Heredia Documento inserto en una secuencia documental, en un contexto de producción y con valores primario y secundario

a) Introduction

For many decades, social sciences in general and political science in particular have dedicated a lot of effort to the study of political coalitions (Riker, 1962). This interest arises from the need to understand how and why political actors competing to obtain power (the government, Congress or municipalities) decide to cooperate and, thus, do exactly the opposite and share this power. It is also interesting to understand how coalition members administer these relationships of cooperation, how their incentives and strategic decisions influence politics and, most of all, what self-restrictions these actors have imposed on themselves to maintain these relations.

Although it is true that political coalitions are influenced by the institutional and historical context in which they are created and developed, the same political actors, parties and political leaders take strategic decisions in those contexts and conditions. Politicians‟ decisions play a role in how politics in general and coalitions in particular evolve and are resolved. Following this particular argument, what is more surprising is how the Concertación, the government coalition that is the subject of this dissertation, survived united for twenty years. It is interesting to analyze the strategic decisions taken by the political actors in this particular historical and institutional context.

Literature has emphasized coalitional analysis in parliamentary systems (Riker, 1962; Laver and Shepsle, 1996; Muller and Strom, 2000). Much less research has been done about coalitions in presidential systems, although, as Shugart and Samuels (2009) argue, since the end of the last century, the majority of democracies have had Presidents who have been directly elected.5 As we will see later, several authors (Altman, 2000 and Godoy, 1992 among others) have underlined a kind of original sin in presidential systems in terms of government and coalition stability. Thus, it is much more

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These authors argue that democracies with semi-presidential and presidential systems make up 65.4% of the total number of democracies.

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paradoxical and, at the same time, puzzling to study Concertación administrations. No other government coalition has continuously managed to maintain control of the Executive from when it was first elected through four successive presidential terms6 (Huneeus, 2005).

To the lack of analysis about government coalitions in presidential systems, we need to add that the most common arguments used to explain the Concertación‟s success and stability have been mostly institutional and historical (Siavelis, 2000). In other words, institutional change - change in the rules of the game - was what facilitated Concertación continuity and stability as a government coalition. Arguments about the Concertación‟s government capacity, about the informal rules of power sharing, presidential leadership and even the strategic reaction to the historical context have been mentioned, but, at the same time, they are characterized by a generality and having been only partially analyzed (Rehren, 1998). In addition, these arguments lack empirical evidence on the Concertación in general and each administration in particular.

In this dissertation, we will consider the long-term and proximate factors that detail how and why this strategy was used. We will also use technocratic literature to develop our hypothesis that part of the Concertación´s success in terms of stability and longevity was related to the balance of political and technical expertise supported and accepted by political leaders. However, this literature features the same problem found in our analysis of coalition dynamics in Concertación administrations - a lack of clear definitions and measurements to compare the role of technocracy in governments‟ political coalitions (Silva, 2006; Silva 2009).

Along the above lines, our argument analyzes and explains internal coalition dynamics in order to understand a coalition‟s success, as well as considering the contributions of different literature and research projects, with the aim of developing several working hypotheses that will allow us to obtain detailed and comparable knowledge of this singular government coalition.

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Huneeus (2005) maintains that the Czech Republic is the other similar case, although there are other cases where second democratic governments have retained power in three consecutive elections, for example ARENA in El Salvador. ARENA was the previous administration‟s main opponent.

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First, we will present the institutional argument. This maintains that presidentialism is the principal cause for instability in democracies and coalitions. Next, we will add the main criticisms of this argument. Secondly, we will present the literature on the Chilean case, divided into pre- and post- 1973. This literature focuses on institutional analysis, although other historical and contextual arguments are presented as well. It also emphasizes the capacity of political elites to develop agreements and negotiate to diminish the negative effects of presidential rigidity. Next, we will present research about informal institutions. In general, this theoretical perspective and, in particular, the Chilean case has several hypotheses and arguments from which we will develop our own hypotheses about politicians‟ conduct. Thirdly, we will continue by studying coalition theory developed for parliamentary and presidential systems. Finally, we will concentrate on technocratic literature and the aspects of it that are useful for our argument. We will pay special attention to definitions and the measuring of concepts.

Our argument does not oppose the institutional or historical arguments in themselves, but, on the contrary, is intended to complement them. We think it is important to provide an additional perspective that we believe is crucial to understand the success of this particular government coalition in a comparative perspective.

b) The Institutional Argument and Additional Explanations

The institutional argument is based on the assumption that the rules of the game, established by institutions, create incentives for political actors‟ conduct. In terms of democracy and government coalitions, it is argued that the rules of the game established by presidentialism are a cause of instability (Linz, 1978). In the case of Chile, this approach says that democratic political institutions explain the Concertación‟s stability since 1990. As we will see later, some authors also argue that,

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before 1973, the elite‟s negotiating capacity explained the limited negative effects of presidential institutions on democratic and government stability (Valenzuela, 1990; Moulian, 1992).