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Government Formation in Presidentialism:
disentangling the combined effects of pre-electoral
coalitions and legislative polarisation∗
Forthcoming in Latin American Politics and Society
Lucas Couto
Aarhus University
lac@ps.au.dk
Abstract
Recent research has shed light on the impact of pre-electoral coalitions on government
formation in presidential democracies. However, the fact that pre-electoral coalitions are
not automatically transformed into coalition cabinets has often gone under the radar. In
this article, I argue that the importance of pre-electoral pacts for government formation
depends on the degree of legislative polarisation. When parties are distant from one
another in the ideological spectrum, presidents face more difficulties in breaking away
from the pre-electoral pact and rearranging their multiparty alliances. Conversely, when
polarisation is not pervasive, presidents have more leeway to build coalition cabinets
different from the ones prescribed by pre-electoral coalitions. Drawing on a dataset of
thirteen Latin American countries, the results support my claim and suggest that the
relationship between government formation and the concession of office benefits for pre-
electoral coalition members is more nuanced than previously assumed.
Keywords: Coalitional Presidentialism, Latin America, Government Formation, Pre-
Electoral Coalitions, Presidentialism
∗I am deeply grateful to Adrián Albala, André Borges, Frederico Bertholini, and Raimondas Ibenskas
for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank three anonymous reviewers, as
well as the LAPS editors, for their attentive reading of the manuscript and their several recommendations.
Raimondas Ibenskas and the anonymous reviewers, in particular, were instrumental in suggesting a great
deal of robustness tests for the paper’s results. My thanks also go to Johannes Freudenreich for generously
sharing the appendix of his doctoral thesis with me, which immensely helped me update the dataset for
this article. Finally, a small note of appreciation to Stone Temple Pilots for their song Plush, which I
repetitively listened to in the late stages of the publication process.
1
1 Introduction
Research on presidential coalition governments shares many of the same topics covered by
research on their parliamentary counterparts. That is to say, we can roughly separate the
literature on coalitional presidentialism into three broad fields of study (Couto et al. 2021;
Laver and Schofield 1990;Müller and Strøm 1999). To start, some scholars have especially
been interested in the formation of coalition governments (Alemán and Tsebelis 2011;
Freudenreich 2016). Others have sought to delve into coalition governance (Bertholini
and Pereira 2017;Pereira and Mueller 2003;Silva and Medina 2023). Finally, some are
keen on unpacking the reasons behind the breaking of presidential coalitions (Altman
2000;Chasquetti 2006).
Even still, we can further divide studies on the formation of coalition governments
into two connected but quite different research streams. Coalition formation is actually
an umbrella that encompasses both studies concerned with the partisan composition of
coalitions and the distribution of ministerial portfolios within multiparty governments
(De Winter et al. 2002). This paper is preoccupied explicitly with the former, asking
about the degree to which pre-electoral coalitions influence the formation of subsequent
governments.
Until recently, the literature had largely overlooked the timing issue in coalitional bar-
gaining. However, irrespective of the system of government, the literature has shown the
different ways in which bargainings prior to elections affect and constrain the behaviour
of future coalition governments (Carroll 2007;Golder 2006;Kellam 2017;Strøm et al.
1994).
In a similar vein, the literature has also discussed how legislative polarisation impinges
on the different facets of coalitions in distinct systems of government (Golder 2010;Kellam
2015;Laver and Shepsle 1994). For instance, research on legislative polarisation has shed
light on how the divisiveness of party systems affects not only the formation but also
the rupture of coalition governments (Albala et al. 2023a;Chiru 2015;Indridason 2011;
Martin and Vanberg 2003).
2
In stark contrast, the interplay between legislative polarisation and pre-electoral agree-
ments to bring about new governments has received much lesser treatment thus far, even
though the scholarly literature has paid attention to either separately. In order to take the
first step towards filling this gap in research on presidential regimes, I thus ask whether
and to what extent legislative polarisation exerts influence on cabinet formation by con-
ditioning the effects of pre-electoral coalitions. Leveraging data from 13 Latin American
countries suggests this is the case, as potential governments derived from pre-electoral
coalitions are more likely to emerge from the government formation game as legislative
polarisation grows stronger.
The starting point is that pre-electoral coalition formation might impact government
formation in presidential regimes. However, this is a contested claim in coalition theo-
ries. On the one hand, some argue that parties lacking competitive presidential candi-
dates would be deprived of office-oriented incentives to join pre-electoral pacts since the
president-elect could decide not to stick to her end of the bargain and simply choose not
to designate any executive office position to members of the original pre-electoral agree-
ment (Kellam 2017). On the other hand, others argue that pre-electoral pacts not only
play a role in forming the next governments (Freudenreich 2016), but parties which were
members of pre-electoral coalitions receive portfolios more proportionally to their leg-
islative contribution than their counterparts that did not take part of these pre-electoral
coalitions (Carroll 2007). Hence, the second line of thought suggests that pre-electoral
coalitions ought to have an impact on government formation, whilst the first contradicts
this idea.
Against this backdrop, my core claim departs from the argument that pre-electoral
agreements matter for government formation. However, I take a step back and argue
that the presidential parties’ leeway towards government formation is conditional on the
extent of legislative polarisation. The reason for this is that high ideological polarisation
in the legislature substantially increases bargaining complexity. As reaching a multiparty
agreement is not a simple task in polarised settings, formateurs have great incentives to
build governments around the original pact, especially as breaking already-established
3
commitments is increasingly risky and costly under these contexts. In this way, I argue
that pre-electoral coalitions serve as focal points on which presidential parties can objec-
tively lay their foundations when party systems have parties far apart from one another
on the left-right dimension. Conversely, party systems barely polarised allow presidents
to seek better bargains than those made pre-electorally insofar as parties do not have
highly antagonistic ideological preferences. As such, pre-election coalition members can
fail to make it into the cabinet if the formateurs have greater wiggle room in selecting
with whom to govern.
The remaining of this work proceeds as follows. The second section brings the lit-
erature on pre-electoral coalitions in parliamentary and presidential regimes to the fore.
