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“Institutions provide the opportunity, but if actors do not behave, things do not work out.”

“Politics is an art” An Aylwin minister

a) Introduction

Few singular events in the history of nations have both a symbolical and a real effect. The ceremony in which Aylwin was sworn in as President at the Congress in Valparaíso on March 11, 1990, had this rare quality. With this democratic ritual, the first administration of the center-left coalition, created two years previously to challenge the dictatorship in the 1988 plebiscite and, afterwards, in the 1989 presidential elections, started. This chapter deals with the question of how the Concertación governed in the first of the four periods that it was in power and how it became one of the most successful government coalitions in Chilean contemporary politics.

We know from Chapters 4 and 5 that certain key characteristics have been confirmed: the maintaining of coalitions and cabinet stability. Chapter 5 also provided some initial data suggesting that the Aylwin administration was among the most stable of the coalition governments in Chilean contemporary political history. In this chapter, we will address the Aylwin administration in detail; we will provide additional data and explore the precise mechanisms used in it. We will fully explain our contextual variables, legacies, political and more proximate learning, suprapartidismo, the informal rules of power sharing and the political use of technocrats.

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When a coalition wins power in a presidential system like the one in Chile, the President is responsible for articulating the complicated balance between being the Chief of State (which means responsibility over state and government administration)143 and, at the same time, being the leader of the coalition that brought them to power. In this sense, different incentives and restrictions operate. From this perspective, the President has to combine the goals of running the administration and, at the same time, maintaining the coalition sufficiently united so that coalition relations do not become a problem. Having good coalition relations must be an asset for the President and not a cost. At the same time, for the parties that are part of the coalition, government posts and policies are a reward in terms of access to power. Government quality is, at the same time, a factor that influences future elections and, in this way, a means of retaining power in the future.

In this chapter, we will analyze how the Concertación administered power between March 11, 1990 and March 11, 1994, the day when President Aylwin handed over to the next elected President, the other concertacionista, Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle. With this act, the coalition achieved one of the most clear and concrete measures of government success: transferring power to a member of the same coalition.

As we have said in previous chapters, the most common explanations for Concertación stability have been its institutional and historical factors. This investigation centers on complementary arguments related to politicians‟ strategic decisions regarding the administration of power. In other words, it analyzes government coalition dynamics. We argue that part of the explanation for the coalition‟s capacity to produce stability was the Concertación‟s own ability to share power among coalition members (appointments).

How can we explain our party level variable of maintaining the coalition and our second dependent variable of cabinet stability? As we have said before, we have concentrated on the internal factors of coalition dynamics. In previous chapters, we analyzed long-term contextual variables,

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specifically political legacies and political learning. In Chapters 6 and 7, we will focus on more short- term variables. These short-term variables are suprapartidismo - the expanded presidential autonomy of the President in relation to coalition party members (in comparison to the relationship between the President and the parties before 1973).

Our second independent variable has to do with the informal rules of power sharing implemented during this first administration and which helped control and diminish potential coalition conflicts related to power sharing and cabinet appointments (Siavelis, 2006; Garretón, 1992). Particularly relevant is the informal rule of transversalidad (inter–party checks), whose aim was to increase coalition governability by sharing posts in a way that guaranteed the presence of different party members within the ministries. This is also related to political learning from the pre-Pinochet period. Finally, we turn to our third independent variable. As we have already said, we named this variable the political use of technocrats because technical expertise did not weaken political control of key areas. Technocrats belonged to coalition parties, which decreased the chance of the potential conflict that would occur if technocrats were strangers to political parties. Moreover, the Concertación leaders were especially aware of the need for a good financial administration, proving their capacity to provide not only social and political but also economic stability. This is true for the Aylwin administration.

As analyzed in Chapter 5, a certain singularity can be observed in this first Concertación administration. In this vein, we argue that the Aylwin administration, as the first Concertación coalition in power, established a certain model of coalition governability that, since it was successful, created a path for the next administrations to follow.

Patricio Aylwin was elected with 55.17% of the votes in the December 1989 elections. His closest rival, the right-wing candidate, Hernán Buchi (Finance Minister during the Pinochet dictatorship), obtained 29.4% of the votes and the independent businessman, Francisco Javier Errázuriz, got 15.43%.

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In Congress, the Concertación won more than 50% of the votes in both chambers (54.6% of the votes for Senators and 51.4% for deputies, electing 22 out of 42 senators and 69 out of 120 deputies).144 During the Aylwin administration, there were also local elections in 1992 (the Concertación won 53.3% of the votes).

Although the Aylwin administration has been the most analyzed of the four Concertación administrations145, our research provides additional knowledge about it because it analyzes appointments in terms of party membership, inter-party checks and, especially, cabinet stability and change in detail. We have also added a qualitative analysis at undersecretary level. We have included the operationalization of transversalidad and applied our technocratic and political scale. Generally, literature mentions these concepts but does not operationalize them, so they cannot be measured (Huneeus, 1998; Montecinos, 1998). With this operationalization, we can make more comparisons, analyzing different administrations through time. Finally, a detailed analysis of cabinet change is useful to understand coalition dynamics and how they are tested when these changes are produced. Cabinet stability is an expression of coalition governability.

In conclusion, we can say that data analysis of our dependent variables confirms that the first Concertación administration was notably stable, that informal rules of power sharing that facilitated power administration were developed within it and that a technocratical presence can be seen, especially in economic state areas, which are more important qualitatively than quantitatively. This chapter is structured as follows: we will first present our dependent and then our independent variables.

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www.elecciones.gov.cl

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b) Administering Power in Presidential Coalitions

In this section, we will analyze stability according to our two dependent variables: maintaining coalitions and cabinet stability.