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Constitutional Political Economy

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01.09.2009 | Original Paper

Are semi-presidential constitutions bad for democratic performance?

Erschienen in: Constitutional Political Economy | Ausgabe 3-4/2009

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Abstract

Many countries since 1990 have adopted semi-presidential constitutions, which are often considered to be problematic, primarily because of the potential for conflict between the assembly-supported government and the popularly elected president. Such conflicts are said to lead to unstable governments, policy paralysis and the eventual undermining of the democratic regime. Using data for all parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies between 1946 and 2006, we examine the effect of semi-presidential constitutions on the duration of prime ministers’ tenure in office, government accountability with respect to economic outcomes, and democratic survival. We also examine (for a smaller sample of post-communist countries) the impact of these constitutions on the progress of structural reforms. We find that the observed higher instability of prime ministers in semi-presidential democracies is more due to the electoral system than to the presence of a popularly elected president. We also find that semi-presidential constitutions have little impact on the government’s accountability to economic outcomes and on the survival of democratic regimes. Finally, we find that neither a weak president nor a weak government is optimal for the progress of economic reforms in post-communist countries. Regarding economic reforms, the optimal allocation of constitutional powers between the president and the government grants both significant powers.

Vorheriger Artikel Separation of powers: new perspectives and empirical findings—introduction

Nächster Artikel The time-varying independence of Italian peak judicial institutions

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Austria’s 1920 constitution, reintroduced in 1945, was also mixed in the sense used here. However, until 1955 the country was governed by the Allied Commission for Austria and hence does not appear as an independent country in our data set.

The number of democracies with mixed constitutions (henceforth also referred to as mixed or semi-presidential democracies) increased to seventeen in 1991 with the addition of Lithuania, Macedonia, Russia, São Tomé e Príncipe, Slovenia and Ukraine. Other democracies with mixed constitutions include Cape Verde, Republic of Congo, Mali and Mongolia (1992), Central African Republic, Madagascar and Niger (1993), Haiti (1994), Armenia (1995), Moldova (1996), Taiwan (1997), Slovak Republic (1999), and Croatia and Senegal (2002).

Sartori (1994) is one of few who actually praises mixed constitutions.

This statement must be qualified. Even in constitutions that stipulate the highest degree of separation between the government and the assembly, the president may be impeached and removed from office for criminal or some other kind of illicit activities. This, however, does not imply assembly responsibility of the government since the criterion for removal is not simply the loss of confidence of the majority. Whether impeachment provisions may evolve to become assembly responsibility is an interesting question, which arises in view of impeachments in the United States, Ecuador, and Venezuela, among others presidential countries. See Hinojosa and Pérez-Liñán (2002) for an analysis of impeachment in the Americas.

There are several other events that could serve as the basis for measures of government stability: changes in the party of the head of government, changes in the partisan composition of the government (which could, in turn, consider all or only changes in the major party) or ministerial turnover. For reasons of both data availability and space, we leave the treatment of these variables for future work.

This is the reason why we believe that selection bias is not a problem in this data. It would have been if the same factors that led countries to choose non-majoritarian electoral systems were also leading them to choose mixed constitutions. As we argue, we believe there is much less “choice” involved in the adoption of these institutions (it is interesting to note that the only democracies that adopted a pure presidential constitution after 1990 are the ones that already had one in the past). But even if this were not the case, the vast majority of new democracies chose semi-presidentialism and non-majoritarian electoral systems. One would be at a loss to generate a story that would account for these choices in all of these cases.

This interpretation is consistent with findings reported in the literature on partisan volatility in new democracies about the strong impact of economic conditions in accounting for shifts in aggregate vote patterns. See Tavits (2005), Mainwaring and Zoco (2007), Roberts and Wibbels (1999).

Survival models yield substantively similar results, as they should given democratic survival exhibits no time dependency (Przeworski et al. 2000).

Elster (1997), pp. 226–228) makes a similar point in his discussion of presidential power indices.

This last power has been found to have an important impact on the budget balances of presidential democracies and other systems.

Drastic economic reforms usually entail social and economic costs such as decline in output and unemployment in the short run which makes them unpopular among the population (Bunce 2001; Nello 2001; Haggard and Web 1993). Promise of EU membership can shield policy-makers from popular discontent and help justify unpopular economic policies. Finally, it can tie hand of policy makers in their actions in the area of economic reforms thus it helps to outnumber the domestic opposition, reduce the intra-party conflict and make policy-making more efficient.

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Titel: Are semi-presidential constitutions bad for democratic performance?
Publikationsdatum: 01.09.2009
Erschienen in: Constitutional Political Economy / Ausgabe 3-4/2009
Print ISSN: 1043-4062
Elektronische ISSN: 1572-9966
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-008-9072-2

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