After that, I present how legislative polarisation influences government formation. The
fourth section shows the connection between pre-electoral alliances and legislative polar-
isation on the unrolling of government formation under presidentialism. In this section,
I outline how governments based on pre-election coalitions are more likely to form than
fully post-electoral coalitions. The fifth section is devoted to presenting my research de-
sign. Subsequently, the sixth section displays and discusses the results. I then wrap up
the article by summarising my claims and findings, in addition to suggesting new paths
of research and discussing the degree to which my theory travels to other contexts.
2 Discussing Matters Prior to the Elections
Forming pre-electoral agreements is not a mere ‘flavour of the month’ issue in either
parliamentary or presidential regimes. Pre-electoral commitments have been around at
least since the end of World War II in parliamentary polities (Golder 2005), whereas trails
of pre-electoral pacts trace back to 1925 for their presidential counterparts (Borges et al.
2021;Kellam 2015). Most importantly, multiparty pre-electoral coordination is still a
trend in most recent elections in both parliamentary and presidential systems (Ibenskas
2016;Spoon and West 2015).
Early scholarship on pre-electoral coalitions in parliamentarism has revealed that po-
4
tential governments that coalesce at an early stage of the electoral cycle are more likely to
form as actual governments than purely post-electoral governments (Martin and Steven-
son 2001;Strøm et al. 1994). The rationale is pretty consolidated: political parties engage
in pre-electoral bargaining to increase their likelihood of either forming or being a part
of the upcoming government (Golder 2006;Debus 2009;Ibenskas 2016). In other words,
parties join efforts and resources once they rationalise they can form the government
together. The point is that parties expect to receive more votes in general elections when
they form pre-electoral alliances than when they compete on their own (Allern and Aylott
2009;Christiansen et al. 2014). In general, in this context, parties coalesce around other
parties with not-so-distant ideological preferences, and this is so for two solid reasons.
Firstly, parties strive not to lose potential voters to other parties or coalitions. Secondly,
it is much more challenging to strike policy agreements when parties disagree over several
issues than when coalition partners have preferences close to one another (Cutler et al.
2016;Golder 2010).
The picture is quite different when we take a glimpse at presidential regimes. Initial
research on presidentialism would deem the construction of pre-electoral agreements as
unreasonable. The president-elect and her party would have no incentive to abandon
some presidential perks in favour of their pre-electoral coalition partners since powers are
fundamentally independent of one another (Stepan and Skach 1993), and the presidential
election is basically a zero-sum game (Linz 1990,1994). Moreover, as presidents dispose
of constitutionally fixed terms, even if they renege on their promises, the parties that
comprised the pre-electoral coalition would not be able to expel them from office earlier
than expected (Cheibub 2007;Samuels and Shugart 2010).1
Nonetheless, as shown previously, pre-electoral alliances are not rare in presiden-
tial democracies. In fact, Albala (2021) even goes so far as to say that presidential
polities have far more coalition cabinets derived from pre-election alliances than their
parliamentary counterparts. Therefore, how does the literature explain the emergence
of pre-electoral coalitions in presidentialism? More precisely, why would a party with a
competitive presidential candidate search to make pacts with other partisan organisations
5
to back its own candidacy for the presidential office? Contrariwise, why would parties
prefer to support someone else’s application for the presidency rather than launching
their own contestant?
To flesh out the reasons behind the construction of pre-electoral coalitions in presi-
dential systems, I start by addressing the first question. Firstly, mirroring what occurs
in parliamentary regimes, parties with competitive presidential candidates aim to form
multiparty alliances in order to boost the vote share of their respective candidacies in the
election looming on the horizon. Indeed, recent scholarship has brought to attention how
presidential tickets strategically include vice-presidential candidates with specific traits
to expand their potential voter base (Lopes 2022). This is the case as even in the absence
of a viable presidential candidate, other parties might still provide politicians well-suited
to a vote-seeking strategy in the presidential arena as vice presidents. This is only a
single instance of how parties in a pre-electoral coalition combine different kinds of assets
to leverage their odds of winning the presidential election.2
Outside vote-seeking considerations, engaging in pre-electoral alliances also enhances
the presidential party’s likelihood of securing a legislative majority in the aftermath of
the election (Borges et al. 2021;Carroll 2007). Despite minority governments not being
stripped out of their governability (Strøm 1990), it bears noting that presidential parties
have compelling incentives to look for a majority parliamentary basis even prior to the
elections. Majority status confers governments with higher capabilities of passing their
legislative agenda, thus circumventing possible stalemates in the legislature and making
governability more straightforward (Amorim Neto et al. 2003;Cheibub et al. 2004;Hiroi
and Renno 2014;Kim 2008). In addition to increasing the likelihood of forming majority
governments, pre-electoral coalitions are also the underpinning for long-standing coalition
cabinets (Albala et al. 2023a). Accordingly, the formation of pre-electoral coalitions grants
legislative support for a long time for presidents to get their bills approved.
Hence, political parties with competitive presidential candidates have clear-cut reasons
to go after pre-electoral agreements. Still, we have not addressed the other side of the
6
coin. Why do parties relinquish from running in the presidential elections on their own?
In brief, the response lies in the fact that parties are able to reap vote, policy and office
benefits from being a member of a successful pre-electoral coalition, whereas they could
have gotten out of the presidential contest with empty hands had they chosen to launch
a frail candidate.
The premise is that political parties without presidential aspirations do not abide by
pre-electoral agreements at no cost. To start with, support in the presidential elections
might come in exchange for benefits in elections at other levels, notably in gubernatorial,
senatorial, and congressional electoral disputes (Borges 2019;Borges and Turgeon 2019).
In this sense, some parties deliberately opt not to run for the national majoritarian
election in order to focus on other electoral disputes (Borges et al. 2017;Spoon and West
2015). In return, presidential parties might directly or indirectly endorse their partners’
contestants in other electoral races by withdrawing their own candidates, for instance. In
fact, this was a standard procedure in the Chilean centre-left coalition Concertación in
the wake of the fall of Pinochet (Albala 2013;Siavelis 2002).
Additionally, in a similar vein to parliamentary coalition agreements (Moury 2011),
parties constrain the president-elect to stick to her electoral policy promises (Kellam
2017). Although governing coalitions do not necessarily form and display written agree-
ments in presidential systems, the enacted public policy might be close to the preferences
of pre-electoral parties because presidents might feel compelled to fulfil their electoral
pledges and avoid disappointing their voters.
