Executive Organisation and Crisis Economic Policy-Making in the Americas

This paper analyzes the organization of the Executive and its effects on economic decision-making in times of crisis. Government responses to economic crises have typically been studied as determined by the nature of the crisis and the political context of their formulation. But regardless of these contextual factors, responses to crises are generally crafted within the Executive branch, and traverse the typical stages of public policymaking – formulation, launching, and implementation. However, there is little analysis on how the Executive is organized to generate those responses, and on whether the varying decision contexts in the policymaking process influence the Executive’s crisis management. This paper intends to fill in this gap by theoretically bridging two hitherto unrelated literatures, US presidential studies on Executive organization and managerial styles and the literature on adjustment politics during the 1980s and 1990s, and using them for comparative analysis of the Executive’s organization and decision-making processes during economic crises in three federal presidential democracies with varying organizational arrangements and experiences with economic emergencies: Argentina, Brazil, and the United States.