Democratic Institutions and Regime Survival: Parliamentary and Presidential Democracies Reconsidered Notes
INTRODUCTION
The form of government influences the survival of democracies.
Linz (1978) argued for the superiority of parliamentary over presidential institutions.
Comparative politics scholars believed that new democracies should adopt parliamentary institutions to succeed.
Parliamentary democracies outperform presidential democracies in survival rates.
Between 1946 and 1999, presidential regimes were more likely to become dictatorships (1 in 23) compared to parliamentary regimes (1 in 58).
At very low levels of economic development, both types of democracies have low survival rates (1 in 8 die).
At higher levels of development, parliamentary democracies are more likely to survive, even under economic crisis.
Presidential democracies are more likely to emerge from military dictatorships and become dictatorships themselves.
The instability of presidential democracies is attributed to the separation of executive and legislative powers.
Parliamentarism is characterized by the fusion of powers, leading to governments supported by a majority in parliament.
This results in highly centralized decision-making.
Presidential regimes often have presidents without a majority in congress.
Congress is composed of legislators with little incentive to cooperate, leading to decentralized decision-making.
Presidential regimes are characterized by weak political parties and frequent stalemates.
Presidential regimes lack mechanisms to resolve conflicts between executives and legislatures, leading to instability.
This view was originally formulated by Linz (1978, 1994).
The operation of the political system cannot be entirely derived from the mode of government formation.
Other constitutional provisions affect how parliamentary and presidential democracies operate.
These provisions may counteract expected tendencies based on constitutional principles.
It is necessary to specify how institutional features are affected by incentives and their consequences.
This review focuses on legislative majorities, incentives for cooperation, and centralization of decision-making.
Although parliamentarism does outperform presidentialism in survival, the causes of this difference are not fully understood.
THE “MAJORITARIAN IMPERATIVE”
The conventional view implies a majoritarian imperative in parliamentarism.
Parliamentary governments must enjoy the confidence of the legislature to attain and retain power.
Decisions are made by majority rule, requiring majority support for parliamentary governments.
Minority governments may emerge occasionally but are temporary, reflecting the inability of the current majority to crystalize.
The system contains automatic correctives: forming a new government with majority support or holding new elections.
Presidential regimes lack the majoritarian imperative.
Voters have two agents (executive and legislative) who may not represent the same majority.
These agents have fixed terms and do not depend on each other to exist.
Conflicts between the two legitimate majorities may lead to stalemate and the collapse of the democratic regime.
However, the majoritarian imperative that supposedly distinguishes parliamentarism and presidentialism is neither an imperative nor sufficient to distinguish them.
Parliamentary governments do not necessarily produce majority governments (Strom 1990).
Minority governments existed 22% of the time in parliamentary regimes from 1946 to 1999 (Cheibub et al. 2001).
Other counts find about one third of governments formed under parliamentarism have a minority status.
Strom’s (1990) analysis shows that minority governments are not necessarily a sign of political instability.
The emergence of minority governments can be explained by the calculus made by party leaders about the costs and benefits of participating in government.
This calculus is affected by the degree of policy influence parties can exert when outside the government, as well as the competitiveness and decisiveness of the electoral process.
Out-of-government policy influence depends on the organization of parliament.
Electoral decisiveness and competitiveness depend on the clarity of electoral alternatives, the fluctuation of seats between elections, the relationship between electoral success and government participation, and the proximity of elections to government formation.
Majority governments are not the expected outcome of government formation under parliamentarism; it depends on institutional traits.
Minority governments under presidentialism are not as widespread as expected.
About 40% of the years of presidentialism between 1946 and 1996 were under minority governments (Cheibub 2002).
The frequency of minority presidential governments is associated with the number of political parties, the type of electoral system, and the electoral cycle.
However, the occurrence of minority governments has no impact on the survival of presidential democracies (Cheibub 2002).
Deadlock, the specter that supposedly haunts presidentialism, is neither pervasive nor associated with regime breakdown (Cheibub 2002).
Deadlock occurs only when the preferences of a majority cannot prevail.
These situations depend on the share of seats controlled by the party of the president in congress and on specific institutional features regarding the presidential veto and legislative override of the presidential veto.
Factors include presidential veto power, the type of congressional majority necessary to override the presidential veto, whether the system is unicameral or bicameral, and veto override procedures in bicameral systems.
These factors distinguish three situations: presidential dominance, opposition dominance, and legislative deadlock.
Legislative deadlock occurs only when the president is likely to veto a bill approved by a majority in the legislature, but that majority is not sufficient to override the presidential veto.
Presidential democracies should face higher risks of dying when conditions for deadlock between the president and congress are met; however, this is not the case.
