Presidential Vetoes and Economic Bills in Multiparty Systems

• In Event: Comparative Studies on Executive-Legislative Interactions

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of bill’s content on presidential vetoes. Extant explanations often attribute the occurrence of presidential vetoes to institutional or contextual factors. Surprisingly, most of these studies have neglected a crucial aspect of legislative bargaining: the actual bill’s content. I argue that since presidents are granted several powers to influence various aspects of the economy, people (voters) assign responsibility for economic outcomes to their office. Effective economic management might enhance their possibilities of succeeding in government, ultimately impacting their reelection prospects. Conversely, poor economic performance might trigger deleterious effects on their capacity to sustain public support, eventually leading to early termination of their term. Importantly, through veto, presidents might micromanage outcomes related to the economy, such as public investment, taxes, subsidies, spending, and debt. In this sense, a bill dealing with economic issues should increase veto likelihood. To examine this expectation, I analyze over 7500 bills passed in Ecuadorian and Peruvian Congresses between 1995 and 2021. To carry out my topic classification task, I utilize the recently developed state-of-the-art multilingual Transformer model XLM-RoBERTa. Consistent with the hypothesized effect, I find that bills dealing with economic issues are a significant predictor of a presidential veto. In addition, consistent with distributive policymaking models, I find that presidents are more inclined to modify bills through amendatory vetoes as opposed to total vetoes.

Author

• Pablo Valdivieso Kastner, University of Oxford