Bolivia's democratic experience has been characterized by the search for ways to solve the basic problem of Latin American presidential regimes, which have regularly slipped into stalemates between executives and legislatures led by minority governments. Most presidential systems in Latin America pose the fundamental problem that they are embedded in multi-party systems with proportional representation; this has been defined as the "difficult equation of presidentialism", and has been a permanent source of political conflicts which has adversely affected the chances of democratic consolidation.
In Bolivia the problem has been partly solved through a basic institutional shift from "presidentialism" with minority governments to a "parliamentarized presidentialism" based on majority governments. This distinctive system of government is a "mestizo child", with both parliamentary and presidentialist features. It is presidentialist because the president serves for a fixed term and, even though chosen by Congress, does not depend on its continuing confidence. But it is "parliamentarised" because the president is chosen by the legislature on the basis of post-electoral bargaining, so ensuring majority legislative support and the compatibility of executive and legislative powers. The mainspring of the system is a dynamic common in parliamentary regimes: the politics of coalition.
Like parties everywhere, Bolivian parties strive to maximize their respective vote shares, but they do not expect popular balloting to be the last stage of arbitration. Rather, they focus on post-electoral bargaining, and it is this that will determine who actually ends up in the congressional majority and with the executive power. The dominant pattern has been that of coordinated congressional and government coalitions, which has enhanced both the stability of the executive authority and the compatibility of executive and legislative powers.
Since the resumption of "free and fair" elections in 1979, the Bolivian party system, which evolved from a highly fragmented one to a moderate multi-party system of six effective parties, has proved unable to produce a single predominant party, or even alternating majorities. Thus, Article 90 of the Constitution, the guiding principle for the electoral system, has defined the normal method for choosing the president. It makes no explicit provision for political pacts, but it is its requirement that presidents be chosen by Congress when no single candidate wins a majority of the popular vote that has created broad scope for bargaining and coalition-building among political parties.
One key dimension of Bolivian "parliamentarised presidentialism" is the List PR electoral system. In fact, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the electoral system helped reinforce the patterns of inter-party competition and coalition building, but the system also had many shortcomings and was prone to fraud and manipulation. One of the crucial issues of democratic stability and legitimacy has been the establishment of coherent rules of the game. The Bolivian electoral reforms in 1986, 1991, and 1994 were characterized by short-term calculations and contingent reactions to political pressures, and not by research or deliberate political engineering. Moreover, party leaderships lacked experience and were unable to develop a coherent reform strategy. The result was that the elections in 1985, 1989, and 1993 were all held under different PR formulas. The D'Hondt formula, introduced in 1956, was replaced in 1986 by a so-called double quotient of participation and allocation of seats, which hindered the access of small parties to Congress. In 1989 a further change established the Sainte-Lagu formula for the presidential and parliamentary elections in 1993, which encouraged, in turn, the representation of very small parties.
Nevertheless, the first wave of weighty changes had paradoxically less to do with the change of the prevailing PR system than with the establishment of an autonomous Electoral Court, the adoption of on-site vote validation of ballots at polling places, and the abolition of mechanisms that made it possible for regional electoral courts to distort results. However, the constitutional reform of August 1994 introduced a second wave of changes, and brought about the most major shift in the PR system so far by introducing, with some modifications, the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system of Germany and New Zealand. At first this revision led to the "contradictory" adoption of parallel First Past the Post (FPTP) and PR systems - basically, a mixed PR system in terms of voting criteria but not in terms of outcomes.
Thus in August 1996, Congress had to pass a new law concerning the application of Article 60 of the Constitution to remove some obvious defects. It re-established the D'Hondt formula of PR and created a three-percent threshold for seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Henceforth, 68 deputies out of a constitutionally-fixed number of 130 will be chosen by FPTP voting in single-member districts, while the remainder will be chosen by party list voting according to proportional representation, in nine regional multi-member districts. Unlike Germany and Venezuela, there is no provision for additional seats. Seats are allocated directly to candidates winning in single-member districts, even if a party wins in only one district and obtains no PR seats. As in Germany, the overall distribution of seats, however, will be decided by applying the PR formula in a compensatory fashion, with a three-percent threshold for representation at the national level. If a party wins 10 seats through the overall List PR voting, and five seats in single-member districts, it is ultimately entitled to ten parliamentary seats.
The most striking phenomenon in the Bolivian experience of electoral reform has been the use of democratic procedures and mechanisms. Reforms were discussed in multi-party commissions and reaching multi-party consensus was a sine qua non condition for congressional approval. No referendum was called because the Bolivian Constitution does not allow this mechanism of legitimization. From 1989 through 1992, inter-party debate unfolded around two key proposals, which were, in turn, rejected. The Acción Democrática Nacionalista and the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria advocated plurality for presidential elections, so that the Congress would only have confirmed the candidate winning the plurality of votes; meanwhile, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) proposed the French-style Two-Round (majority-runoff) System (TRS). Both proposals started from the premise that the congressional election of presidents through party bargaining did not respect the people's will, and decisions were taken behind closed doors; people voted, but did not choose the president.
A consensus was finally reached based on the MNR's proposal to adopt an MMP system for the legislature and, furthermore, to reduce the number of presidential candidates able to obtain a plurality of votes at the parliamentary election from three to two, and to establish a five-year mandate for the president, the vice-president, and members of parliament. The real shift to MMP-style PR stemmed from discontent with vote manipulation in the 1989 general election, but the specific causes of the reforms were three-fold: the concern about a process of de-legitimization of party representation because closed party lists weakened the links between MPs and voters; the disillusionment of citizens with a lack of political responsiveness and accountability of governing parties; and finally a desire to reduce the growing alienation between parties and society by fostering constituency representation.
In the presidential and parliamentary elections of June 1997, these electoral reforms did not have the effects expected, as the party system became more fragmented and polarized than the one elected in 1993. For example, in 1993 the largest party won 35.6 percent of the vote; in 1997, the largest party - a different one - won only 22.3 percent. Only seven parties won seats in 1997, compared to nine in 1993, but the delegations were much more equal in size, making for a significantly more fragmented congress. There were three reasons for this unexpected outcome. First, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of incumbent president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada lost nearly half of its share of the vote, depriving it of its temporary dominant position vis-a-vis its competitors. Second, in 1993 the MNR's two principal rivals, AND and MIR, were joined in an alliance called the Patriotic Accord; before 1997 this pact broke apart, and ADN and MIR ran separate presidential candidates and presented separate congressional lists. It is tempting to argue that there would have been fewer parties if these two events had not transpired; however, the MMP electoral system actually appears to have worsened the fragmentation. Due to the unusually high degree of regional concentration of party support, more parties (seven) won seats in the new single-member districts than in the multimember districts (five parties). Overall, the new parties were more personalist than before, but it is difficult to attribute this outcome to the mixed electoral system, as many of the personalist deputies were elected by PR.