The difference in the transition probabilities for deadlock and no-deadlock situations is rather small.
The belief that the survival prospects of presidential democracies are compromised when presidential parties lack a majority of seats in congress or when deadlock situations exist has no empirical basis.
The conventional view is that deadlock will never occur in parliamentary regimes.
Parliamentary regimes are designed so that whenever there is a deadlock between the government and the legislature, either the government changes, or the legislature changes.
Divided government may also exist under parliamentarism (e.g., with minority governments).
The government in these systems exists only as long as there is no alternative majority that can replace it, distinguishing them from presidential regimes.
Divided government in parliamentarism cannot produce deadlock in the same sense as in presidentialism.
Parliamentarism includes a mechanism that can be invoked in case of policy conflict between the government and the legislative majority.
This mechanism will not always be invoked, or that, once invoked, it will necessarily put an end to the disagreement that led to its use.
Deadlock under parliamentary regimes may occur over time, as when governments succeed governments and no stable majority is formed even after new elections are held.
The existence of a majority, either in parliamentarism or in presidentialism, does not automatically mean the ability of the government to govern.
The scope of action available to the government can also be reduced as it seeks to obtain majority status.
What matters is both the number of parties that must come together in order to establish a majority and the cohesion of the party (or parties) that belong to the majority.
Government action is necessarily limited to the area that contains policy proposals preferred by its supporters over the status quo.
Policy change in democratic regimes is associated with the number of actors who can veto a proposal (Tsebelis 1995).
The number of veto players is a function of both institutional and ideological variables.
Policy stability increases with the number and the cohesion of, and the distance among, the parties that belong to the government.
The reduction in the scope of governmental action as a by-product of majority building will certainly affect the policies pursued in a given system.
Governments may have to pay the price of policy immobility in order to form a majority, and this price may have a negative effect on the survival of the democratic regime.
INCENTIVES FOR COOPERATION
Parliamentary regimes are supposed to foster cooperation.
Political parties have an incentive to cooperate with one another.
Parties in the government will support the executive.
Parties out of the government will refrain from escalating conflicts because they may become part of the government.
Individual members of parliament will align themselves with their parties.
The government is supported by a majority composed of highly disciplined parties, prone to cooperate with one another.
Presidentialism is characterized by the absence of such incentives.
Governments, even if supported by a majority, are based on undisciplined parties that tend to compete fiercely with each other.
There are two distinct issues here: the discipline of political parties and their propensity to enter and stay in governing coalitions.
Although related, these issues must be discussed separately.
Party Discipline
There are formal and nonformal arguments relating regime type to party discipline or cohesion in legislative vote.
In the nonformal arguments, legislators’ desire to come to and remain in office matters most.
The threat of government dissolution and early elections is necessary and sufficient to induce party discipline.
Under parliamentarism, undisciplined parties may mean a failure to obtain majority support in parliament, the defeat of government bills, and consequently the fall of the government.
Political parties enforce discipline so that their members in parliament can be counted on to support the bills proposed by the government.
Individual legislators have an incentive to support the government in order to prevent the occurrence of early elections in which they would risk losing their positions.
Under presidentialism, since the government and the legislature are independently constituted, office-seeking political parties have no reason to impose discipline on their members; their survival in office does not depend on the result of any particular vote in the legislature.
Individual members of congress also lack any incentive to accept the discipline of political parties.
Voting against the party or the government would not make them any more likely to lose their mandates in early elections.
The fusion of power that characterizes parliamentary regimes generates incentives for individual legislators and political parties to cooperate with the government, resulting in a high level of party discipline.
The separation of powers that characterizes presidentialism implies very low levels of party discipline.
Even if a president were lucky enough to belong to a party that controlled a majority of seats in congress, he or she could not necessarily count on the support of that majority in order to govern.
One of the most-noted circumstances appears near the end of the presidential term.
As presidential elections near, the argument goes, members of the president’s party try to distance themselves from him or her in order to avoid paying the costs associated with the government’s policies.
There are several problems with this argument.
The assumption on which it is based—that politicians care only about office—is not tenable.
If it were true, minority governments should never be observed, since the party in charge of forming a government would always be able to lure some party into the government in order to attain a majority.
The standard argument that connects the threat of government dissolution with party discipline is inconsistent.
If the argument assumes at one stage that individual legislators may gain electorally by providing specific benefits to their constituency, it denies the existence of these benefits at the next stage.
Suppose a key presidential initiative implies losses for a specific group and gains for the whole society. In the standard view, presidents have no means to induce legislators to support a proposal that removes some special privileges of a given constituency.
