Leadership and presidentialization of politics in Argentina

This paper’s aim is to analyze the impact of presidentialization of politics in the Argentinian political system. There, the presidential system has often implied the predominance of the executive leadership over the other institutional powers. This characteristic, which relates to structural and historical factors, has been increased as a product of the recent transformations in political representation. They suppose the emergence of leaders whose popularity has to do less to his party membership than to his personality and his direct appeal to voters, reproduced by the media. Related to this, the traditional political identities have lost stability, becoming them fragmentary and fluctuant. As a corollary, the political scene is dominated by popularity leaderships that structure their supports around fluctuant networks and party machines. In addition, the president, being leader of a professional electoral party; controlling the state’s resources and being not constrained by the party program, develops a decisionist style of leadership, that can bypass the parliamentary control.

As a sign of this phenomenon, we analyze particularly the 2011 election in the Buenos Aires Province.  In this process, the personalization and presidentialization of politics is the key to understand the definition of the executive and legislative lists and the campaign development. The presidential decisions, legitimated by a high support in the public opinion, could easily overcome ambitions of traditional party actors, associated with the provincial and local scenes. Second, we examine the map of the organization power in the light of the electoral results, and specifically, the consequences of a strengthen leadership with a dominant coalition and a parliament majority. Finally, to figure the scope of these changes in political representation, we  make comparisons between the Argentinian presidential system and the Uruguayan and Chilean systems, where the party competition is more stable than in Argentina.