmentpolicy; thatall institutionalproce dures were devices to delay and frustrate public demands; and that any who held back from following this logic would lose out to those who acted first.56

To paraphrase Laverna, protesters have concluded that it is politicians who think democracy is all rights and no responsibilities. Seen in this light, the protests are democ ratic processes, with civil society seeking to have a voice where it has been roughly excluded or, as Lucero argues for the indigenous movements of Ecuador, simply engag ing in the historic process of constructing rights throughpolitical contestation.57 Whether Whitehead's observations are literally true in all the countries of South America in the first years of the twenty-first century, a question that is beyond the scope of this article, it is an undeniable fact that most South American countries have move ments that share these convictions and are acting on them.

Conclusion: Presidents,Legislatures, Publics, and Presidentialism

Challenged presidents share a set of probabilistic risk factors: personal implication in scandal, neoliberal policies, and minority status. At the same time, the dynamics of

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recent challenges to presidents and their outcomes appear to be closely related to the complicatedand less studiedphenomenon of streetprotest. The patternsof interaction among presidents, legislatures, and publics, as they have appeared in recent South American politics, require new attention to presidentialism and to possible variations in it indifferent regions of theworld. In a presidents inevitably stand apart and above other political actors because of their special powers and special sources of legitimacy.58 Since 1978 the shape of these powers has been on the political agenda in South American countries nearly constantly. The huge amount of time and energy that went into challenges to presidents is yet another demonstration of the centrality of presidents. At the same time, the regular challenges to presidents show how vulnerable they are to the withdrawal of their special legitimacy. Populations evidently can and do withdraw their mandates for presidents to rule them, and few presidents have survived large and violent mobiliza tionsagainst them. The phenomenonof SouthAmerican presidentialfall suggests severalobservations about legislatures and their relationships to both presidents and publics. In extreme political events, like removal from office, legislatures emerge as stronger in practice than would be expected from their comparative weakness in more normal politics. Legislaturestook part inbringing down five presidents,often cuttingconstitutional cor ners in the process. In contrast, only Peruvian president Fujimori managed to close a legislature,despite regular rumorsof "anotherFujimorazo." Mass publics have not turned against legislators in the same way that they have pushed out presidents. There were only two cases of mass protests against congresses, the "que se vayan todos" (get them all out) mobilizations inArgentina after the fall of De la Rua and similar fury in the Ecuadorian streets in 2000 after the civil society/military coup failed. There may be some difference in the nature of the mandate given to presidents as opposed to that of legislatures, perhaps related to their separation of purpose.59 Alternatively, itmay simply be too complicated to take down a group of diverse actors like a congress. Legislators also can exercise their power against presidents only with allies in civil society. Political scientists need to return some attention to state-society relations to understand political outcomes and the quality of democracy. It seems clear that South American politicians and parties are steadily less able to channel a significant portion of social demands into existing political institutions. This conclusion is supported by quite different evidence on party affiliations and elections as well.60 Whether civil society, political society, or both are responsible for this breakdown in representation, they must be engaged for the sake of both the quality and stability of regional democracy. Further research in this direction could look not just at street protests, but also at other data related to the population at large, such as public opinion, unemployment figures, and the sustained presence or absence of street actors who can effectively policy as well as challenge presidents. Overall, the evidence on presidential falls supports the arguments that at least in

