ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the issuance of unilateral actions by Latin American presidents executed through administrative decrees. These decrees are an important vehicle of presidential discretion that amplify a president’s powers of unilateral action vis-à-vis the other branches of government and political institutions. But little is known about how presidents use these decrees in parallel to their legislative powers. Understanding what the executive targets with these decrees is crucial for a more comprehensive assessment of presidential power, which is enhanced by administrative decisions in both ordinary times and emergencies. We use an unsupervised machine learning technique (structural topic modelling, STM) to analyse the content of presidential decrees. We demonstrate that presidents pay attention to a great variety of policy areas and that different goals drive their behaviour. We built a large, novel dataset that comprises administrative decrees issued by presidents in six countries (1985–2018): Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia, and Peru.