To conclude, pre-electoral coalitions also envision distributing office rewards to their
members (Carroll 2007). As a result, parties engage in pre-electoral agreements while
knowing beforehand that they will probably have a cabinet position if the pre-electoral
coalition succeeds in the presidential election.
Yet, pre-electoral agreements are not set in stone. A colourful example is that not
rarely pre-electoral coalitions are enlarged to accommodate other parties in post-electoral
settings (Albala 2017;Freudenreich 2016). This article points out a nuance around the
7
government formation hitherto not explored in presidential regimes. The whole procedure
of forming governments does not occur in a vacuum; instead, it takes place on a board
where parties are spread across the political spectrum. Put differently, the government
formation game takes place in party systems where political parties are ideologically less
or more separated from one another. This study puts forward the idea that formateur
parties are more constrained to build the government around pre-electoral coalitions in
the degree to which ideological polarisation increases in the legislature, and the following
sections explain why this should be so.
3 Legislative Polarisation and Government Formation
In general, polarisation is a broad concept that refers to the distance between groups
regarding their stance on a specific issue. In recent years, research on polarisation has
focused heavily on affective polarisation (e.g. Garzia et al. 2023), but other topics have
also attracted attention, such as activist polarisation (Collitt and Highton 2021) and mass
polarisation (Levendusky 2009). In this paper, I am more concerned with ideological
polarisation in the legislature.
Legislative polarisation depicts how far political parties are ideologically distant from
one another in the legislature of a given party system. By and large, party systems have
varying levels of legislative polarisation over time. There is only a single instance where
polarisation is null: when all parties share the very same political preferences. However,
this is hardly the case in any democratic regime. To demonstrate this point, the left
panel of Figure 1shows the average level of legislative polarisation in Latin America in
the period under study. In a complementary manner, to show how legislative polarisation
is not stationary over time, the right panel of Figure 1illustrates the degree of ideological
polarisation at the party system level from 2016 to 2019 in the same region. As can be
seen, Brazil’s 2018 and Chile’s 2017 general elections resulted in a degree of polarisation
above the countries’ respective averages, as opposed to Colombia’s 2018 and Panama’s
2019 general elections, which were below their countries’ average levels of ideological
8
polarisation.
Figure 1: Legislative Polarisation in Latin America
Note: Parties’ size and ideology come mostly from the DPEILA (Borges et al. forthcoming). Legislative polarisation has
been measured by means of Dalton’s Index and runs from 0 to 10 (see below for more information).
At the beginning, coalition theories ruled out the influence of ideological preferences on
the government formation process. Rooted primarily in office-seeking assumptions, schol-
ars argued that actual governments should consist of either minimal winning coalitions or
coalitions with the fewest possible number of parties to retain a legislative majority (Leis-
erson 1966;Riker 1962). In short, either form would emerge as a consequence of parties’
unwillingness to share the spoils of government with more parties than needed. However,
initial models of government formation suffered from dismaying predictive power and fre-
quently failed to explain the process underlying the rise of governments (De Winter et al.
2002;Laver and Schofield 1990). As a result, coalition theories rapidly acknowledged that
political parties are also pushed by policy incentives (Axelrod 1970;De Swaan 1973).
More recently, most studies include both office- and policy-seeking propositions in
their models of coalition formation (Druckman et al. 2005;Eppner and Ganghof 2017;
Freudenreich 2016;Giannetti and Pinto 2018). The background is that potential cabinets
marked by high ideological division are far less likely to form than alternatives that are
9
ideologically homogeneous. Despite taking policy penchant seriously, the literature still
has a tendency to resort to a crude measure of the policy-seeking approach (Indridason
2011). In general, the bulk of studies on government formation operationalise ideological
division as the distance between the most left-wing and the most right-wing parties within
each potential government, thereby leaving aside the overall ideological differences among
the parties comprising the party system.
As such, this measure entails one major problem: it disregards the general polarisation
of party systems. To see how this can be consequential, consider Piñera’s first cabinet
in his first term in Chile. Figure 2displays the percentage of seats in the lower chamber
and the position of each political party in Chile at the time along the economic left-right
dimension.3
Figure 2: Piñera’s Government Formation Process
Note: Parties’ size and ideology hail from the V-Party dataset (Lindberg et al. 2022). The original 7-point scale was
transformed into a 10-point scale for the sake of better visualisation. There was no available information on minor and
regionalist parties, such as the Independent Regionalist Party (PRI, Partido Regionalista Independiente).
On the left, Figure 2shows the composition of both Piñera’s pre-electoral coalition
and first cabinet, along with their distribution along the ideological dimension and their
share of seats. As can be seen, the coalition was comprised of two right-wing parties: the
National Renewal (RN, Renovación Nacional), and the Independent Democratic Union
10
(UDI, Unión Demócrata Independiente). Likewise, the ideological position of each party
present in the party system and their respective size in the legislature can be seen on the
right side of Figure 2.
By and large, looking at the bigger picture of party systems provides us with further
insight to make sense of government formation in presidential democracies, and this is
demonstrated by the Chilean experience in 2010. From a theoretical standpoint, at the
government formation stage, a pre-electoral coalition between the RN and the UDI leading
to a cabinet composed of these two parties is entirely reasonable, especially considering
the evolution of party competition in the country since re-democratisation. However, the
lack of proper attention to polarisation glosses over how the party system was divided
into two different camps. As a result, the RN could hardly afford to expel its pre-electoral
partner to build a totally different governing coalition.
Nonetheless, not every presidential party is cloistered in such a constricted situa-
tion. To provide an example of the reverse scenario, Figure 3illustrates the government
formation process for the first cabinet of Rousseff in that same year in Brazil. In this
example, we witness some pre-electoral members not being rewarded with cabinet posts
in a political landscape with less pervading legislative polarisation.4
As I shall elaborate in the next section, the bottom line is that legislative polarisation
and pre-electoral coalitions constrain the government formation to the point where the
decision as to whom to invite to the cabinet does not depend solely on the parties that
ultimately were invited to take a seat but also on the other parties available in the party
system (Indridason 2011, p. 692). That is, amongst other things, in both instances, the
formateur parties’ decision to form their cabinets was made consciously after grasping
how far parties were apart in the party system and considering that there was already a
pre-electoral coalition up and running.
