Government Coalitions in Brazilian democracy

Abstract

T he online encyclopaedia Wikipedia defines "government coalition" as "a cabinet of a parliamentary government in which several parties cooperate.The usual reason given for this arrangement is that no party on its own can achieve a majority in the parliament."(Emphasis added.)This commonsense view predominated until very recently in academic circles.Studies of government coalitions were limited to countries with parliamentary systems and the comparative literature assumed that presidents, because they have fixed terms that are independent from the legislature, would not have incentives to form coalitions.The assumption that coalition governments are peculiar to parliamentary systems has, however, been demolished, both theoretically and empirically.1 Coalition governments occur in 53.6% of the situations in which the president's party does not obtain a sufficient number of seats to govern alone (Cheibub, Przeworski and Saiegh 2004, 574).In other words, presidents also seek to form governments that increase their support in the legislature and the reasons leading them to do so are not much different from those that motivate prime ministers.1 * I thank José Antônio Cheibub who helped me with many suggestions and much advice; Marcus Figueiredo and Fernando Limongi for their last-minute reading and comments; Sérgio Abranches for his reading of a previous version and the information on some ministers of the 1946-64 period; Daniel Heller and Andrezza Ribeiro for their participation in gathering and organizing data.The research that gave rise

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