Legislators have a clear preference for distributive policies, that is, policies that concentrate benefits on their constituencies and disperse the costs.
Legislators will do better if they vote against the presidential initiative and protect their constituency’s narrow interests so that they will obtain its vote again in the future.
An identical situation would lead to a different result under a parliamentary regime.
Because dissolution and early election are possible, legislators will prefer to follow the party line and support the government so that they can guarantee their seats.
There are costs to bear, since one may lose his or her seat. By calling (or threatening to call) an early election, the prime minister invites the electorate to judge the behavior of the legislator.
With purely office-seeking politicians, early elections are not a credible threat that would induce party discipline.
The standard argument includes an unstated presumption that voters in parliamentary regimes base their votes on party labels and not on individual politicians.
Whether voters vote on the basis of party labels or of legislators’ personal attributes is not necessarily related to the form of government.
As a matter of fact, electoral laws, and not the form of government, are usually seen as the main factor determining whether voters will vote according to personal or party attributes in a given system.
In Carey & Shugart’s (1994) attempt to rank electoral systems according to the kind of incentives they provide, the key factor is the control parties exercise over a politician’s chances to get elected or reelected.
Parties are said to be strong and capable of enforcing discipline if these factors allow them to affect the probability that a politician will get elected.
Electoral laws may provide the incentives for legislators to cultivate the personal vote, but the decision-making process may deny them the means to do so.
What matters is whether we have reasons to expect that parliamentary governments necessarily foster a higher degree of centralization in policy making.
Is the process described by Cox inherent to parliamentarism?
Are all presidential regimes like the one described by Mayhew?
The United States and England should not be taken to be the paradigmatic cases of presidential and parliamentary regimes when it comes to policy making.
Some of the implications of the standard view concerning the relationship between mode of government formation and party discipline are not supported by the facts.
The calculus of the individual legislator under parliamentarism cannot be solely connected with the risk of election because early election is not the necessary consequence, or even the most frequent consequence, of a government dissolution.
On the other hand, as far as presidentialism is concerned, the standard argument assumes that voters use their two votes independently and that representatives are judged exclusively by what they do to defend the narrow and immediate interests of their constituency.
Considerable evidence suggests that voters do tend to associate their vote in presidential and legislative elections.
Formal arguments linking parliamentary regimes with legislative vote cohesion have been recently developed by several authors.
Huber’s (1996b) spatial model of the interaction between the prime minister, the cabinet, and the prime minister’s majority highlights the role of vote-of-confidence procedures in legislative outcomes.
Baron (1998) and Diermeier & Feddersen (1998) use a model of legislative bargaining to show how confidence procedures that characterize parliamentary democracies affect legislative cohesion.
The models proposed by Huber, on the one hand, and Baron and Diermeier & Feddersen, on the other, differ in at least one very important aspect.
Whereas the latter models explicitly set up a situation entailing conflict of interests among political parties so that legislative cohesion is not a function of similarity of preferences, Huber’s analysis does not.
Underlying both models, as well as Huber’s (1996b, p. 280), is the view of a presidential system such as the one in the United States, in which agenda-setting power lies with the legislature.
If presidents can control the legislative agenda much in the same way as prime ministers can, then the mechanism that drives party cohesion in parliamentary regimes can also operate under presidentialism.
If one considers the full range of existing presidential regimes, the United States is exceptional in granting little or no legislative and agenda power to the executive.
Presidential regimes are compatible with executives that hold a high level of agenda and legislative powers (see Mainwaring & Shugart 1997b).
Confidence procedures may be a sufficient institutional feature to induce legislative vote cohesion, but they are not a necessary feature.
Other mechanisms may exist, some of which are institutional (e.g., centralized legislative organization and executive agenda and legislative powers) and some of which are not.
Medina’s analysis demonstrates that cohesion does not necessarily depend on disciplinary measures (such as the vote of confidence) and can be obtained under any institutional set-up.
It is not at all clear that the existence of cohesive legislative blocs is endogenous to the regime type.
We should not presume that presidential regimes invariably generate low levels of party discipline in the legislature.
Coalition Government
The basic argument about coalitions is that presidentialism, unlike parliamentarism, does not offer incentives for political parties to cooperate with the government.
This fact is supposed to give rise to legislative paralysis or some other kind of “ungovernability,” with all its attendant tragedies.
Coalition governments, thus, are considered rare and unstable in presidential regimes and frequent and stable in parliamentary regimes.
Mainwaring (1993) added the complicating factor of party system fractionalization.
The problems of presidentialism are compounded by a multitude of political parties in the legislature.
This argument is problematic in many respects.