11
Figure 3: Rousseff’s Government Formation Process
Note: Parties’ size comes from the DPEILA (Borges et al. forthcoming), and parties’ ideology hails from Baker and Greene
(2011). The original 20-point scale was transformed into a 10-point scale for the sake of better visualisation. In the left
panel, the parties in dark grey did not receive a cabinet post when Rousseff assumed the presidency. In the right panel,
the party in light grey received a ministry even if it was not a member of the pre-electoral coalition.
4 The Entanglement between Pre-Electoral Coalitions,
Legislative Polarisation, and Government Formation
The vast majority of the literature on pre-electoral coalitions in presidential democracies
argues that being part of pre-electoral pact matters for portfolio allocation in the post-
electoral scenario (Albala 2021;Albala et al. 2023a;Borges et al. 2021;Carroll 2007;
Freudenreich 2016;Peron 2018). I take a step back and claim that the degree of legislative
polarisation has a decisive impact on converting pre-electoral coalitions into coalition
cabinets.
Legislative polarisation is known for increasing the complexity around multiparty bar-
gaining in parliamentary regimes. This is materialised by the fact that governments take
longer to form as legislative polarisation increases (Falcó-Gimeno and Indridason 2013;
Golder 2010;Martin and Vanberg 2003). This clearly cannot happen under presiden-
tialism because both the executive and the legislature have constitutionally fixed terms
(Linz 1994), which means that governments have not only a date to end, but also a date
12
to begin their terms. Nevertheless, this does not preclude legislative polarisation from
disturbing the government formation in presidentialism.
In the first place, multiparty negotiations do not represent a straightforward endeavour
in fragmented party systems. Naturally, even if the presidential party still has the upper
hand in many respects, sharing the power with other parties already entails bringing more
veto players to the scene (Tsebelis 1995). Yet, they become inherently more difficult as
legislative polarisation increases since parties hold increasingly irreconcilable views on
various issues. Consequently, highly polarised settings present presidential parties with
a smaller set of viable alternative governments, thereby reducing their leeway to build
their cabinets. Conversely, slight legislative polarisation represents the best scenario for
the executive once it has a great variety of feasible coalition alternatives.
My point is that pre-electoral agreements counteract the effect of legislative polari-
sation on cabinet formation. Although polarisation implies more bargaining complexity,
pre-electoral agreements make parties abide by several compromises even before the elec-
tions take place. In the midst of these compromises, parties discuss common grounds over
public policies to be implemented, which policies should be left aside, and ministries to
be distributed amongst coalition members (Peron 2018). Thus, presidential parties have
significant incentives to keep to their end of the bargain under polarised contexts and not
dispatch any pre-electoral coalition member from the upcoming coalition government.
The rationale is straightforward: building the new government around a previous, settled
pre-electoral agreement is much simpler than finding the middle ground amongst other
arrays of parties in an inhospitable party system.
Note that my contention does not implicate that legislative polarisation leads to
greater or lesser formation of pre-electoral coalitions. On the contrary, my claim starts
from the fact that pre-electoral pacts have already been made and, subsequently, con-
strain the government formation process increasingly more to the extent that formateur
parties face greater ideological hurdles in the legislature. Also, I do not argue that parties
far apart from one another cannot be part of the same pre-electoral pact. Even if their
13
ideological positions are starkly different, they can make concessions to each other and
meet at the halfway. This can be exemplified by the pre-electoral coalition formed be-
tween the National Convergence (CN, Convergencia Nacional) and the Movement toward
Socialism (MAS, Movimiento al Socialismo) in 1993 Venezuela, two parties located at
opposite ends of the ideological camp. In spite of the distance between the parties at the
same pre-electoral pact, my argument continues the same: the CN had more incentives
to build the government around the pre-electoral coalition to the extent that legislative
polarisation was moderately acute in the party system.5In the end, the CN preferred to
form the government with the MAS as opposed to inviting other right-wing parties into
the cabinet.
By contrast, meagre polarisation along economic and social policy lines provides fewer
incentives for presidents to form governments based on pre-electoral alliances. Consider
the following chain of events. To start, as legislative polarisation decreases, parties become
less differentiated from one another and, as a consequence, have fewer disagreements over
policy issues. In this sense, coalition bargaining is more amenable to be undertaken
and might have many different outcomes. The greater resemblance in the party system
ultimately favours presidential parties since they can forgo their original pre-electoral pact
and strive to build a bargain more beneficial to themselves. In a hypothetical scenario,
where the party system would look like an undifferentiated amalgam of parties from
similar ideological positions, presidents could dismount their pre-electoral coalition and,
rather than building a multiparty cabinet, decide to govern through ad-hoc coalitions.
This discussion relates to the question of fairness in coalition governments and returns
to the conundrum of whether presidents share office payoffs with pre-electoral coalition
parties. Some scholars suggest that coalition governments under parliamentarism have
an internalised norm by which executive office positions are proportionally allocated in
relation to each member’s size in the legislature (Browne and Rice 1979;Browne and Fren-
dreis 1980). The rationale is that proportional portfolio allocation does not derive from
a purely rational approach but rather from a social norm about fairness.6This reasoning
could be roughly applied to pre-electoral agreements under presidentialism, where one
14
could argue that pre-electoral coalitions should naturally transform into post-electoral
coalition cabinets. Coalition cabinets fully composed of pre-electoral coalition members
should be the fairer outcome amongst all possible alternative governments once all par-
ties relinquishing from launching a presidential candidate would still be compensated by
being granted participation in the next government.
Arguments based on norm-driven behaviours, though, remain untested in the studies
on government formation in presidential regimes. The literature is, nevertheless, split
into different explanations based on the rational choice theory. On the one hand, pres-
idential parties lack incentives to maintain a bargain struck prior to the elections since
their survival is not reliant upon the legislature (Kellam 2017). On the other hand, pres-
idents honour the pre-electoral pact because, in rational choice terminology, governing is
a repeated interaction between presidents and parties in the legislature, in which pres-
idential parties reap the benefits of keeping their word in pre-electoral agreements by
demonstrating to be credible coalition partners (Borges et al. 2021).7
These contradictory claims can be illustrated through the Brazilian case. Following
the first stream of studies, as office-seeking would be out of the question, parties should
join pre-electoral coalitions based solely on policy-seeking considerations (Kellam 2017).
