Institutions, Actors and Mechanisms: tentative explanations to "parlamentary coups" in Latin America

• In Event: Executive-Legislative Realtions, Party Politics and Presidentialism

Abstract

This work aims to discuss the limits and possibilities of institutional theory to explain president's destitution processes in Latin America. Recent cases like Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil represent challenges to explicative capacities of traditional institutional theories since the formal rules of legislative and executive branches remain the same for long periods of time, without instability occurs. Other cases in the region, like Argentina and Venezuela show great social and economic instability, without, however, lead to impeachment or interrupting of president’s term. From the case of impeachment of brazilian president Dilma Rousseff we drawn a deductive model from Mahoney and Thelen (2010) and from the work of Roy Baskhar in which institutional configuration, types of actors, and causal mechanisms work together to explain why “parlamentary coups” occurs. The causal mechanism is the social process that produces cohesion or fragmentation in social actors, changing their strategies and their capacity to operate in the institutional framework.

Author

• Marcus Vinicius R da Rocha, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul