Regime types

What is political power/effectiveness of governance?

• Agenda control

• Legislative success

• Capacity to govern in conflict

Terms in office comparison

Presidential: fixed

Parliamentary: flexible

Semi presidential systems: president-parliamentary

President is popularly elected and has constitutional authority. PM and cabinet are dually accountable to the president and parliamentary majority.

Semi-presidential systems: premier presidential

President is popularly elected and has constitutional authority. The PM and cabinet are exclusively accountable to the parliamentary majority.

President is likely to share executive power with PM and cabinet.

COHABITATION

Parliamentary majority and president represent opposing parties. This can shift power away from a president, limiting their ability to implement their own agenda.

• In Portugal, the cohabitation of the president and PM in 2021, in which the president served as a check rather than a direct operator, demonstrates that constitutional design interacts with party control to shift where power sits.

• France’s 3 past periods of cohabitation were not necessarily synonymous with paralysis.

Cohabitation in Ukraine

Cohabitation in Ukraine in 2006 saw refusals to recognise the election results. The president called for election that he hoped would reduce the power of his PM rival, a move that was labelled as a coup d’état. It was a bitter and violent political conflict.

Presidential Separation of survival/origin

SAMUELS

• Survival = fixed terms

• Origin = presidential votes counted separately from allocation of legislative seats.

  • A president may bargain under the reliability of a fixed tenure. Divided governments (or presidents without a legislative majority) are common, and do not cripple a president in the way it might a PM, especially due to their fixed term.

• Colombian President Alvaro Uribe was able to use his 4-year fixed term to negotiate a constitutional amendment in 2004, allowing for consecutive re-election, which he subsequently won.

Presidential system delegation model (Kaare Strom)

“Multiple-chain”

• Voters delegate policymaking power to a legislature and a president. A president is directly elected through the people, separate from the allocation of legislative seats (direct accountability).

• More transparent - policy bargaining takes place in the public domain.

Issues with presidential delegation model

• Less clear which delegate made decisions (i.e., the president or the legislature) so voters cannot punish as easily.

• More susceptible to adverse selection - qualities to make a presidential candidate successful in governance are not the same needed to win an election - parties must choose who will appeal to the masses, not who will pursue party goals.

Parliamentary delegation system (Kaare Strom)

“Single-chain”: Citizens (principals) delegate to MPs (agents), MPs (principals) delegate to the PM (agent), the PM (principals) delegates to ministers (agents), and ministers (principals) delegate to civil servants (agents).

• “Voters should attribute relatively more responsibility for outcomes to directly elected executives than to indirectly elected PMs.” (Samuels)

Issues with parliamentary delegation system

• Exacerbates moral hazard - agents may take decisions diverging from the preferences of principals, due to asymmetric information.

  • Politicians face a myriad of temptations (to further their own political agenda rather than platform their constituents, to influence for personal/familial gain, etc).

• “A singular chain of delegation is only as strong as its weakest link.”

Other presidential features (Authority)

• Constitutionally guaranteed executive authority to execute the laws

• Can range from decree-heavy to decree-light

  • The president could use unilateral power (presidential decrees or vetoes) to achieve their policy goals (Clark, Golder and Golder), without making policy concessions.

Example of presdiential decree usage

• In Argentina, President Javier Milei used over 100 DNUs (decrees) 2023-2024 to unilaterally enact massive economic deregulation and privatisation. He achieved this without needing to negotiate with the opposition-controlled legislature.

Other presidential features (Cabinet)

• Cabinet size and formation

  • More power in appointing cabinet, so formation of it is done strategically to build political alliances with the legislature.

• In the case of the presidential system, non-partisanship is more common, such as the case of Donald Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk as Head of DOGE and Senior Advisor in early 2025. As a technocrat, Musk had no prior experience in politics and enacted policies not necessarily supported by the population, resulting in thousands of workers unemployed.

Other parliamentary features (bargaining)

• Can range from strong party discipline to fragmented coalition bargaining.

• More conducive to democratic consolidation than presidentialism (which has competing claims for legitimacy, rigidity of office, populist candidates, etc).

Unilateral tools in both systems

• Scope of these tools depends on veto players (courts), parties, and fragmentation within the legislature.

• The “presidentialisation” of PMs, who have used emergencies to take control of the legislative agenda as a president would, suggests that regime classification is a limited tool.

  • British PMs have acted increasingly more presidential, through wider use of their prerogative powers without consulting Parliament; as was the case when Boris Johnson attempted to prorogue Parliament to push through the EU Withdrawal Act in 2019; likewise, when Theresa May authorised airstrikes on Syria in 2018 without a prior vote in the House of Commons. Rishi Sunak ordered drone strikes on Yemen, May also used several SIs to attempt to get her Brexit deal through.

Legislative deadlock means there is not necessarily higher policy stability in spite of veto points

• Often, presidents that fail to negotiate with opposition parties often face legislative deadlock, where policy simply does not pass, leading to regime crisis for presidentialism.

• Linzian Causal Chain:

  • Competing claims for legitimacy

  • Winner takes all, little tolerance of opposition (opposition is marginalised).

  • Legislative effectiveness weakens, so no incentive for coalition formation.

  • Presidents govern with minority coalitions, so more legislative ineffectiveness.

  • Eventually, deadlock and democratic collapse.

  • Fixed terms mean removing an ineffective president is difficult.

Presidential cabinets can vary in power

• Presidents can vary the partisan nature and proportionality of their cabinets, often doing so based on their decree power.

  • “Coalitional presidentialism” in Brazil means presidents usually depend on coalition cabinets, with ideologically diverse parties, to secure legislative support.

Majority in parliament determines power outcomes

• PMs appoint cabinets on the basis of how strong their majority is within Parliament: a government with a large majority means power can be concentrated using a cabinet strongly aligned with the PM’s politics, but if the government must depend on consensus among parties, cabinets must be formed through power-sharing.

  • In Germany, coalition negotiation results in shared cabinets. The PM is not necessarily held accountable to all of the voters then if the PM has a large majority.

  • Coalition structure mediates constitutional design.

Presidential and democracy example

The election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela initiated a slow but total collapse of democratic institutions from within, as he weakened the constitution and legislature to concentrate executive power.

Eval

• Regime type allocates power, but in practice, agenda control depends on party discipline, coalition structure, and informal norms.

• Although regime type does provide a form of classification, it is misleading due to within-type variation.

Westminster model

Use of the “Westminster model” as the exemplar of majoritarianism and occasionally parliamentarism.

• Citing a term so ambiguous (Russell & Serban), referring to a cultural and historical phenomenon rather than an empirically established benchmark for comparative analysis, suggests that parliamentarism is not a singular, consistent, or highly effective model, but rather a set of often mismatched, flexible features, therefore estimated effects are fragile.

Duverger’s claims

• Semi-presidentialism is an alternation of presidentialism and parliamentarism based on whether the president controls a legislative majority.

• President has legislative majority: functions like parliamentarism.

• President has no legislative majority: functions like a presidential system with minority cabinet, where decrees become important.

DATAAA

Stepan and Skach: non-OECD presidential democracies had a low survival rate (measured as being democratic for 10 consecutive years) of 20% between 1973–1989, compared to 61% for parliamentary.

• From these countries, 40% of presidential democracies experienced a coup, compared to 18% for parliamentary.

Madison’s dilemma

The issue of creating governments strong enough to govern effectively, while constrained enough to ensure it cannot become despotic.

Nigeria example

Trade-off: having changed from a parliamentary to presidential constitution in 1979, they traded exclusion of opposition under executive dominance for gridlock and ineffectiveness under separation of powers.

Legislatures: Gary Cox

Features of democracy arise from lack of plenary time in legislative state of nature.

• Parties are only viable route to high office

  • Threshold of support to form a political faction: Austria (2.7%), Chile (7.5%) - systematically excludes smaller groups

• Power to delay can lead to gridlock

• Power to hasten can lead to overspending

Legislatures: Laver

Parties are the de facto gatekeepers to high political office (parliamentarism)

• BoJo whip removed from 21MPs - representation legislation tradeoff

Presidentialism too:

• Chile has very strong national party discipline

  • Perhaps this is how they represent? By not breaking party lines voters know how their representative will legislate.

Legislatures: Lovenduski

Representation requires substantive and descriptive - institutions themselves are gendered.

• TO IMPROVE descriptive REPRESENTATION: institutional reform (quotas, reserved seats) - will fast track agenda priorities (substantive representation)