Crisis and Rapid Re-Equilibration: The Consequences of Presidential Challenge and Failure in Latin America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Juan Linz posited his perils of argument in 1978. Yet contrary to Linz's predictions, since then presidential democracies have been much less likely to break down. Still, presidents continue to confront challenges to remaining in office for their full terms. Between 1978 and 2006 30% of all democratically-elected presidents worldwide faced serious efforts to remove them from office, and 12% were actually forced from office prior to the end of their terms. Thus far scholars have focused on the sources of these crises. In this paper, by contrast, we focus on their effects. Do these crises represent a serious new peril of presidentialism, or, to echo Linz, do we see crisis and re-equilibration, with few lasting consequences? This empirical question has important theoretical and normative implications. If we observe profound consequences following from these challenges, then even with the military largely sidelined and regime collapse not at issue, presidentialism would remain associated with normatively bad outcomes. Yet if we find that challenges or failures have minimal effects, then early presidential exit may represent an under-appreciated equilibrating mechanism that helps resolve executivelegislative conflict. In this case, early presidential exit might actually reveal democracy's vitality across the region. Both the pessimistic and optimistic views find some conjectural support among scholars, yet more systematic empirical analysis provides little support for the pessimistic view. Although presidential challenges and falls are surely difficult crises, their effects are limited and ephemeral. We thus conclude that challenges and falls cause only superficial and ephemeral damage to democratic governance in Latin America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".