When Presidents Microtarget: Administrative Decrees and Presidential Particularism

This article examines presidential particularism in Latin America using presidential administrative decree-making. While existing research on presidential unilateralism has largely focused on the executive’s legislative powers, this study shifts attention to the administrative arena, where presidents retain greater discretion over implementation. We ask whether, and under what political conditions, presidents use administrative decrees to pursue particularistic distributive strategies. We argue that electoral vulnerability and cabinet coordination failures increase presidents’ incentives to rely on administratively targeted instruments. Narrow electoral victory margins and heightened competition from non-allied parties at the district level raise the electoral returns of targeted distributive decisions. At the same time, low legislative success and intra-cabinet conflicts constrain presidents’ ability to advance their preferences through ordinary legislative channels. Under these conditions, administrative decrees constitute a flexible instrument for the microtargeting of distributive benefits, enabling presidents to simultaneously consolidate electoral support and address coordination challenges within the cabinet. We therefore distinguish between presidential particularism, driven by the president’s electoral calculations, and cabinet particularism, driven by coordination and support problems within the governing coalition. Both forms of particularism are operationalized through text analysis of administrative decrees and data on budgetary allocations executed by the president. The empirical analysis draws on an original dataset covering all presidential administrative decrees issued in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Paraguay between 1990 and 2025.