Power-Sharing, Presidential Style: Issue Salience and Portfolio Allocation in Multiparty Presidential Systems

Abstract

Minority presidents form coalitions to secure legislative support. However, such support comes at the policy cost of delegating power to coalition partners. Given this dilemma, how do presidents decide on portfolio allocation? The argument is that presidents consider ministries' policy relevance and the characteristics of coalition parties when distributing positions. The president will allocate the most important ministries to aligned ministers (seeking policy control) and to the larger coalition parties (seeking legislative support), distributing the least policy-relevant ministries to clientelist parties. The article presents an original measure for policy salience based on topic modeling of presidential addresses and conditional logit models to test the hypotheses. The analysis consists of a comparative study of Brazil, Chile, and Colombia over 24 years. Results indicate that presidents use salience to sort ministries and decide portfolio allocation. This evidence for the president-specific salience argument shows the relevance of considering the qualitative aspects of portfolio allocation in multiparty presidential systems and how presidents share power with coalition partners without losing control over governmental decisions.