Governing together: the Concertacin administrations in Chile (1990-2009)

Achieving stability in government coalitions within presidential systems is not a common political phenomenon. On March 11, 2010, the Coalition of Parties for Democracy (CPD - Concertacin de Partidos por la Democracia), a coalition created in Chile to defeat Pinochet, ended twenty years in power. Its continuity is particularly surprising if we consider that this coalition was formed by parties and political leaders who, in the sixties and at the beginning of the seventies, were political enemies. Why was the Concertacin one of the most successful coalitions in Latin American political history? From a political science point of view, the most common explanations provided to understand this phenomenon have mainly been external, focused on institutions and context. We argue that the success of the Concertacin was also due to its ability to sustain coalition governability, in itself understood as the maintaining of coalitions and cabinet stability. We analyze two dependent variables: one at a party level (maintaining coalitions) and the other at an individual level (cabinet stability). We have two sets of explanations or independent variables for coalition and cabinet stability: long-term ones, related to political learning, and short-term contextual ones, related to presidential autonomy (suprapartidismo), the informal rules of power sharing and the political use of technocrats. In developing our argument, we build on hypotheses drawn from the literature on technocrats as well as different findings regarding coalition theory and informal rules. Using descriptive statistics, we analyze all the Concertacin cabinets as a single case study, contrasting it to earlier periods. We also explore variation across the four Concertacin administrations. Our main finding is that, in comparison to pre-1973 democracy, the Concertacin administrations were more stable, with the Aylwin administration the most stable. We also observe that the patterns of power distribution and cabinet administration in the other Concertacin administrations vary in relation to how Presidents administer their autonomy (suprapartidismo), apply informal rules of power sharing and appoint technocrats. Suprapartidismo is the independent variable that most explains change