The unwritten Law of Governability

COLOMBIA - In Brief 26 Apr 2023 by Andrés Escobar Arango

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Typically, at the beginning of a Colombian government, congressmen tell the ministers who still don’t know it, about the way things are handled vis-à-vis Government in that solemn bastion of representative democracy, National Congress. Namely, an iron law that has survived decades, and yet it isn’t written in paper. The law states that the first year belongs to the recently elected government. The second year is shared between Government and Congress. The third year belongs to Congress and the fourth and final year of the administration belongs to no one, since everyone who matters would be campaigning and people would be paying more attention to who the next presidente will be, rather than to the priorities of the soon to be ex-president. This law can be drawn, in a simplified fashion, as a downward-sloping straight line between the maximum level of governability, attained on inauguration day, on August 7th of the first year, and heading towards almost zero at the end of its 3rd year. Figure 1 depicts such line. Figure 1. Who rules in Colombian Congress? Source: Congress gossip and EConcept. At least two things derive from this Law: first, the Government is running a race against time. Second, the slope of the gray line of Figure 1 is not fixed; hence it can take any (negative) number. Indeed, Congress has the incentive to make the slope of the gray line steeper; and eventually, yet not frequently, Government can make it flatter through efficacy, popularity across the country and acceptability among Congressmen. Recall that in theory, theory and practice coincide, but in practice they don’t. Hence, in Figure 2 we show our assessment of how the theoretical Law depicted...