In this way, pre-electoral agreements should not thrive in Brazil as office-seeking parties
abound in the country (Borges 2021). However, much to the contrary, the Brazilian
presidential elections have been inundated with pre-electoral coalitions since the return
to democracy in 1985. More surprisingly, several party leaders only agree to engage in
multiparty bargaining if they can have an eye on portfolio distribution, even if the presi-
dential and legislative elections have not taken place yet (Peron 2018). Taken together,
the Brazilian experience has pointed out that parties without viable presidential candi-
dates do expect office perks by joining a pre-electoral pact. Of course, though, anecdotal
evidence from a single-case study should still be taken with a grain of salt.
That being said, my theory adds a nuance to the discussion about pre-election coali-
tions and their post-electoral fulfilment. Although the literature has mainly supported
15
the idea that pre-electoral agreements matter once the government is in place, Kellam
(2017) still has a point when she argues that presidents might enjoy their constitutional
privileges and try to exploit the office payoffs of being the formateur of the coalition. In
other words, presidents might break out from pre-electoral arrangements when they can
construct a more beneficial bargain for themselves. This should be most likely to hap-
pen when the legislative polarisation is low, where presidential parties have more feasible
alternative governments to build than they would have when parties are far apart from
one another in the standard left-right dimension. This is in line with previous studies
that have stood out how presidents resort to institutional features to favour themselves
in the coalition formation and lawmaking process (Inácio and Llanos 2015;Silva 2022).
By contrast, presidential parties have compelling incentives to form governments around
pre-electoral agreements when the ideological polarisation in the legislature is high, as
pre-electoral pacts serve as focal points that reduce bargaining costs, especially in com-
parison to forming a new government from scratch. Thus:
Hypothesis: The marginal effect of pre-electoral composition on cabinet formation grows
in strength as legislative polarisation gets larger; this positive effect is most substantial
when legislative polarisation is at its highest and vanishes as legislative polarisation de-
creases.
5 Research Design
In order to test my argument, I analyse patterns of government formation in thirteen
Latin American countries. A comparative research design appears well-suited to the
task as coalition governments are quite common in presidential regimes (Cheibub 2007;
Cheibub et al. 2004), especially in Latin America (Chaisty et al. 2018;Couto et al. 2021).
In other words, coalitional presidentialism is not a whim of a handful of countries but
rather is a real tool to engender legislative majorities in the region.
My focus resides in Latin America for a few reasons. First, focusing on a single region
helps to preserve the unit homogeneity of the research (King et al. 1994). Otherwise, the
16
results could be biased if the study had drawn on presidential regimes across different
continents once non-observable features could be at play. At the same time, however, it
could be said that the same logic discussed above regarding pre-electoral coalitions and
legislative polarisation could be extended to encompass presidential government forma-
tion outside the Latin American scope. This leads to a second reason for centring the
analysis on the Latin American context. Despite a few remarkable exceptions (Ariotti
and Golder 2018;Hanan 2012;Kim 2011), data on presidential coalition governments in
regions other than Latin America are not aggregated yet, thereby hindering comparative
enterprises. Indeed, pre-election agreements have been scarcely addressed in African,
Asian and Eastern European presidential countries8in contrast to the well-documented
evidence when it comes to Latin American countries (Albala 2021;Borges et al. 2021;
Freudenreich 2016;Kellam 2017).
To effectively test my hypothesis, I follow Freudenreich’s (2016) lead and employ con-
ditional logit models to study the patterns of government formation in presidentialism.
Most remarkably, models based on conditional probabilities have a close-knit relation-
ship with the literature on government formation under parliamentarism (e.g. Martin
and Stevenson 2001). As Freudenreich (2016, p. 90) well noted, though, studies on presi-
dential regimes have not followed the same methodological approach. A plausible reason
for such a difference is that presidential systems significantly restrain the set of potential
cabinets once the presidential parties are, most of the time, the formateur parties.9This
institutional feature might have prompted scholars to consider only the formed presiden-
tial cabinets in their analyses regarding the characteristics of presidential cabinets, such
as their status in the legislature (e.g. Figueiredo et al. 2012).
The most popular statistical techniques to deal with coalitional presidentialism, how-
ever, provide misspecified estimates to grasp patterns of government formation. This
happens because the structure of government formation makes the likelihood of forming
a specific cabinet contingent on the other potential governments that could have borne
out. In this way, government formation is a choice problem in which presidential parties
contrast the utility of forming each alternative government with one another. To put it in
17
presidential terminology, presidents have a whole set of possible governments from which
they can choose only a single instance to come into existence. That is, just like passengers
choose among different transportation systems to get to a destination (McFadden 1974),
presidents are confronted with varying alternatives from which they have to choose one
to form.
The dependent variable depicts whether the potential government was formed by
assigning one to formed governments and zero to all others that remained only in the
theoretical plan. In other words, my dependent variable is an indicator highlighting which
government emerged from the coalition formation bargaining process.10 It is worth noting
that, since my claim pertains to the transition from pre-electoral coalitions to coalition
cabinets, I examine only government formation opportunities that follow legislative or
presidential elections. In this case, reshuffled cabinets are not present in what follows.
Data on government formation come from the ground-breaking work done by Freuden-
reich (2016), which I have updated to cover more recent cases of cabinet formation.11
Following the standard procedure in parliamentary studies, only significant parties are
taken into account for government formation processes. That is, parties with extremely
minor legislative seats are excluded from the analysis since their size in the legislature
does not influence interparty negotiations12 (Budge et al. 2001;Sartori 1979). In practical
terms, parties with less than one percentage of seats in the legislature are disregarded.
Table 1displays the countries included in the dataset, their respective temporal cov-
erage, their number of actual governments, and their percentage of minority presidential
parties.
