The power of the executive is. This decline began about a decade ago.: Worldwide, the opposite has happened: the power of presidents has been experiencing a secular expansion of their constitutional competences. Even in parliamentary countries, the phenomenon has been observed that political science classifies as “presidentialization of parliamentarism”, whose most notable trait is the loss of the collegiality of cabinet governments and the emergence of leaders above parties.
The current trend, marked by populism, is distinct. The expansion of powers is associated with abuse of authority. The locking of the executive branch – in jargon, “Executive Aggrandizement” – has its most extreme expression in the figure of Trump. These trends generate conceptual confusion.
There is an essential distinction made pioneering in 1963. The author of “The Two Brazils” (1953) and a US constitutional history argued that the designation “presidentialism” for Latin American countries was “deplorable” because “it is a source of errors, leading to the regime works closer to the American model.” Lambert proposed the concept of “presidential preponderance regime”. Such regimes “approach both US presidentialism and the cabinet government … evolved into a confusion of powers, a collaboration directed by the executive branch.”
Lambert referred to several countries where presidents historically had broad constitutional powers – EX. power to issue decrees – far superior to those of the US President. Afonso Arinos had already leaned over this issue with prescience, adding that the hyperpressialism of the First Republic was neutralized by the adoption of proportional representation (PR), which created the imperative of forming coalitions.
This “confusion of powers” functioned as a safeguard against abuse, but compromised decisive efficiency. It was the “stabilization of instability,” as Arinos wrote in 1949. The institutional response should be the president’s constitutional strengthening – for example, through the creation of provisional measures, the expansion of his legislative initiatives, the definition of exclusive skills and the control over the budget.
Measures in this sense, proposals as early as 1956, were only incorporated into the Constitution in 1988. The 1952 crisis was largely the result of a president unable to rule within the new institutional configuration of “transactional presidentialism” (Arinos). In 1988, the diagnosis was similar: it was necessary to give more powers to executives, but also strengthen brakes and counterweights. This constitutional configuration has changed little since then. Three innovations deserve to be highlighted: the limitations to MPs (EC 32/2001) and the amendments of the imposing budget (EC 86/2015 and EC 100/2019).
Constitutional machinery is a fundamental element of the exercise of power. But the operator – the “driver” – matters as much as. An inept operator, in certain contexts, ends up leading to institutional innovations that undermine its power,
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