All opposed: the relationship between public approval and presidential legislative success in Argentina

This thesis explores the effect of public approval on presidential legislative success as conditional on the presence of presidential majorities using conditional party government (CPG), cartel theory, and agenda setting theory. Highly-disciplined majority parties, acting as cartels, exercise negative agenda setting power to preserve the interests of the party and protect the party label. Presidential majorities exercise negative agenda setting power to constrain their president when the president is unpopular. The empirical analysis in this study models agenda setting, measures explanatory factors of legislative success, and predicts presidential legislative success using all of the presidential legislative bills introduced in Argentina from 1983 to 2015. Approximately sixty percent of all presidential bills in this sample were successfully enacted, leaving some eight hundred and fifty bills that, at some point in the legislative process, failed. The results show that in the Chamber of Deputies the likelihood that a bill is shelved in committee depends on public approval when the chamber is controlled by the opposition or the president’s party; presidential majorities in the Chamber of Deputies are no less likely than the opposition to shelve bills when the president is unpopular. In the Senate, the interaction effect of public approval and majority control shows a positive and statistically significant relationship; whereby presidential majorities are more likely to constrain their own president against public opinion wishes. The unexpected results suggest that partisan behavior differs in the Senate and may be explained by more individualist senators that do not delegate full authority to the party.