Latin American presidential systems have received overwhelming scholarly attention in the past few decades. Thanks to this, our understanding of the workings of separation of powers systems has extended well beyond the rather simplistic characterizations that led to theories about the incompatibility of presidentialism with stable democracy. However, our understanding of the subtleties that make one presidential democracy similar to, yet significantly different from, the next has not evolved evenly. Importantly, studies of the presidency as an organization have lagged behind.
Jorge Lanzaro’s edited volume constitutes a much-needed step toward filling this gap. The volume focuses on the presidential office, which Lanzaro refers to as the centro presidencial; that is, the group of close advisers who assist the president in defining and carrying out policy goals and political strategies. Contributing authors survey the form and variation that this organization takes in seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. They also look into the development of this office in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and Spain—the last three, parliamentary systems.
In 1993, Edwards, Kessel, and Rockman (Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches) pointed out that studies of the presidency had been largely undertheorized, focusing too heavily on individual presidents and, at best, comparing their offices, with weak hypotheses that failed to transcend the shifting contexts or to uncover patterns and trends beyond the individual motivations and behaviors of specific presidents. Terry Moe was a precursor in pushing studies away from the personal presidency and toward approaches that would provide more theoretical payoff. Lanzaro underscores the tensions between actor and system, politics and institutions, agency and structure (29) and, while emphasizing the importance of leadership, leaves the resolution of these tensions and their effects up to each contributing author.
Lanzaro’s introductory chapter highlights a set of factors that characterize the executive administration and its relationship to the presidential office, suggesting that these may act as analytical tools for case analysis: centralization, politicization, institutional and political complexity, delegation, coordination, and control. How they can guide the analysis, however, the chapter does not make explicit, and different authors use the analytical categories in a variety of ways and to different extents. The chapter might have benefited from posing questions, such as under what conditions do these processes occur? What are the consequences of institutional complexity? Does political complexity affect the form and function of the presidential office in the way institutional complexity does, or differently? These questions are not asked in this chapter, and while the toolkit seems reasonable and aligned with debates in the field, an opportunity is lost that might have sparked a series of hypotheses to test systematically in the different chapters.
In his analysis of agency design in the United States, David Lewis (Presidents and the Politics of Agency Design: Political Insulation in the United States Government Bureaucracy, 1946–1997, 2004) points out that the influence the U.S. president can exert over agency design is constrained by its interaction with Congress and largely limited to three channels: the president’s constitutional authority, unanticipated use of delegated authority, and creative use of vague statutes. This stands in sharp contrast with the prerogatives that Latin American presidents have to design executive agencies, such that the otherwise powerful U.S. president seems quite disarmed when compared to the prerogatives of his southern counterparts. Bert Rockman’s chapter in Lanzaro’s volume highlights this paradox well. Yet despite the differences, Lewis’s approach takes structure and politics into account in a parsimonious way that may serve as a guide to understanding the determinants of agency design in Latin American countries. Despite the concentration of unilateral prerogatives in Latin America, it is not infrequent that presidents resort to congressional statutes to shape the administration, such that the other branches of government have an undeniable part in affecting the shape and style of the presidential office, as most of the contributors highlight, with varying emphasis.
I bring Lewis’s work to this discussion because it serves as a powerful example of the ways that studies of Latin American presidencies may evolve: away from descriptive accounts of how different presidents, partly due to their personalities and leadership styles, carried out their job. The subfield would greatly benefit from a move toward a theoretically motivated understanding of the conditions under which presidents choose different administrative design—levels of centralization, coordination, and insulation, among other characteristics that configure the relationship between presidents and the administrations they lead. In particular, such an approach can serve as a valuable approximation of the determinants of different configurations of the centro presidencial. In fact, Lewis’s analysis of the presidential politicization of the bureaucracy gives valuable insight into the trade-offs facing presidents, an analysis that may be applied to understanding Latin American presidents’ varied approaches to the centro presidencial. Importantly, several contributors to the volume bring Lewis’s work to the fore.
The contributors to the volume work through their cases with a common interest in the tighter organization that constitutes the presidential office, and each
undertakes the task by looking into the evolution of that office in the country they analyze. The chapters are quite diverse in terms of their goals and in terms of their scope of empirical analysis. Some cover the full period since Third Wave democratizations, others cover specific presidents, while yet others cover centuries of development of the office of close advisers. Some chapters focus almost entirely on the presidential office, with marginal mention of the broader bureaucracy that presidents command, while others see the conformation of the centro presidencial as a reflection of the president’s interaction with that broader bureaucracy.
