This research argues that such behavior is more likely when presidents have government agendas that diverge from the interests of legislators or ministers. When these divergences are accentuated, presidents prefer to act unilaterally, issuing decrees to enforce their positions and broaden political support for their government agenda. This study is relevant, as it demonstrates that presidents influence laws during their approval in Congress as well as afterward, when they alone decide how they should be executed. To measure the degree of presidential particularism, the analysis will initially focus on a sample of autonomous decrees issued by presidents in the countries studied, differentiating among their distributive or regulatory nature, their allocative scope, and the potential beneficiaries. We built a novel dataset on legislative and administrative decrees issued by presidents in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Paraguay since 1985.

Our main hypothesis is that the type of government (one-party or coalition) affects changes in presidential organization, and that this effect is conditional on the nature of the presidential agenda and the constitutional constraints on presidential discretion.

These changes are more frequent in coalition governments, since the multi-party format of the cabinet subjects the president to more complex coordination problems. This study focuses on two processes of change in the presidency, relating to (1) the frequency of changes in its organizational units, and (2) the use of unilateral executive decrees. The type of cabinet, one-party or coalition, is the main variable of interest. Thus, we compare Latin American presidencies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay) with those of countries with consolidated democracies (the United States, Germany and Spain). The research produced new databases covering the period between 1985 and 2018.