Coalition governments and their incidence on Latin-American presidentialism: the case of the Southern Horn

Abstract

Although studies on coalition politics is one of the most fertile fields on comparative politics in the last few decades, this assertion fits only for studies on parliamentary democracies. Indeed, following the debate on presidentialism vs. parliamentarism, coalition governments were mostly under studied on presidential regimes, being largely considered as «accidental». The very few works on this topics use to limit their investigations on the ministerial portfotlio sharing or on the dissolution of such governments. This work proposes to update the coalition theories, by studying closely the latin American presidentialisms. We will concentrate our analisis on the Southern Cone and demonstrate that far from being accidental, this coalition use to have huge repercussions on the governance process and fulfilled profound realignments on party systems.