Most fundamentally, it assumes that the institutional differences between the two regimes are sufficient to create divergent incentives for coalition formation.
The circumstances under which portfolio coalitions are likely to be formed are identical under the two systems.
The crucial difference between parliamentarism and presidentialism is the “reversion point,” that is, the situation that emerges if no coalition is formed.
In parliamentary regimes, the reversion point is an early election; in presidential regimes, since mandates are fixed, it is a situation in which the president keeps all the portfolios.
In parliamentary regimes every portfolio government enjoys the support of a legislative majority, under presidentialism it is possible for a legislative majority to hold no portfolio.
This difference is not sufficient to generate different incentives for the formation of portfolio coalitions.
If there is a large distance in policy space between the party of the formateur and the party closest to it, portfolio coalitions are formed in both parliamentary and presidential systems.
Alternatively, when the distance in the policy space between the party of the formateur and the party closest to it is small, and together these two parties would form a majority, no coalition is formed, again in both parliamentary and presidential systems.
Given that, by definition, mandates are fixed in presidential regimes, what needs to be explained is not so much why coalitions are not formed under presidentialism (which, as we show below, is not true anyway), but why presidents do not always form majority coalitions.
The reason majority coalitions are not always formed under presidential regimes has to do with the opposition’s beliefs about how much it would gain electorally from opposing the president.
If the opposition believes that its vote share will increase in the next election, it may be willing to stay out of the government, in which case a majority of legislators unite against the president and the president remains in office for the duration of the term.
This outcome is structurally unavailable under parliamentarism.
If it occurs, it does not invariably imply impasse or deadlock between the executive and the legislature.
Legislative paralysis is likely to occur only under very specific institutional configurations, namely, if the legislature cannot initiate legislation or if the president can veto legislation without being overridden.
A generalized lack of cooperation between executive and the legislature or chronic legislative paralysis are not the outcomes that would naturally result from the structure of incentives in presidential regimes.
Except for the cases in which one party holds more than 50% of the seats in the legislature, the frequency of coalition governments is higher under parliamentarism than under presidentialism.
When no party holds a majority of seats in the legislature, coalition governments emerge slightly over half the time.
The frequency of coalition and majority governments actually increases significantly when no party holds more than a third of the seats in the legislature.
Incentives for coalition formation are the same under the two regimes.
Fragmented parties does not make coalition formation more difficult under presidential systems.
Even if we grant that incentives for coalition formation are the same under parliamentary and presidential regimes, one basic difference between them is that the number of possible coalitions under presidentialism is necessarily smaller than under parliamentarism.
When the president is an “outsider” with very little support in congress, the power of his or her party is magnified by the fact that that party must be a member of the government.
It is not the case that presidents tend to belong to small parties or be outsiders (Cheibub et al. 2001).
Presidential regimes are not considerably more constrained than parliamentary regimes in the process of coalition formation.
In both regimes, the government tends to be headed by the largest party, and this political factor, rather than any formal rule, seems to be sufficient to constrain the process of government formation in ways that make the two systems look alike.
Presidential regimes would be less likely to survive when the party of the president does not hold a majority of seats in congress and no coalition is formed.
The impact of coalition governments reduces survival chances when no party has >50% of the seats in congress.
This effect is stronger in presidentialism when the largest party holds between one third and one half of the seats.
It seems to be the level of party fractionalization that determines the effect of coalition formation on the survival of presidential democracies.
CENTRALIZATION OF THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS
From the constitutional point of view, all legislators, whether in presidential or parliamentary regimes, have the same rights and duties.
Legislatures are egalitarian institutions.
In order to manage their workload, legislatures organize themselves in a variety of ways and adopt internal rules that regulate individual legislative rights and access to resources.
Individual legislators’ chances to influence the order of business and to have a say in decision making depend on the legislative rights granted to them by the internal rules of their assembly.
Legislative organization affects the structure of the decision-making process and the weight of legislators in policy decisions.
Most arguments that we find about decision making in democracies contrast England( A centralized and a decentralized legislature, respectively) and the United States (a parliamentary and a presidential democracy).
The English parliament is characterized by the complete control of the cabinet over the legislative agenda.
Government bills are appreciated under a special calendar that gives them priority over bills introduced by individual members of parliament, and parliamentary minorities have no way to “close the gates” to governmental proposals.
Individual members of parliament are often restricted in their capacity to amend government bills.
The government has had the sole prerogative to initiate measures that increase expenditures (Lowemberg & Patterson 1979, p. 249).
Because of the government’s control over the agenda, legislative output is marked by a high rate of success for the executive’s initiatives.
Cabinet defeats are rare events.