414 KathrynHochstetler

SouthAmerica presidentialism is a with special vulnerabilities. However, they are not necessarilyquite like those identified to date.Not only do the dual democraticlegitimacies of presidentsand legislaturespush them towardcompeti tion,but because of the unanticipatedcapacity of publics towithdraw theirmandates from presidents, the public remains an active player in the development of presidencies.6' It can be a crucial support to either side in the ongoing struggles between executivesand legislaturesand deserves furtherstudy as such.Moreover, the forty percent of SouthAmerican presidentswho were challenged by legislaturesor protestmovements and the twenty-threepercent who were forced out of office early confirm that presidential terms are not as rigidly defined in practice as the theoretical discussion suggests.These twoobservations support the argumentthat South American presidentialismis prone tobreakdown. Yet theversion of breakdownis not thedescent intoauthoritarianism that most fear. Awkward,violent, uncertainchallenges to SouthAmerican presidentsafter 1978 result ed innew civiliangovernments. Schamis credits the survivalof democracy inArgentina to specialquasi-parliamentary institutions, but all of the countrieswhere presidentsfell producedsimilar results with a varietyof procedures.62While thedetails vary, they too passed through a period of "high-level bargaining of the kind that is typical of parlia mentary systems after an election has been held or a government has collapsed" and came out with a new president and some kind of term and went on.63 The parliamentary phrase of lost confidence is also helpfully evocative of the ways the electorate can with draw itsmandate for a president to rule. Thus, the often-lamented institutional flexibility of South American countries may be producing its own hybrid of parliamentalism and presidentialismin practice thathas helped create theunexpected stability of basic elec toraldemocracy in the region, even as individualpresidents fell. This hybridbehavior may also appear in routine decision making.64 Challenges to presidents and presidential falls are not limited to South America, as shown by the experiences of Philippine president Estrada, President Clinton in the United States, and others. One obvious next step for research is to catalogue challenges to presidentialism outside South America and their causes and outcomes. This analysis of South American experiences can not make conclusions about the worldwide phe nomenon.Certainly, South America is unusual in the extremeflexibility of itspresiden tial terms, especially in contrast with the classic case of U.S. presidentialism and its con tinuinghighly rigid terms.Which, if either, is a better startingpoint for understanding the general phenomenaof presidentialismand presidential fall is an open question. Whether themore specificmotivations for challengeshold andwhether streetprotests are equally decisive elsewhere are open questions too, although it is worth noting that the failed congressional challenge to Clinton also failed to mobilize support in the streets. In any case, the phenomenon of presidential fall deserves additional research and appears more important for current presidentialism than outright regime breakdown.

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NOTES

I would like to acknowledge helpful suggestions from Javier Auyero, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Dawn King, Steven Levitsky, Fiona Macaulay, Vicky Murillo, David Samuels, Kurt Weyland, and the anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Kyle Saunders for assisting with the statistical analysis and its interpretation. Finally, the librarians of the Latin American Centre, Oxford University, were very helpful in facilitating my need to read hundreds of issues of Latin American Weekly Report. 1. Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, eds., The Failure of Presidential Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart, eds., Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jos? Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Economic Performance, 1950-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2. Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 84. 3. Juan J. Linz, "Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does ItMake a Difference?," in Linz and Valenzuela, eds., p. 6. 4. Linz, p. 7. 5. John M. Carey, "Transparency vs. Collective Action: Fujimori's Legacy and the Peruvian Congress," Comparative Political Studies, 36 (November 2003), 983-1006; Hector E. Schamis, "Argentina: Crisis and Democratic Consolidation," Journal of Democracy, 13 (April 2002), 81-94. Carey's review of a series of recent cases also presumes that executive-legislative relations are central. John M. Carey, "Presidentialism and Representative Institutions," in Jorge I. Dom?nguez and Michael Shifter, eds., Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 22-25. 6. Diego Abente-Brun, '"People Power' in Paraguay," Journal of Democracy, 10 (July 1999), 93-100; Ernesto Garc?a Calder?n, "High Anxiety in the Andes: Peru's Decade of Living Dangerously," Journal of Democracy, 12 (April 2001), 46-58; Jos? Antonio Lucero, "High Anxiety in the Andes: Crisis and Contention in Ecuador" Journal of Democracy, 12 (April 2001), 59-73; Kurt Weyland, "The Rise and Fall of President Collor and Its Impact on Brazilian Democracy," Journal oflnteramerican Studies and World Affairs, 35 (1993), 1-37. In the conclusion to his comparative study of a new presidentialism, P?rez-Li??n acknowledges the apparent role of popular protest but does not analyze it. An?bal P?rez-Li??n, "Pugna de Poderes y Crisis de Gobernabilidad: ?Hacia un Nuevo Presidencialismo?," Latin American Research Review, 38 (October 2003), 149-64.