Information on political parties’ ideological preferences and legislative polarisation
comes from the Dataset of Parties, Elections and Ideology in Latin America (DPEILA)
(Borges et al. forthcoming). The DPEILA provides the positioning of parties along
the traditional economic left-right dimension by transforming the V-Party scores to a
twenty-point scale. In turn, ideological polarisation in the legislature is measured using
Dalton’s (2008) Polarisation Index, calculated with a slight modification from the original
18
Table 1: Dataset Summary
Country Period Actual
Governments
Minority
Presidential Parties
(n / %)
% in the
Dataset
Argentina 1983-2019 20 16 / 80.00 13.89
Bolivia 1982-2014 9 6 / 66.67 6.25
Brazil 1989-2018 10 10 / 100.00 6.94
Chile 1989-2018 9 9 / 100.00 6.25
Colombia 1978-2018 12 7 / 58.33 8.33
Costa Rica 1970-2020 14 10 / 71.42 9.72
Dom. Republic 1978-2016 15 7 / 46.67 10.41
El Salvador 1984-2019 18 16 / 88.89 12.50
Honduras 1982-2018 10 5 / 50.00 6.94
Nicaragua 1997-2016 5 2 / 40.00 3.47
Panama 1989-2019 8 7 / 87.50 5.56
Uruguay 1985-2020 8 5 / 62.50 5.56
Venezuela 1974-1999 6 4 / 66.67 4.16
Total 1970-2020 144 104 / 72.22 100
formula.13
Legislativ eP olarisationI ndex =
n
X
i=1
P i(Si −M j
9.5∗10)2(1)
Where Pi is the proportion of seats of the party i, Si is the score of the party iin the
left-right divide, and Mj is the mean left-right position of the party system j.14 In plain
terms, Dalton’s Polarisation Index allows grasping the degree to which party systems are
divided in the post-electoral scenario by weighting parties’ positions by their size in the
legislature.15 More importantly, in the current ocean of different measures of polarisation,
Dalton’s index was explicitly built with party systems in mind. As such, it comes as no
coincidence that this measurement has gained prominence among scholars in the last
years (e.g. Carroll and Kubo 2021;Ecker and Meyer 2015;Lupu 2015).
The complementing central independent variable to the analysis is Pre-Electoral Coali-
tion (PEC), denoting whether potential governments derive their composition from pre-
election coalitions. Importantly, potential coalitions excluding at least one of the pre-
electoral coalition partners are coded as not based on pre-electoral alliances since the
original multiparty pact is broken. On the other hand, alternatives containing all mem-
19
bers or representing an extended version of pre-electoral coalitions are deemed to be based
on pre-electoral multiparty bargaining.16
Lastly, I employ most of the original variables used by Freudenreich (2016) to serve as
controls for my hypothesised claim. As a matter of fact, most of them consist of standard
variables in the literature on government formation in parliamentary democracies and
are broadly summarised in office, policy, and institutional incentives in the bargaining
process. The first control is Minority, and it captures whether potential coalitions have
majority legislative support in the lower chamber or the only chamber in the legislature.17
Number of Parties controls for the fact that parties prefer to form governments composed
of fewer as opposed to more parties by indicating how many parties are present in each
potential coalition. Turning to the policy aspect of the government formation process,
Ideological Division captures the distance between the most rightist and leftist party in
each potential coalition, Median Party indicates whether possible governments contain
the median party in their composition, and Extreme Parties does the same for extreme
parties. Lastly, Runner-up Party indicates whether potential coalitions include the party
that finished as the second-most voted option in the last presidential election. For more
information, Table A.2 in the Supplementary Material provides more details on the oper-
ationalisation of each variable in the models, and Table A.3 presents descriptive statistics.
6 Results
Table 2provides the results for the empirical implication of my theoretical argument.
The first model considers only minority government formation bargaining processes, as
coalition formation is more natural when presidential parties lack a legislative majority.
The second model considers all presidents, regardless of their legislative status.
To start the analysis, as legislative polarisation never reaches zero, I focus the in-
terpretation here mainly on the interaction term (Brambor et al. 2007). Both models
indicate that the effect of pre-electoral coalitions appears to be conditional on the degree
of legislative polarisation at the 0.01 level. For government formation opportunities un-
20
Table 2: Government Formation in Latin America
Minority
Presidents
All
Presidents
(1) (2)
Minority −1.397∗∗∗ −1.214∗∗∗
(0.334) (0.315)
Number of Parties −1.812∗∗∗ −1.781∗∗∗
(0.164) (0.149)
Ideological Division −0.175∗∗∗ −0.157∗∗∗
(0.056) (0.051)
Median Party 1.321∗∗∗ 1.220∗∗∗
(0.327) (0.314)
Extreme Parties 0.228 0.163
(0.508) (0.493)
Runner-up Party −1.385∗∗∗ −0.939∗∗∗
(0.397) (0.326)
Pre-Electoral Coalition (PEC) −2.682 −2.463
(1.901) (1.547)
PEC * Legislative Polarisation 2.644∗∗∗ 2.542∗∗∗
(0.669) (0.567)
Cabinets 104 144
Number of Alternative Cabinets 147,736 149,452
Log Likelihood -251.904 -302.924
Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗ p<0.01
21
der minority presidential parties, the first model tells us that, on average, the increase
of one unit of legislative polarisation makes potential governments based on pre-electoral
coalitions approximately 14 times more likely to form than alternative governments that
exclude any pre-election coalition partner of their composition. The same pattern holds
true when majority presidents are also taken into account, as potential coalitions based
on pre-election coalitions are more likely to form as legislative polarisation increases.
To have a better view and a more consistent analysis of this relationship, Figure 4plots
the marginal effects of legislative polarisation and pre-election coalitions on government
formation across a range of values of each other based on Model 1.
Figure 4: Conditional Marginal Effect of Pre-Electoral Coalitions on Cabinet Formation
On the left, we can see the marginal effect of legislative polarisation. As the in-
terpretation of the impact of legislative polarisation on government formation requires
a more comprehensive modelling strategy, as Indridason (2011) does for parliamentary
democracies, I refrain from exploring this effect any further. Still, this plot helps leverage
information concerning the importance of pre-electoral coalitions for coalition talks.18 In
fact, by holding all else constant, the plot on the left shows that, when based on a pre-
22
electoral coalition, potential governments are 1.3 to 3.9 times more likely to be formed
than their counterparts not based on any kind of pre-electoral alliance, thereby replicating
Freudenreich’s (2016) findings when taking legislative polarisation into account.
