Increasing mass protests due to economic crisis and to public distrust in politics forced President of Argentina Fernando De la RĂșa (1999â2001) to leave office on December 20, 2001, before the expiration of his presidential term. Opposition governors had a meeting to choose his successor on the same day,1 and Congress elected Governor of the Province of San Luis Adolfo RodrĂguez SaĂĄ as the interim president on December 23, 2001.2 President RodrĂguez SaĂĄ declared a default on the Argentine national debt, and he sent several bills to Congress for implementing his public policy.3 In spite of facing such a deep crisis, Congress discussed none of his bills, since legislators followed the position of his copartisan governors, who immediately started to oppose him. These governors claimed that he tried to hold the presidency until 2003, which broke the initial agreement between him and them at the meeting that he was in charge of calling for presidential election for March, 2002. As a result, he also resigned on December 30, 2001, as the president due to the lack of support from governors ,4 and Argentina suffered from a serious political crisis until Senator and former Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires Eduardo Duhalde âs accession to the presidency on January 2, 2002.
One of the important tasks for President of Brazil Luiz InĂĄcio Lula da Silva (2003â2010) during his tenure was reforming the Brazilian tax system to achieve fiscal stability of the federal government. However, Congress often blocked his attempts following instead the preferences of governors . In 2003, for example, he proposed a tax reform package, which included a plan to make Provisional Contribution on the Movement or Transmission of Values, Credits, and Rights of Financial Nature (Contribuição ProvisĂłria sobre a Movimentação ou TransmissĂŁo de Valores e de CrĂ©ditos e Direitos de Natureza Financeira, CPMF) a permanent tax.5 Governors and legislators strongly opposed the tax reform, complaining that it did not take into account decrease in state revenues that would be caused by federal taxes, such as the CPMF. In consequence, what President Lula could do was get an extension of the CPMF until 2007 (Werneck 2006).6 As tax reform attempts were a factor that negatively affected his relationship with governors, he invited opposition governors as well as his copartisan governors for lunch and asked for their âlegislativeâ support immediately after his successful reelection bid in 2006. Before the lunch meeting, he emphasized the importance of governorsâ commitment to economic and political reforms: âThe election is over and we need to govern Brazil with all the governors â.7
These two episodes indicate that governors in some federal countries are important political actors at national politics and that the national executive branch needs their support. However, this evidence contradicts a principle of federalism , which distinguishes the jurisdiction of the national government from that of subnational governments . Riker (1975) regarded federalism as a political system in which a central government and regional governments make final decisions in their jurisdictions. For Elazar (1997), a critical component of federalism is that power is distributed among multiple centers. Rikerâs definition focused on decentralization of power, whereas Elazarâs argument emphasized non-centralization of power (Gibson 2004; Lijphart 1999, 2012). Nevertheless, both of them agreed that governors do not hold constitutional powers over the national political process.
I thus ask the following question in this book: Under what conditions can subnational governments be national veto players? Many studies (e.g., Carey and Reinhardt 2004; Cheibub et al. 2009; Gibson 2004; Jones 2008; Jones and Hwang 2005a, b; Langston 2010; Rosas and Langston 2011; Samuels and Mainwaring 2004; Spiller and Tommasi 2007; Stepan 2004; see also Monaldi 2010) have regarded governors as national veto players even though they do not have such a constitutional status. However, the statistical tests of comparative legislative studies and comparative federalism have not succeeded in showing gubernatorial effects on a national political arena. In this book, I shed light on the conditions under which governors can be national veto players by studying the treatment of presidential bills between 1983 and 2007 in the Argentine Senate, which serves as an arena for subnational governments to influence national politics through their senators. Identifying senatorsâ principals as well as focusing on the sequential flow of the legislative process, I argue that senators change their actions according to stages in the legislative process and that longstanding governors can be national veto players, since their tenure power is indispensable for controlling their senators.
In the remainder of this chapter, I first explain why we should rethink gubernatorial effects on a national political arena more in detail. I then introduce my research strategy and organization of this book.
1.1 Rethinking Gubernatorial Effects on National Politics
Tsebelis (2002) defined a veto player as a political actor whose support is indispensable for policy change. According to him, policy change becomes more difficult as the number of veto players increases. The numbers of institutional veto players , whose agreement is required by the constitution for a policy change (e.g., the president and the legislative branch), and their relative positions in a policy space influence the implementation of policy reforms. He also claimed that players such as courts, army officials, and individual voters (through referendums) can be potential veto players in some political systems.
The constitution codifies the power of institutional veto players , and thus subnational governments are not such players at the national level. A national polity under federalism consists of multiple levels of government, and each exercises exclusive authority over policy areas that are prescribed by the constitution (Gibson 2004). A federal system may generate more institutional veto players than a unitary system, not because of the constitutional powers of governors, but because of other features of federalism such as bicameralism and qualified majority rules in the upper chamber (e.g., filibuster s and cloture in the US Senate ) make the status quo more stable (Tsebelis 2002). Federal constitution clearly draws the line between the jurisdiction of the national government and that of subnational governments . Theoretically speaking, subnational governments cannot be institutional veto players at the national level, even though they enjoy exclusive authority over subnat...