7. Ruud Koopmans and Dieter Rucht, "Protest Event Analysis?Where to Now?," Mobilization, 4 (Fall 1999), 123-30. 8. I use the term civil society in a narrowly descriptive way here, to indicate nonstate actors. I do not make normative assumptions that they are necessarily civil or democratic. 9. Deborah J. Yashar, "Democracy, Indigenous Movements, and the Post Liberal Challenge in Latin America," World Politics, 52 (October 1999), 76-106. 10. Susan C. Stokes, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 11. Linz, pp. 3-5. 12. For example, Octavio Amorim Neto, "The Presidential Calculus: Executive Policy-Making and Formation in the ," Comparative Political Studies, 39 (forthcoming, August 2006); Jos? Antonio Cheibub, "Minority Governments, Deadlock Situations, and the Survival of Presidential ," Comparative Political Studies, 35 (April 2002), 284?312; David J. Samuels and Matthew Soberg Shugart, "Presidentialism, Elections, and Representation," Journal of Theoretical Politics, 15 (January 2003), 33-60. 13. Kurt Weyland, "Limitations of Rational-Choice Institutionalism for the Study of Latin American Politics," Studies in Comparative International Development, 37 (January 2002), 57-85.

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14. Barbara Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 15. Koopmans and Rucht. 16. Hrtp://www.latinnews.com/lwr_/LWR_2315 .asp. Citations to specific issues follow the Report's format: WR-00-03 is the third issue of the Weekly Report in 2000. 17. This type of action contrasts with the more institutionalized kinds of activity that have emerged inmany social movements sectors since the return to civilian rule. See Elisabeth Jay Friedman and Kathryn Hochstetler, "Assessing the Third Transition in Latin American Democratization: Representational Regimes and Civil Society in Brazil and Argentina," Comparative Politics, 35 (October 2002), 21-42. 18. Carol Wise and Riordan Roett, eds., with Guadalupe Paz, Post-Stabilization Politics in Latin America: Competition, Transition, Collapse (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003). 19. Data for 1982-1995 are from Stokes, pp. 14-15. Data for other years are from the Economist. This col umn in Table 1 ismarked "yes" for presidents whose policy orientation in government was neoliberal, "no" for policy orientations that the Economist calls "populist." 20. See also Jody C Baumgartner, "Introduction: Comparative Presidential Impeachment," in Jody C Baumgartner and Naoko Kada, eds., Checking Executive Power: Presidential Impeachment in Comparative Perspective (Westport: Praeger, 2003); An?bal P?rez-Li??n, "Presidential Crises and Democratic Accountability in Latin America, 1990-1999," in Susan E. Eckstein and Timothy P.Wickham-Crowley, eds., What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 21. Baumgartner, p. 5. 22. WR-93-36.

23. See WR-92-01; Anibal Romero, "Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic: The Agony of Democracy inVenezuela," Latin American Research Review, 32 (1997), 15. 24. WR-00-02. 25. WR-00-40.

26. This estimate of the level of corruption is very conservative, as LAWR frequently does not report cor ruption charged in other sources. In addition, it should be noted that a president is labeled corrupt only if the report ismade during the term when he might have been challenged. In this column of Table 1, "yes" indicates that the president was personally implicated in charges of impeachable offenses, normally financial corruption. 27. They were Alfonsin, De la Rua, and Sanchez de Lozada II in Bolivia, for whom corruption was report ed in his first term. 28. WR-92-17.

