Constitutional Design and Decision-Making Processes in Presidential Systems: An Analysis of the President’s Executive Powers Over Cabinets

Our objective in this paper is to analyze the degree of political dominance exercised by the executive power on cabinets in presidential systems. According to the 1990s debate, in contrast to parliamentary systems where a joint decision-making process is prevalent, presidential systems are characterized by a non-collegial decisionmaking process, led and personalized in the figure of the president (Lijphart 1992; Sartori 1997; Amorim Neto 2006). The key argument of this paper is that, although all presidents have the constitutional power to remove cabinet ministers, the executive decision-making process in presidential systems is not necessarily vertical or based on a non-collegial process. We found a significant variation on executive power exerted by presidents over the cabinets, and that this variation has not been addressed by current literature. To classify the degree of political dominance of the presidents over the cabinets, we analyzed 18 Latin American constitutions focusing on the rules of the cabinet’s decision-making process. Paper prepared for the 73rd Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago IL, April 16-19, 2015.