This book is a major accomplishment in the comparative study of institutional politics in Latin America. It makes four important contributions. One is theoretical: it proposes a formal model to explain all types of interbranch crises. The others are empirical: it compiles the first dataset that includes all interbranch crises in the region since the last wave of democratization; it shows that presidential crises are correlated to the gap between the institutional and partisan powers of presidents; and it demonstrates that crises focused on one branch of government spill over to the other branches. Altogether, these contributions constitute the most comprehensive approach to the understanding of political instability in Latin America since the 1980s.
Helmke’s model is intended to solve the puzzle that the repeated interbranch crises in the region pose to the theory of separation of powers systems: neither institutional checks and balances nor partisan-laden punishments seem to deter actors in any branch from launching or eliciting attacks on the others. Building on Powell’s theory of bargaining in the shadow of power, Helmke argues that interbranch crises are bargaining failures triggered by the combination of a branch’s move to increase its control over policymaking and its difficulty assessing the extent to which this move can be realized. This difficulty stems from the gap between the president’s institutional and partisan powers. Institutionally strong presidents may appear mighty as they typically try to encroach on the legislature and the courts, but they are actually vulnerable when they attempt this from a weak partisan position, such as minority status in Congress.
This gap leads straightforwardly to bargaining failure when executives miscalculate their ability to expand their policymaking power, and legislatures threaten or move to curtail it. Then, as presidents insist on their encroachment, legislators cannot credibly commit not to depose the aggressor president, so either legislative impeachment of the president or presidential self-coup against the legislature ensues.
In turn, crises between executives and legislatures spill over to the judiciary when presidents at risk from the legislature construe courts as able to enhance the threat to their stability, and therefore attempt to replace judges or change their jurisdiction. But whereas presidential and legislative crises are more likely when institutionally strong presidents are in the minority, judicial crises only require strong institutional powers, regardless of minority status. In general, interbranch crises are more likely when the aggressor branch is more popular than the targeted branch and when countries have a history of previous crises. Aggressors leverage their popularity to mobilize against targets and are more prone to do so when precedents show that threats may actually be executed.
Helmke investigates these arguments for a set of interbranch crises that took place in Latin America between 1985 and 2008. To identify these crises, she defines them as episodes “in which one branch of government challenges the composition of another branch of government” (38), and sifts through Latin American Weekly Report using seven selection rules: focus on crises involving at least two branches, excluding courts as aggressors; include only episodes that target presidents and multiple members of collective bodies, not individual legislators or judges; focus on episodes that threaten the composition of branches, excluding those that attempt to change their institutional powers only; include all initiated attacks, regardless of their ultimate outcome; the number of targeted branches determines the number of crises per episode; single crises must be distinguished from sequential crises; and crises last from the first public notice of an attack to either the removal of the targeted branch or the last day of news coverage.
The author thus builds the Interbranch Crises in Latin America (ICLA) dataset, which covers 18 countries and identifies 89 attacks and their outcomes. Legislatures succeeded against the executive in 13 of 36 episodes and against the judiciary in 4 of 11 episodes, while presidents succeeded against the legislature in 6 of 9 and against the courts in 25 of 33. The distribution of crises in the region has been uneven, with Ecuador as an extreme case—under institutional crises about 18 percent of the time—whereas Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, and Mexico had none. Crisis frequency has been consistent over time, and some crises (i.e. presidential and judicial) have typically occurred together in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Paraguay, and Venezuela.
Probing the data with a large set of independent variables, Helmke shows that presidential crises are—as expected—more frequent when strong institutional powers interact with minority partisan support. This conditional relationship is specifically driven by presidents’ proactive and reactive powers, rather than by their ability to shape bills or control financial legislation. Additionally, Helmke shows that presidential instability breeds legislative instability, as presidents who feel threatened and can act first trigger legislative crises. This also holds for judicial instability, which is 50 percent more likely in countries with the highest number of previous presidential crises—particularly when presidents are institutionally strong, regardless of their partisan support.
These patterns suggest that “the prospect of presidential crises serves as kind of tripwire” that induces executives to target legislatures and courts (155), thereby generating a spillover effect that reproduces and amplifies instability. These outcomes would not be normal occurrences explained by separation of powers theory or mere results of personal ambition, as delegative democracy theory argues, but consequences of politicians’ learning to coordinate against other branches, which destroys trust in institutions and lowers the threshold for future crises.
As is the case with all major works, Helmke’s book raises several questions that will probably feed into the debate on political instability hereafter. One concerns its very object: the notion of crisis. While the definition in the ICLA dataset confines it to episodes in which the composition of government branches is at stake, both the theoretical model and the case studies effectively include previous conflict over policymaking powers in its conceptual core. If crises are triggered by the combination of a branch’s move to increase/curtail its/other’s policymaking power and the miscalculation of its/the other’s ability to succeed/resist, these bargaining failures over policymaking induce the threats over branch composition. But if this conflict drives actors into crises, perhaps not counting the instances in which branches struggled for policymaking power without their struggle putting branch composition at stake underestimates the actors’ perception of threats and the duration of crisis episodes. If threat perception matters for the decision to initiate a crisis, then the history of struggles over policymaking power about consequential issues (i.e., landmarks of the government’s or the majority party or coalition’s program) would also matter for counting and dating crises.
This raises another set of questions that directly address the relevance of Helmke’s findings for the theory of separation of powers systems. First, how frequent are these crises compared to the struggles over policymaking power that end without crisis? This question is inherently linked to the two solutions the literature identifies for interbranch conflict in presidential systems, neither of which is systematically explored in this book. On the one hand, delegation, as theorized in the literature on U.S. politics and relayed in Helmke’s case studies: if crises arise from difficulties in calculating the acceptable delegation space or the counterpart’s disposition to pay specific costs to increase or maintain it, does the frequency and stability of delegation to the executive increase or diminish the likelihood of executive-legislative crises? On the other hand, coalition governments, as recently investigated by Amorim Neto, Chasquetti, Pereira, Power, Zucco, and others: if, as these authors demonstrate, both majority coalition and minority party governments are typically as stable as majority party governments, does this increase or diminish the probability of crises? By the same logic, the influence of party factionalization on the likelihood of crises may also affect Helmke’s model and outcomes.
Two methodological issues also stand out: the operationalization of the minority status and past vulnerability variables. Minority status is defined as a situation in which the president lacks a majority in the lower house of congress (83). This definition runs the risk of overestimating minority situations, for at least two reasons. One is the size of the legislative shield—to use Pérez-Liñán’s expression—that protects presidents against impeachment. If this size is critical in minority situations, and sizes vary across countries, defining minority simply as the absence of majority conflates situations in which presidents control the legislative shield with those in which they don’t. The other reason is, again, coalition governments. If the president’s minority party is partner to a stable coalition government, its minority situation may not affect presidential stability. In turn, past vulnerability is defined as the number of previous administrations in the country that suffered a presidential crisis. Applied as is, this definition also runs the risk of overestimation: not all precedents may be comparable, due at least to the size of the electoral margin, the effective number of parties, and the president’s control over the legislative shield.
Still, neither these issues nor others that may arise obscure the basic fact that Institutions on the Edge is a major work that should be required reading for any course in Latin American politics and comparative political institutions.