The cabinet entirely monopolizes the law-making process and, for that matter, all the decisions about policy.
The US congress is supposed to be a decentralized body, organized as it is around a strong committee system.
The committee system allows legislators to have a say in decisions related to policy areas that are important to their electoral survival.
Each committee has a monopoly on initiating legislation in its own policy jurisdiction.
Political parties do not control the assignment of legislators to specific committees; this is described as a process of self-selection in which legislators pick the committee that has jurisdiction over the policy area that will bring them the highest electoral payoff.
Electoral considerations dictate that politicians prefer distributive, pork-barrel policies.
Paradigmatic parliamentary regime is one in which the government has complete control over the legislative agenda; the rights of the individual members of parliament are “expropriated” and monopolized by the cabinet.
Prototype of a presidential regime, in turn, is one in which the organization of congress preserves the right of individual representatives to have a say on policy decisions.
Presidential systems vary considerably in the degree of legislative powers they grant the president.
The US president is one of the few presidents in existing systems who cannot initiate legislation.
The US president only has the package veto, which weakens his capacity to oppose distributive bargains produced in congress.
The US presidency is unique in that the president has only “reactive legislative powers” (Mainwaring & Shugart 1997b).
Presidents often endowed with the capacity to initiate legislation; often they also have the exclusive right to initiate legislation in some areas (such as appropriation and budgetary matters), whereas legislators are restricted in their capacity to amend bills in these areas.
Some presidents also have decree power; they are constitutionally able to unilaterally alter the status quo.
A president with decree power can dictate the legislative agenda by forcing the legislature to make a decision on some matter it could not have appreciated otherwise.
The power to impose an agenda does not imply that presidents always prevail against the will of the majority.
The government’s legislative and agenda powers, including decree power, need not be interpreted solely as means for solving “vertical” conflicts, that is, conflicts between the government and the opposition.
They are also means for solving “horizontal” conflicts, that is, conflicts between the government and its supporters (Huber 1996a).
These powers enable the government to protect the cohesion of its coalition against the opportunistic behavior of its members.
The executive’s legislative powers are not only a mechanism for checking the power of the majority or imposing the will of the president.
Legislative powers of the executive are also weapons of the majority.
Endowing presidents with considerable legislative powers have a greater probability of breaking down.
Strong presidents have smaller incentives to negotiate with congress, making paralysis and crisis more likely.
The organization of congress and the degree of control the executive has over the legislative agenda does influence the behavior of individual legislators.
Legislators act in a constrained environment. If they want to influence policy, they have to do so according to the procedural rules of their legislative body and the terms set by the president.
Decentralization of the decision-making process has a far-reaching effects.
The system produced by the 1988 constitution is frequently cited as a prime example of bad institutional design (Ames 2001).
Brazilian presidents have rely on the support of a disciplined coalition (Figueiredo & Limongi 2000).
This outcome results from both the organization of the Brazilian congress and the president’s control of the legislative agenda.
The Brazilian congress is highly centralized. Legislative rights heavily favor party leaders.
It should be clear by now that separation of powers does not necessarily imply decentralized decision making.
Presidentialism does not necessarily imply, or require, decentralized decision making and conflict between the executive and the legislature.
Presidential control over the agenda becomes a weapon to be used by the majority rather than against the majority.
Presidents are not necessarily as distinct from prime ministers as is normally assumed.
Outcomes that are usually associated exclusively with parliamentarism, such as executive success and dominance over the legislative output obtained through disciplined parties, can be found even in “hopeless” presidential regimes such as Brazil’s.
Parliamentary systems: Government control over the legislative agenda does not follow from the definition of parliamentarism.
The instability of these systems resulted not from the form of government but from the way decision making was organized.
Policy performance is important for the survival of a democratic regime, we cannot deduce it from the basic constitutional principle that defines the regime.
Policy making under parliamentarism is not necessarily centralized, and consequently the government is not always successful in having its policy proposals approved. Similarly, policy making under presidentialism is not necessarily decentralized, and the government is not invariably immobilized in terms of the policies it can implement.
CONCLUSION
The difference between the survival of parliamentary and presidential regimes cannot be explained by the structure of incentives that supposedly follows from the regime’s basic principles.
Parliamentary systems do not operate under a “majoritarian imperative”.
Deadlock is not as frequent as supposed under presidentialism and is not absent from parliamentarism.
Coalition governments are not foreign to presidential systems and emerge for the same reasons as they do in parliamentary systems.
Decision making is not always centralized under parliamentarism and is not always decentralized under presidentialism.
If parliamentary regimes have a better record of survival than presidential regimes, it is not because they are parliamentary.