A new appraisal of the relationship between the Presidency and Congress in Argentina over the first two decades of its democratic regime. Mariana Llanos uses the processes of privatization and state reform in Argentina to re-assess the performance, functions and stature of these institutions as the country embarked on the programme of change. A valuable contribution to the debate on the development of political institutions in Latin America.

This volume is the first comprehensive analysis of a new type of executive instability without regime instability in Latin America referred to as "presidential breakdown." It includes a theoretical introduction framing the debate within the institutional literature on democracy and democratization, and the implications of this new type of executive instability for presidential democracies. Two comparative chapters analyze the causes, procedures, and outcomes of presidential breakdowns in a regional perspective, and country studies provide in-depth analyses of all countries in Latin America...