The Puzzle

Since 1979, on average one out of six South American presidents have failed to fulfill their terms in office. These “failed presidencies” encompass situations in which elected presidents are forced to leave office early by means of impeachment, legislative initiatives, or resignation but without compromising the democratic order. This dissertation seeks to discover the forces that underlie these presidential failures.

 

Previous Works

Previous studies have found that institutional accounts, economic factors, social mobilizations, and political scandals are powerful forces affecting presidential failures. Nonetheless, these works have fallen short in three aspects: failing to employ a more appropriate quantitative approach for studying events, known causal relations still remain black-boxed, and inadequate operationalization of democracy.

 

Methods

I use Cox Proportional-Hazard model to quantitatively analyze 65 presidencies between 1979 and 2012, and process tracing for in-depth study of one survivor and two failed presidents.