In a complementary fashion, the plot on the right provides supportive evidence for
the findings in Table 2and depicts that legislative polarisation indeed conditions the
effects of pre-electoral coalitions on cabinet formation. Except for low levels of ideological
polarisation, where the 95% confidence intervals do not let us assure the exact impact of
pre-electoral pacts on the formation of presidential governments, pre-election coalitions
matter most as parties are more distanced from one another on the left-right policy
dimension.19 From a Legislative Polarisation Index of 1.76 onwards, the construction of
pre-electoral pacts exerts increasingly more pressure on cabinet formation, increasing
from 1.97 (0.30; 3.63) to 12.51 (8.38; 16.64) times the likelihood of formation of potential
governments based on pre-electoral alliances. To attest to the empirical importance of
this finding, 86 out of 104 formation opportunities under minority presidents analysed
by the first model score more than 1.76 in the index of Legislative Polarisation, which
means that disregarding legislative polarisation when studying pre-electoral affairs and
government formation in Latin America is quite inadvisable.
To probe whether the above findings are robust, I conduct a series of robustness tests,
all of which are available in the Supplementary Material. I test whether the purported
relationship between pre-electoral alliances and legislative polarisation is sensitive to the
distribution of upper chamber seats, the choice of ideological measure, the number of
effective parliamentary parties, the occurrence of party primaries for the selection of
presidential contestants, specific electoral institutions, party system institutionalisation,
electoral volatility, varying party–voter linkages, the use of the liberal-conservative di-
mension instead of the traditional economic left-right, the ideological distance between
presidential and median parties, and the extent of presidential powers. Additionally, I re-
run the models excluding one country each time to assess whether my results are driven
by a particular country. Overall, the robustness checks yield essentially the same results
as compared to those from the original models. More remarkably, the interaction between
23
pre-electoral coalitions and legislative polarisation practically never loses statistical sig-
nificance and, in fact, in some models, has a more pronounced coefficient than what was
previously registered. Therefore, the findings are consistent across different modelling
strategies.
7 Concluding Remarks
Pre-electoral coalitions are a trademark of electoral democracies. This paper has been
concerned primarily with the impact of pre-electoral coalitions on government forma-
tion in presidential democracies, albeit agreements that pre-date elections are equally
pivotal in parliamentary regimes (Golder 2006;Ibenskas 2016). This focus arises from
the fact that the literature on coalitional presidentialism has long been puzzled about
whether pre-electoral pacts matter or not to government formation. On the one hand,
the impact of pre-election coalitions as a means to distribute office benefits is belittled
as formateur parties need not act in accordance with the pledges made towards other
parties (Kellam 2017). After all, presidential parties’ survival in the executive is not
reliant on the legislature (Linz 1990,1994;Samuels and Shugart 2010). On the other
hand, pre-electoral coalitions are seen as the spearheads of coalition cabinets. In this
view, presidents do commit to allocating office pay-offs to pre-electoral coalition mem-
bers, even if they are not constitutionally obliged to stick to their pre-electoral promises
(Carroll 2007;Freudenreich 2016;Peron 2018).
This paper has sought to bring nuance to this discussion. I argue that presidents do
not behave in such a black-and-white manner. Actually, their decision to build coalition
cabinets around pre-electoral agreements depends on which context the government is
embedded in. More specifically, pre-electoral pacts should increasingly constrain the
government formation process as legislative polarisation is more pervasive in the party
system. The explanation resides in the fact that an increased ideological dividedness
at the party system level reduces presidents’ wiggle room to build governing coalitions
since parties have conflicting policy preferences. In this context, the utility of forming
24
governments around pre-electoral pacts increases as they largely reduce bargaining costs.
Conversely, agreements struck prior to the elections do not offer the same advantage when
legislative polarisation is shallow. When a party system is not composed of parties with
too many disagreements on the left-right ideological dimension, presidential parties have
varying possible multiparty governments at their disposal, and they may end up forming
a government different from those derived from pre-electoral pacts.
To test my claim, I make use of a dataset comprising alternative governments of thir-
teen Latin American countries over fifty years. The conditional logit models highlight,
across different specifications, that the effect of pre-election coalitions is substantially con-
ditional on the degree of legislative polarisation. In other words, potential governments
based on pre-electoral agreements are more likely to form as ideological polarisation in-
creases in the legislature. As a consequence, barring the formateur party, pre-electoral
coalition members should not take their participation in government for granted in barely
polarised settings, even if the candidate they provided support won the presidential elec-
tion. On the other hand, they should be more confident about being part of the govern-
ment when the party system is strongly ideologically polarised in the legislature.
These findings contribute to a better understanding of government formation in mul-
tiparty presidential democracies and have particular implications for the study of pre-
electoral coalitions in presidentialism. Importantly, they also reveal another way by which
polarisation impacts politics. While I remain neutral as to whether the moderating effect
of legislative polarisation on government formation is good or bad from a normative stand-
point, what we should take from the results is that we should not disregard legislative
polarisation when studying government formation in presidential democracies.
Despite being tested on Latin American cases only, the theory put forward here applies
to presidential democracies located outside the boundaries of Latin America. However,
the generalisability of this work’s findings depends on how the political competition is
structured in other countries. More specifically, the results of this study are meaningful
for presidential democracies that have party competition at least minimally subsumed
25
in the typical economic left-right spectrum. If this is not the case and the policy space
is either multidimensional or based on non-programmatic lines, then it follows logically
that we cannot extend the idea that the effect of pre-election alliances is conditional on
the degree of legislative polarisation.
Looking down the road, the literature would greatly benefit from taking any pol-
icy dimension other than the traditional economic left-right division into consideration,
even if it means sacrificing a comparative perspective at first. For example, African and
Asian presidential democracies seem to have other prominent political cleavages shaping
their party systems other than the traditional left-right divide (Hanan 2012;Kim 2011).
Against this backdrop, the fact that not mere legislative polarisation, but multidimen-
sional legislative polarisation can moderate the impact of pre-electoral coalitions in these
countries merits further scholarly attention.
Additionally, despite the solid, robust results outlined above, recent deviant experi-
ences suggest that alternative factors might also be relevant in accounting for the trans-
lation of pre-electoral coalitions into full-fledged governing coalitions. For example, even
embedded in a heightened polarised scenario, the Workers’ Party (PT, Partido dos Tra-
balhadores) did not reward all of its pre-electoral coalition partners with ministerial port-
folios when Lula was sworn into office for his third term in Brazil in 2023. Going forward,
scholars would do well to expand the scope of analysis to consider features beyond the
government formation process. For example, future analyses can be enriched by taking
into account the alternative "tools" that governments can resort to ensure governability
(Raile et al. 2011). While only tentative speculation in nature, it can be the case that the
pre-electoral coalition members deprived of cabinet posts are rewarded in another way in
Brazil, such as through the favourable allocation of budgetary resources.
