Semi-Presidentialism and Moldova’s Flawed Transition to Democracy

Abstract

Scholarly debate regarding the virtues and vices of presidential versus parliamentary regimes has been a fixed part the intellectual landscape of political science over the past half century. The study of semi-presidential variants emerged as a subsidiary line of research in the wake of Maurice Duverger’s seminal work in the 1970s on the French Fifth Republic (Duverger 1980). While a number of prominent scholars (Liijphart 1992; Shugart and Carey 1992; Sartori 1997) ventured into the field, interest remained relatively modest, in all probability due to the limited number of cases to which the model pertained. As the 1990s progressed, however, studies of semi-presidentialism have burgeoned, probably in part due to the proliferation of these political systems in the former Soviet space (See, for example Baylis 1996; Pasquino 1997; Elgie 1999; Roper 2002; Siaroff 2003).