Presidential Republics Are Not Inherently Unfit to Govern

Abstract

It is rather surprising that there should not have been a systematic attempt by political scientists, at any rate for many decades, to account for the fact that, while the presidential republic flourished during over two centuries in the United States, even if with some problems, no European country should have successfully adopted that model in the course of several decades following American independence: as a matter of fact, the only occasion in which such an attempt was made was in France in 1848; but, in 1852, the president who had been elected by universal suffrage, the nephew of Napoleon, usurped his powers, dismissed the constitution and set up an ‘empire’. Perhaps not surprisingly, American-type presidentialism was regarded for a century, at any rate in France, as leading directly to dictatorship. Meanwhile, in Latin America, where the presidential model had been widely adopted, the results were at best unconvincing. Yet, if the presidential republic was good for America, why could such a model of government be ineffective or even ‘dangerous’ elsewhere?