Are government coalitions less frequent under presidentialism than under parliamentarism? Do legislative deadlocks occur when presidents do not form majoritarian governments? Are presidential democracies more brittle when they are ruled by minorities? We answer these questions observing almost all democracies that existed between 1946 and 1999. It turns out that government coalitions occur in more than one half of the situations in which the president's party does not have a majority, that minority governments are not less successful legislatively than majority coalitions in both systems, and that the coalition status of the government has no impact on the survival of democracy in either system. Hence, whatever is wrong with presidentialism, is not due to the difficulty of forming coalitions.

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The literature exploiting historical data generally supports the democratic advantage thesis, which holds that democracies can sell more bonds on better terms than their authoritarian counterparts. However, studies of more recent—and extensive—data sets find that democracies have received no more favorable bond ratings from credit rating agencies than otherwise similar autocracies; and have been no less prone to default. These findings raise the question: where is the democratic advantage? Our answer is that previous assessments of the democratic advantage have typically (1) ignored the democratic advantage in credit access; (2) failed to account for selection effects; and (3) treated GDP per capita as an exogenous variable, ignoring the many arguments that suggest economic development is endogenous to political institutions. We develop an estimator of how regime type affects credit access and credit ratings analogous to the “reservation wage” model of labor supply and treat GDP per capita as an endogenous variable. Our findings indicate that the democratic advantage in the postwar era has two components: first, better access to credit (most autocracies cannot even enter the international bond markets); and second, better ratings, once propensity to enter the market is controlled and GDP per capita is endogenized.

In this article, I use joint scaling methods and similar items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties, and politicians from different Latin American countries on a common ideological space. The findings reveal that ideology is a significant determinant of vote choice in Latin America. They also suggest that the success of leftist leaders at the polls reflects the views of the voters sustaining their victories. The location of parties and leaders reveals that three distinctive clusters exist: one located at the left of the political spectrum, another at the center, and a third on the right. The results also indicate that legislators in Brazil, Mexico, and Peru tend to be more “leftists” than their voters. The ideological drift, however, is not significant enough to substantiate the view that a disconnect between voters and politicians lies behind the success of leftist presidents in these countries. These findings highlight the importance of using a common-space scale to compare disparate populations and call into question a number of recent studies by scholars of Latin American politics who fail to adequately address this important issue.

Argentine fiscal federalism is considered to be very inefficient by all specialists. Its allocation of tax and spending authorities, and its system of intergovernmental transfers do not correspond to any economic criteria and provide all sorts of perverse incentives and obstacles for sound economic policies.Agreeing with the above diagnostic, we attempt to take a step further and to provide an explanation for the many inefficient features of Argentine fiscal federalism. In order to do that, we apply and further develop an approach, presented in Spiller and Tommasi (2000) that tries to explain public policies as the outcome of political transactions. These approach argues that the nature and characteristics of the observed policies will be conditioned by the rules of the political game under which those t ransactions / policies are made. Hence, it refocuses "policy recommendations" from the level of policy reform to the level of institutional reforms, with emphasis on political institutions.