When Parliaments Prevail: Legislative Override in Ecuador and Peru (1995-2017)

• In Event: Class and Inequality & Legislative Politics & International Security Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Legislative Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Legislative insistence has been one of the institutions that have received the least attention from comparative legislative studies in Latin America (Alcántara Sáez and Sánchez López 2001; Alemán and Schwartz 2006; Palanza and Sin 2020). To shed light on this void, the research focuses on unveiling the factors under which unicameral multiparty legislatures find greater incentives to override the presidential veto. From an unpublished database on bills processed in Ecuador (1996-2017) and Peru (1995-2016), we estimate the legislative override incidence. The empirical evidence shows that this phenomenon is more frequent than one might think. It is shown in a counterintuitive way than in scenarios where there is greater fragmentation within the legislature; it will be more likely that the congressmen will prevail over the veto. In contrast, it is observed that when the president has a may number of legislators in his party, and it was less likely legislatures would defeat his objection. At the same time, it is argued that, in the absence of a second chamber, there is a higher proportion of insistence on partial vetoes compared to total vetoes.
Based on the above, the research focuses on answering two fundamental aspects in the last stage of drafting a law: i) how often do the legislative overrides occur in multiparty, unicameral countries such as Ecuador and Peru? And ii) What factors explain the insistence on legislation in the congresses of these countries? Legislative policy studies in the United States provide a framework for understanding the logic in the different phases of the law-making process, which cannot always be applied to other areas (Palanza and Sin 2020). This is how Latin America has been specifically characterized by adhering to a presidential system with some institutional and partisan variants compared to the North American model. Concerning the legislative process, three facts are decisive: i. legislative initiative of the president; ii. the possibility that a bill has an urgent character; iii. variation in votes' requirement to approve a motion of persistence (Alemán and Schwartz 2006; Magar, Palanza, and Sin 2021; Shugart and Carey 1992). Regarding the partisan components, two fundamental differences are distinguished: i. multipartyism; ii. low discipline (Calvo 2014; Pereira and Melo 2012).
In this sense, the study of presidential vetoes and legislative insistence in Latin America is presented as a fertile ground for research and theory construction given the differences it presents with the United States (Cameron and McCarty 2004; Palanza and Sin 2020). Thus, analyzing the legislative process in the interaction between presidents and legislatures under multiparty contexts becomes an important focus of empirical and theoretical analysis to assess this variable's effect on the legislative override (Magar 2001).
Added to this is the unicameral design of some countries in the region, which makes the logic of the conflict between these two branches of power operate differently from that of the bipartisan, bicameral United States (Palanza and Sin 2013). The foregoing taking into account that in bipartisan, bicameral contexts such as that of the United States, legislative insistence has only a 12% success rate, while in multiparty, unicameral countries such as Ecuador, legislative insistence manages to exceed 20% (Bridge 2015; Basabe -Serrano and Huertas-Hernández 2020). In the article, with this panorama, we seek to investigate the factors that influence the generation of legislative insistence for 21 years in the multiparty, unicameral contexts of Ecuador (1996-2017) and Peru (1995-2016) as cases to compare.
The work is structured in the following way. First, we present a review that focuses on the main points addressed by the specialized literature about vetoes and legislative insistence in presidential systems, especially in the United States and Latin America. Subsequently, we propose some working hypotheses and variables derived from the previous section, formulating that the degree of political fragmentation is an important variable to explain the presence of an override of the executive veto. In a third section, we present the methodology and data used, introducing Peru's legislative bodies (1995-2016) and Ecuador (1996-2017) as case studies. In a fourth section, we test the hypotheses raised employing logistic regression models, thus discussing the results obtained and their implications. Finally, the article closes with the study's main conclusions and notes for a future research agenda.

Authors

• Sergio Huertas-Hernández, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• Pablo Valdivieso Kastner, University of Houston