29. Catherine M. Conaghan, James M. Malloy, and Luis A. Abugattas, "Business and the 'Boys': The Politics of Neoliberalism in the Central Andes," Latin American Research Review, 25 (1990), 3-30; Anita Isaacs, "Problems of Democratic Consolidation in Ecuador," Bulletin of Latin American Research, 10 (1991), 221-38. 30. John Crabtree, "The Collapse of Fujimorismo: and Its Limits," Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20 (July 2001), 295. 31. Peter Lambert, "A Decade of Electoral Democracy: Continuity, Change and Crisis in Paraguay," Bulletin of Latin American Research, 19 (July 2000), 392; Abente-Brun. 32. Data for 1978-1997 are from Charles D. Kenney, Fujimori's Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 264-66. For presidents after 1997, data are from www.observatorioelectoral.org, using Kenney's methodology ("[a] presidency is considered to have had a legislative majority if the president enjoyed the support of a majority in each legislative chamber throughout his or her term in office). Kenney, p. 333, note 3. It should be noted that this definition is stringent. 33. Lambert.

34. John C Dugas, "Drugs, Lies, and Audiotape: The Samper Crisis in Colombia (Review Essay)," Latin American Research Review, 36 (2001), 157-74; Naoko Kada, "The Role of Investigative Committees in the Presidential Impeachment Processes in Brazil and Colombia," Legislative Studies Quarterly, 28 (February 2003), 29-54.

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35. Scott Mainwaring, "Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination," Comparative Political Studies, 26 (July 1993), 198-228. 36. Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King, CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, Version 2.1, Stanford University, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University, January 5, 2003. available at http://gking.harvard.edu/. Also see Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg, "Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation," American Journal of Political Science, 44 (April 2000), 347-61. 37. Since this set is a population rather than a sample, the probabilities are the most important indicator of the relationships in the data. A table of the coefficients and results are available from the author upon request. 38. Peter Flynn, "Collor, Corruption and Crisis: Time for Reflection," Journal of Latin American Studies, 25 (May 1993), 351-71; Weyland, "The Rise and Fall of President Collor." 39. See Flynn, p. 364; Marcos Nobre, "Pensando o Impeachment," Novos Estudos CEBRAP, 34 (November 1992), 15-19. 40. Comisi?n Ciudadana de Seguimiento, Poder, Justicia e Indignidad: El Juicio al Presidente de la Rep?blica Ernesto Samper Pizano (Bogot?: Comisi?n Ciudadana de Seguimiento, 1996). 41. Kada. 42. Inmost cases there is no reliable information about the exact size of mobilizations. Estimates for those inVenezuela in 2002-3 show the broadest range, from tens of thousands to amillion. WR-02-28. 43. WR-03-07; WR-02-15; WR-02-50. 44. Lucero, p. 63. 45. WR-02-01; WR-02-15. 46 WR-03^14. 47. WR-02-02,p. 14. 48. WR-02-29.

49. Javier Auyero and Timothy Patrick Moran, "The Dynamics of Collective Violence: Dissecting Food Riots in Contemporary Argentina" (unpublished manuscript); Enrique Peruzzotti, "Civic Engagement in Argentina: From the Human Rights Movement to the 'Cacerolazos'" (unpublished manuscript), p. 1. 50. Schamis, p. 85. 51. WR-03^1. 52. Yashar. 53. Roberto Laserna, "Bolivia: Entre Populismo y Democracia," Nueva Sociedad, 188 (November December 2003), 4-14. 54. Arturo Valenzuela, "Latin American Presidencies Interrupted," Journal of Democracy, 15 (October 2004), 5-19. 55. Crabtree; Lucero; Valenzuela; Wise and Roett. 56. Laurence Whitehead, "High Anxiety in the Andes: Bolivia and the Viability of Democracy," Journal of Democracy, 12 (April 2001), 13. 57. Lucero, p. 70. 58. Valenzuela. 59. Samuels and Shugart. 60. Kenneth M. Roberts and Erik Wibbels, "Party Systems and Electoral Volatility in Latin America: A Test " of Economic, Institutional, and Structural Explanations American Political Science Review, 93 (September 1999), 575-90. 61. Linz; Valenzuela. 62. Schamis, pp. 90-91. 63. Ibid., p. 91. 64. Bolivar Lamounier, "Brazil: An Assessment of the Cardoso Administration," in Dom?nguez and Shifter, eds., pp. 269-91.

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