"Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America"

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Presentation of their forthcoming book with Oxford University Press.

Eduardo Aleman
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Houston

George Tsebelis
Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellow

Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America(Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2016), edited by Eduardo Alemán and Visiting Fellow George Tsebelis, provides a framework to understand how the interaction of legislative majorities, political institutions, and the policy positions of key actors affect the initiation and passage of legislation. Evidence from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay—countries with varying presidential and legislative systems—shows that presidents with extensive legislative powers may be constrained by the positions of their legislative allies, whereas weaker presidents may be well-positioned to build successful coalitions to achieve their legislative goals.

In their contributions, twelve leading experts in Latin American politics describe the constitutional and congressional rules that allocate powers to propose, amend, and veto legislation; identify the political actors who have these prerogatives; and apply the framework to show how their policy positions and relative strengths influence legislative decision making.

Eduardo Alemán is associate professor of political science at the University of Houston. Specializing in the comparative analysis of political institutions and Latin American politics, he focuses his research on executive–legislative relations, legislative politics, and political parties. He has published articles in such journals as World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Latin American Research Review. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

George Tsebelis, a 2015–16 Kellogg Visiting Fellow, is the Anatol Rapoport Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. A comparativist who specializes in political institutions, he has worked on Western Europe, the European Union and more recently, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Widely published, he is the author Nested Games (University of California Press, 1991), Bicameralism (coauthored, Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Veto Players (2002) and Reforming the European Union: Realizing the Impossible (coauthored, 2012), both from Princeton University Press. He holds a PhD from Washington University in St. Louis.