Likewise, there is great promise in advancing the link between pre-electoral coalitions
and intra-party politics in future research. At the current stage, it is known that partici-
pation in coalition governments might trigger dissatisfaction within parties. In Venezuela,
for instance, the moderate and the radical factions of the Movement for Socialism (MAS,
26
Moviemiento al Socialismo) vehemently opposed each other’s view over participation in
Caldera’s government in the mid-to-late 1990s (Handlin 2017). As the formation of pre-
electoral coalitions implies different gains and losses for various sectors within each party,
future investigations should gain from a closer examination of intra-party dynamics.
Finally, it should be stressed that pre-electoral coalitions not only influence party
and electoral systems but also the accountability between voters and parties. First, as
well noted by Spoon and West (2015, p. 401), even if pre-electoral coalitions may be
mutually beneficial to pre-electoral coalition members, they are not necessarily a blessing
for representation. Much to the contrary, multiparty electoral coordination may preclude
voters from casting a vote on their favourite option, as pre-electoral alliances shrink
the number of available candidates on the election day. However, to the best of my
knowledge, the link between pre-election coalitions and representation has been weakly
explored thus far in presidential democracies, either from a theoretical or an empirical
standpoint. Hence, future studies would thrive from closing this gap in our current
knowledge, especially in presidential countries in Latin America, which are known for
their low levels of partisanship.
Notes
1. There is a persisting idea that presidents need not be concerned with their parties’ seat share in the
legislature to secure their survival in office (e.g. Jang 2023). However, this is the subject of an ongoing
debate. Thus far, the literature has found mixed results regarding the effect of the size of the presidents’
legislative contingent on their survival (Hochstetler and Edwards 2009;Martínez 2021;Negretto 2006;
Pérez-Liñán and Polga-Hecimovich 2017). Hence, what we can take out of this discussion is that presi-
dents are not necessarily doomed to fail if they lack control of a majority in the legislature, but this does
not mean that they are shielded regardless of their legislative support.
2. As another example, in the Brazilian presidential elections, pre-electoral coalition members take advan-
tage of the electoral legislation to increase the amount of free political advertising time on the media
for their presidential candidate. This is because each party is allocated a corresponding amount of free
airtime relative to its legislative seat share. Hence, reliant on their parties and their coalesced parties,
presidential candidates may have a more extensive time of electoral free broadcasting than their foes.
27
3. In this article, the left-right dimension refers only to the traditional economic left-right, unless stated
otherwise.
4. In the first section of the Supplementary Material, I provide two complementary graphical representations
of my argument. More specifically, I show a case of a pre-electoral coalition fracturing and giving birth
to a single-party government (Venezuela in 1978) and a case of a post-electoral enlargement of the pre-
electoral pact (Panama in 1994). Together, these four visualisations present a more complete bird’s-eye
view of the conditional theory presented in the article.
5. The 1993 Venezuelan party system would have a low legislative polarisation in comparative terms. From
a national perspective, however, ideological polarisation in 1993 was at its peak at the time and was a
glimpse into the future of the highly polarised 1998 presidential election (Handlin 2017).
6. Of course, other scholars firmly disagree with this view and argue that coalition governments are primarily
driven by rational thinking (Bäck et al. 2009;Ecker and Meyer 2019;Falcó-Gimeno and Indridason 2013).
7. An extension of this argument could preview that presidents may even increase cabinet size to accom-
modate pre-electoral coalition members. However, a recent study has shown that this is not the case
(Albala et al. 2023b).
8. Kadima and Owuor (2014) and Kim (2008) are notable exceptions.
9. Strictly speaking, the presidential party can even stay out of office. The justification for that resides in the
fact that some presidents maximise their utility by not including their party in the cabinet, thus opting
for reaping the benefits of building co-optation or non-partisan cabinets (Albala 2013;Amorim Neto
1998).
10. For ease of understanding, I provide an illustration of this process and of my operationalisation in the
second section of the Supplementary Material based on a real-world experience from Uruguay.
11. The steps behind the updating process are discussed in the third section of the Supplementary Material.
12. Furthermore, excluding very small parties from the sample is a way to deal with measurement errors, as
experts get into trouble in estimating their policy positions (Marks et al. 2007). It is also noteworthy
that, in so doing, not much information is lost in terms of coverage of the share of seats. In the most
extreme case, in Argentina in 1991, the excluded parties did not amass more than 7% of the total number
28
of seats.
13. This is not necessarily a problem, as the reason for such a difference stems from the fact that the scales
of ideological preferences are different. While Dalton (2008) relies on a ten-point scale, the DPEILA
makes use of a twenty-point scale to locate parties across the ideology continuum.
14. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting a more readable explanation of this formula.
15. A brief discussion on the Legislative Polarisation Index is available in the fourth section of the Supple-
mentary Material.
16. The argument of this paper does not differentiate between congruent and enlarged pre-electoral coali-
tions, as none of the original ‘signatories’ have been expelled from the multiparty agreement in either
instance. Either way, the empirical support for my claim holds when segmenting the original variable
into Congruent Pre-Electoral Coalition and Enlarged Pre-Electoral Coalition. The results are available
in Table A.4 in the Supplementary Material.
17. Due to data unavailability on party’s seat share in upper chambers across Latin America, I cannot gauge
whether the distribution of seats in second chambers confounds the entangled relation between pre-
electoral coalitions and legislative polarisation on the formation of presidential cabinets with the entire
updated dataset. To examine if this is the case, I conduct a few robustness tests regarding bicameral
settings in the Supplementary Material.
18. In so doing, I follow the advice of Berry et al. (2012) and Clark and Golder (2023) to test the conditional
theory at hand as much as possible from different angles.
19. It is worth noting that the statistical insignificance of the point estimate when legislative polarisation
reaches low levels does not raise concerns for the hypothesis tested here. This is because the underlying
theory posits that the effect of pre-electoral coalitions should be larger as legislative polarisation increases;
this effect is expected to lose strength as legislative polarisation decreases.
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