How Do Minority Presidents Manage Multiparty Coalitions? Identifying and Analyzing the Payoffs to Coalition Parties in Presidential Systems

• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912917715912
• Author: Svitlana Chernykh,Paul Chaisty
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917715912

Political Research Quarterly

2017, Vol. 70(4) 762 –777

© 2017 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912917715912

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Article

Authoritarian breakdowns in the late twentieth century

gave birth to new political systems that combined directly

elected presidents with multiparty systems. As a result,

the odds that presidents would fail to command single-

party legislative majorities increased. This raised fears

eloquently identified by Juan Linz (1990) and Scott

Mainwaring (1993) that minority presidentialism would

be prone to institutional conflict and breakdown.

As we now know, this danger has been largely avoided.

Like minority prime ministers in parliamentary systems,

minority presidents have mitigated the problem of institu-

tional conflict by building multiparty coalitions. Although

minority presidents (unlike minority prime ministers in

parliamentary systems) do not face the threat of losing

votes of confidence, they still deploy coalitional strate-

gies. Between 1974 and 2013, 52 percent of minority

presidents governing in political systems that met mini-

mum democratic standards formed cabinets from more

than one party (Chaisty and Power 2016).

With coalitional rule today the modal form of gover-

nance in minority presidential systems, the focus of

research has turned to how presidents manage their coali-

tions to ensure legislative support (Chaisty, Cheeseman,

and Power 2014). This work, which has been concerned

with Latin American (mainly Brazilian) presidential sys-

tems, has largely focused on the ways in which minority

presidents share cabinet portfolios with their coalition

allies in return for legislative support. Analysis of

Brazilian presidentialism has found strong evidence to

suggest that cabinet portfolio payoffs strengthen legisla-

tive support for minority presidents (Amorim Neto 2002;

Pereira, Power, and Renno 2005).

However, these theories of coalitional governance have

not been tested outside of Latin America. Cross-regional

research on presidential systems has found little evidence to

suggest that multiparty cabinets raise the level of legislative

voting unity among their party contingents (Carey 2009,

161–62), but this analysis is not concerned with questions

of coalition management. There has also been little consid-

eration of the relative importance of cabinet strategies com-

pared with other strategies of coalition management.

715912PRQXXX10.1177/1065912917715912Political Research QuarterlyChaisty and Chernykh

research-article2017

1University of Oxford, UK

2Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Paul Chaisty, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford,

62 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6JF, UK.

Email: paul.chaisty@politics.ox.ac.uk

How Do Minority Presidents Manage

Multiparty Coalitions? Identifying and

Analyzing the Payoffs to Coalition Parties

in Presidential Systems

Paul Chaisty1 and Svitlana Chernykh2

Abstract

The preponderance of minority presidents in modern democracies has concentrated the attention of researchers

on the multiparty coalitions that presidents form to govern in legislative assemblies. This analysis of “coalitional

presidentialism” has focused almost exclusively on presidential systems in Latin America, and Brazil in particular. It

has understood multiparty presidential coalitions as cabinet-level constructs, which bind the support of parties in

legislatures through portfolio payoffs. In this article, we explore this analysis in a non-Latin American context: post-

Soviet Ukraine. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, we find that portfolio payoffs are an important tool

for managing Ukrainian coalitions. But we also find that minority presidents have relied systematically on the support

of legislative parties outside of the cabinet and have used different payoffs to manage their support. Given that this

complexity also exists in other new democracies, we argue that there is a need to distinguish between cabinet-level

and floor-level coalitions in minority presidential systems.

Keywords

minority presidents, multiparty coalitions, coalitional presidentialism, Ukraine

Chaisty and Chernykh 763

In this article, we explore how minority presidents

manage their multiparty coalitions to achieve legislative

support in another region: the former Soviet Union. We

focus on Ukraine, which is an ideal case in many respects.

