Llanos and Margheritis 77 Mariana Llanos is a researcher at the Institut für Iberoamerika-Kunde (IIK) in Hamburg, Germany, and teaches Latin American politics at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on Latin American political institutions, particularly to the president-congress relations and the legislatures of the Southern Cone. She is the author of Privatization and Democracy in Argentina (Palgrave, 2002), co-author of Bicameralismo, Senados y senadores en el Cono Sur latinoamericano (ICPS, Barcelona, 2005, together with Francisco Sánchez and Detlef Nolte) and co-editor of Controle Parlamentar na Alemanha, na Argentina e no Brasil (KAS, Rio de Janeiro, 2005, with Ana María Mustapic), among other works. Ana Margheritis is assistant professor of international relations and Latin American politics at Univer- sity of Florida. Her research interests are in international political economy, foreign policy, regional cooperation, and inter-American relations. She is the editor of Latin American Democracies in the New Global Economy (2003); author of Ajuste y Reforma en Argentina, 1989-1995 (1999); and co- author of Historia de las relaciones exteriores de la República Argentina (with Carlos Escudé et al., 1998) and Malvinas: Los motivos económicos de un conflicto (with Laura Tedesco, 1991), as well as of several articles in academic journals and book chapters. Studies in Comparative International Development, Winter 2006, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 77-103. Why Do Presidents Fail? Political Leadership and the Argentine Crisis (1999-2001) * Mariana Llanos and Ana Margheritis This article explores why Argentine president Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001) failed to govern and the factors that prevented him from completing his constitu- tional mandate. This study draw on current literature about leadership. We argue that President De la Rúa’s ineffective performance was characteristic of an inflex- ible tendency towards unilateralism, isolationism, and an inability to compromise and persuade. Moreover, we examine how de la Rúa’s performance, in the context of severe political and economic constraints, discouraged cooperative practices among political actors, led to decision-making paralysis, and ultimately to a crisis of gov- ernance This work seeks to make four contributions. First, it conceptualizes political leader- ship by providing an analytical framework that integrates individual action, insti- tutional resources and constraints, and policy context, thus filling a gap in the literature. Second, it explains the importance of effective leadership in building up and maintaining multiparty coalitions in presidential systems. Third, it comple- ments existing institutional approaches to improve our understanding of a new type of instability in Latin America: the failure of more than a dozen of presidents to