Minority presidents who fail to build multi-party majority coalitions are often victims of legislative paralysis. Legislative paralysis has been repeatedly mentioned as resulting from ill-functioning executive-legislative relations. The short-lived leftwing government of Salvador Allende in Chile (1970-73) is often cited as an example of a minority president who suffered from legislative paralysis. Here, we check the validity of that claim. We compare the legislative output of all Chilean presidents from 1841 to 1973 to assess the extent to which there was a decline under Allende. We collected 7498 presidential bills introduced by 17 presidents in the period and found 3810 laws promulgated from those bills. The rate of success of Allende’s legislative bills (.39) is slightly lower than the rate of success of all bills during the period (0.50), but Allende’s legislative output was not similar to several other previous Chilean minority coalition presidents who successfully completed their terms.

The Salvador Allende leftwing presidency in Chile (1970-1973) is often cited as an example of the detrimental consequences of presidents who do not have sufficient support in the legislature. In fact, Allende’s Chile is often cited as an extreme case of political polarization and alleged legislative paralysis that, presumably, led to—or at least significantly contributed—to a democratic breakdown. Though there seems to be consensus on the negative consequences for presidents who do not have majority support in Congress, the reasons why democracy broke down in Chile might be explained by other variables, not because Allende lacked a congressional majority. In fact, the claims that relate Allende’s alleged legislative paralysis to the breakdown of democracy do not report the legislative success of previous Chilean presidents. Thus, we do not really know if Allende’s legislative success was in any way comparable to that of previous presidents.

By compiling data on the legislative success of Chilean presidents from 19841 to 1973, we can first verify the validity of the claim that Allende’s minority coalition government in fact experienced legislative paralysis. We can conduct the comparisons taking into account the size of Allende’s legislative coalition and compare it with previous presidents who had similar sized legislative coalitions. Given that Allende only served half of his 6-year term, we can also compare his legislative output with his predecessors at comparable times.

With the wealth of data we have collected, we can also go beyond situating Allende’s legislative output in the proper comparative context of Chilean presidents. We can assess the effect of support in the legislature for presidents on the success of presidential legislative agendas, the effect of the electoral calendar on the success of the president’s agenda and the effect of changes in the institutional design of executive-legislative relations on the success of the president agenda.

This paper constitutes a rough draft of what we expect will be a series of articles analyzing the success of the president’s legislative agenda in Chile under different conditions to draw lessons on what explains the success of a president’s legislative agenda when presidents do not enjoy majority support in Congress.

Here, we do not take issue with the reasons why Allende was overthrown and Chilean democracy was replaced by an authoritarian regime in 1973. We simply set out to test the claim that Allende experienced legislative paralysis as a minority president—and that, presumably, had something to do with his downfall. By compiling data on the legislative initiatives by Chilean presidents from 1841 to 1973, we want to assess the success of Salvador Allende’s legislative initiatives in a proper comparative context—the success of previous Chilean presidents’ legislative initiatives. Though we have lots of work ahead to assess the effect of the president’s legislative support on the success of the legislative agenda and to single out institutional design changes that might have affected that success, we have enough evidence to call into question the long standing claim in comparative political science—and democratic breakdown literature in specific—that Chilean President Salvador Allende experienced legislative paralysis during his short 3-year presidency. Compared to previous minority presidents in Chile, Salvador Allende had a similar level of success in his legislative agenda.