First, with few exceptions, it has been governed by multi-

party cabinet coalitions since 1996 (Chaisty and Chernykh

2015) and it offers rich macro-level data. In these ways,

Ukraine provides a more appropriate point of comparison

with Latin American cases than other post-Soviet states or

even cases of coalitional presidentialism that exist in

Africa. Second, Ukraine is a difficult case with which to

test institutional hypotheses. Extant analyses of Ukrainian

politics have questioned the applicability of notions of

coalitional behavior and have suggested that coalitional

solutions to the problems of limited legislative support are

difficult to operate in the Ukrainian context. Therefore, we

contend that any findings for effective coalition manage-

ment strategies (specifically cabinet portfolio payoffs) in

Ukrainian politics will significantly strengthen theories of

coalition management. Third, the coalitions that deliver

legislative support for Ukrainian presidents contain par-

ties that do not have cabinet representation and are not

motivated by strong programmatic goals. Thus, Ukrainian

presidential coalitions provide an opportunity to explore

the noncabinet strategies that presidents use to manage the

support of coalition parties. This highlights the need to

distinguish broader floor coalitions from cabinet coali-

tions and hence emphasizes the multivariate nature of

coalition management. This distinction between cabinet

and noncabinet coalition parties travels to other cases of

Third-Wave minority presidentialism, where program-

matic party development is equally limited (Chaisty,

Cheeseman, and Power, forthcoming).

In the following sections, we provide an overview of

the relevant literature on coalition management in presi-

dential systems and then turn to an analysis of the cabinet

portfolio payoff hypothesis in the Ukrainian context. Our

analysis, which replicates the empirical research of Latin

American scholars, finds strong evidence for this theory,

even controlling for ideological and electoral factors.

However, in the course of this analysis, we also discover

that Ukrainian presidents have relied systematically on the

support of parties from outside of their cabinets. In account-

ing for the behavior of such noncabinet coalition parties,

we argue it is necessary to examine the other strategies that

Ukrainian presidents use to maintain their support in the

legislature. In this analysis, we use qualitative data on the

motivation of noncabinet parties to join presidential coali-

tions to infer the strategies that presidents deploy.

Coalitional Presidentialism

Coalitional presidentialism is an institutional strategic

response by minority presidents to the challenge of

securing legislative support in multiparty assemblies. The

coalitions that presidents form are not situational or ad

hoc; they are durable and stable alliances that endure for N

units of time or legislative sessions.

In analyzing the strategies that presidents deploy to

augment their alliances, extant research has largely

focused on the ways in which minority presidents distrib-

ute cabinet portfolios to their coalition allies (Alemán and

Tsebelis 2011; Amorim Neto 2006; Amorim Neto and

Samuels 2010). Although most presidents have the uni-

lateral power to determine the composition of their exec-

utives, there are well-known “perils” associated with the

separation of powers, which force presidents to concede

executive authority. The probability that the democratic

legitimacy claimed by both presidents and assemblies

will lead to deadlock and governmental crisis is one of

the main perils facing minority presidents (Linz 1994;

Mainwaring 1993). The formation of multiparty cabinet

coalitions is one way in which presidents have largely

avoided this outcome (Cheibub 2007; Cheibub,

Przeworski, and Saiegh 2004).

The benefits that minority presidents gain from dis-

tributing cabinet authority are well documented in the

research on coalitional presidentialism in Latin America.

Minority presidents who share cabinet appointments with

their coalition allies are found to enjoy higher levels of

legislative support (Amorim Neto 2002; Raile, Pereira,

and Power 2011; Zucco 2009). They increase the likeli-

hood that their legislative proposals will become law

(Saiegh 2011). They expedite the enactment of their deci-

sions (Hiroi and Renno 2014). They strengthen their “leg-

islative shield” against impeachment or removal

(Pérez-Liñán 2007), and they augment the durability and

effectiveness of governments (Martinez-Gallardo 2012).

It should therefore come as no surprise that cross-regional

surveys of members of Parliament (MPs) find portfolio

payoffs to be the most widely used strategy of coalition

management by minority presidents across a broad range

of regional contexts (Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power,

forthcoming).

Minority presidents deploy this portfolio strategy in a

variety of ways. First, they can manipulate the size of their

cabinets to manage coalition support. The likelihood that

presidents will form minimum winning cabinet coalitions

will depend on the reliability of the legislative support of

their party allies, which is contingent upon factors like

levels of party fragmentation, ideological division, and the

electoral cycle (Altman 2000; Meireles 2016; Power

2010). The institutional capacity of minority presidents to

bypass assemblies also affects the presidential calculus

surrounding cabinet size. Factors like the magnitude of the

president’s agenda-setting powers—for example, decree

and veto powers (Amorim Neto 2006; Martinez-Gallardo

2012)—and the institutional constraints that presidents