The chapters are packed with descriptive detail and make for an interesting read; most authors walk readers through several decades of fascinating political developments and the intriguing challenges facing specific presidents. The descriptive emphases, however, vary between contributors. While some contributors undertake a painstaking analysis of the numerical variation of offices in the bureaucracy broadly defined (as Marcelo Camerlo and María Eugenia Coutinho do in chapter 2 on Argentina and Magna Inácio does in chapter 3 on Brazil), others overlook the point entirely, focusing instead on leadership style or presidential agendas.
Some chapters deserve special mention, due to their effort to provide a systematic approach to analysis that helps transcend the specificity of each president and to build in the direction that the field has long needed. Inácio’s chapter on Brazil makes perhaps the largest contribution in this direction. She proposes that in Brazil, the presidential office has varied with two factors: the level of centralization of cabinet coordination, which may be centralized or decentralized, and the level of concentration of the policymaking process, which may be shared with the ministries or concentrated in the presidency. She shows how this leads to four types of presidential offices: cabinet, cabinet centered in the presidency, hypertrophied presidency, and dominating ministry. Analysis of each type then proceeds according to the forces that shape the type of presidential office, which take form under different presidents and often in specific periods of a president’s tenure.
Read alongside each other, Inácio’s chapter on Brazil, Peter Siavelis’s chapter on Chile, and Luis Bernardo Mejía and Felipe Botero’s chapter on Colombia provide a rich understanding of the added complexity brought about by coalition governments. Siavelis analyzes each of the presidencies between 1990 and 2009 and provides an account of leadership choices surrounding the presidential office. He points out the contextual factors and varying concerns that led each president to choose a specific type of presidential office in relation to the rest of the administration. Coalition management is at the top of Siavelis’s explanation (along with the need to advance policy while maintaining popularity).
Mejía and Botero go farther back in time and recount the historical development of the presidential office in Colombia as early as 1810, albeit focusing primarily on the period since 1956, when the Administrative Department of the Presidency (Departamento Administrativo de la Presidencia, DAPRE) was first created. Regarding coalition management, Mejía and Botero point to information asymmetry as a concern affecting presidents who appoint ministers from parties that are not their own. They claim that different types of presidential offices may be required, depending on the characterization of administrations in this regard, given the need to oversee the activities of ministers whose preferences are farther from the president’s than if they belonged to the same party. Thus, the fact that some presidents confront the added challenge of governing their coalition when deciding how to approach their administration is surely a driving force of presidential office configuration.
Interestingly, the chapters on Germany (Mario Kölling) and Spain (Juan Luis Paniagua) also shed light on the constraints that weigh on heads of government when leading coalition governments, and this is importantly the case in parliamentary systems—although not in Great Britain (the chapter by Martin Smith), clearly different in this regard, due to majority rule. These chapters, along with Bert Rockman’s chapter on the United States, underscore the enormous difference between the unilateral powers of Latin American presidents and other strong executives. The presidential office in these cases is constrained by constitutions and powerful legislatures.
Other chapters, such as Camerlo and Coutinho’s on Argentina, José Luis Méndez’s on Mexico, Salvador Peralta’s on Peru, and Lanzaro’s on Uruguay, pay little to no attention to coalition management considerations and provide highly contextualized, temporally sequential accounts of the characteristics that different presidents endowed on the presidential office at specific times. Among these, the chapter on Mexico stands out because the author proposes two clear questions from the outset: how may we analyze the characteristics of the presidential office? and how may we explain such characteristics? However, while Méndez offers two principles to analyze the characteristics of the presidential office (cooperative certainty and competitive uncertainty) and suggests that structural factors explain general characteristics while contextual factors explain organizational choices, the chapter is organized sequentially and not according to these analytical categories.
All endeavors of this magnitude face challenges, and this volume is no exception. Where it falls short is in taking advantage of the coordination between chapters to adopt common definitions and approaches that could have freed the reader from iterated literature reviews and similar yet differentiated definitions of the centro presidencial. In this specific regard, it is problematic that after reading several chapters, the reader loses track of the differences that each contributor highlights about understanding the centro presidencial. The takeaway is an approximate notion that partly dispels one of the advantages of undertaking an editorial effort of this type. This is but the agenda that the volume offers for future research, which will be simplified by the existence of this important step in building toward a theoretically motivated understanding of the presidential office in comparative perspective. This edited volume will be of enormous utility to students, scholars, teachers, and civil servants seeking to gain information about the evolution of the organization of presidential offices through recent presidential administrations across important countries in Latin America and Europe. It is also useful to those interested in learning minute details of the difficult choices presidents faced at specific times of their mandates that affected organizational decisions.
