How Do Minority Presidents Manage Multiparty Coalitions? Identifying and Analyzing the Payoffs to Coalition Parties in Presidential Systems

Abstract

The preponderance of minority presidents in modern democracies has concentrated the attention of researchers on the multiparty coalitions that presidents form to govern in legislative assemblies. This analysis of “coalitional presidentialism” has focused almost exclusively on presidential systems in Latin America, and Brazil in particular. It has understood multiparty presidential coalitions as cabinet-level constructs, which bind the support of parties in legislatures through portfolio payoffs. In this article, we explore this analysis in a non-Latin American context: post-Soviet Ukraine. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, we find that portfolio payoffs are an important tool for managing Ukrainian coalitions. But we also find that minority presidents have relied systematically on the support of legislative parties outside of the cabinet and have used different payoffs to manage their support. Given that this complexity also exists in other new democracies, we argue that there is a need to distinguish between cabinet-level and floor-level coalitions in minority presidential systems.