Making Presidential and Semi-constitutional Constitutions Work
For many years, comparative scholarship about forms of government and democratic survival has been strongly influenced by Juan Linz’s thesis that presidential institutions are not conducive to democracy’s survival. Influenced by Linz’s work, empirical studies, and the prevalence of collapsing democracies, comparative scholarship argued for either replacing strong presidential systems with parliamentarian ones, or, in the alternative, weakening or dramatically reforming presidential institutions. This scholarship produced a litany of recommendations for reform, all unified around the idea of weakening strong presidents or replacing them with strong parliaments.
However, in the intervening years, democratic breakdowns have become the exception rather than the norm, and, in turn, the academic landscape, afforded space to discuss other aspects of democratic systems, has shifted. Scholarship has recently evaluated democratic systems for their ability to do more than just survive. Such scholarship includes work on the impact of democratic forms of government on economic policy, ethnic conflict, international cooperation, accountability, and the type of public policies generated by the political system, amongst others. Coinciding with this scholarship have been studies on the different ways in which powers can be conferred to presidents in presidential, semi-presidential, and non-presidential systems to effectuate these various policy goals.
In his article, Jose Cheibub demonstrates how much of this scholarship has provided a challenge to Linz’s thesis. Recent scholarship, while somewhat mixed in the desirability of strong presidential institutions, does demonstrate that strong or mixed presidential systems can be preferable in achieving certain outcomes.
To be sure, the historical record does provide reason to maintain the preference for parliamentary over presidential systems; however, a more critical analysis of the historical record may indicate that it was not the presidential systems that produced the high frequency of democratic failures, but rather the fact that emerging democracies favoring strong presidential systems were democracies that followed strong military dictatorships. It may not have been a problem in choice of the democratic regime, but rather a problem of history; regardless of the type of democratic system created, the historical strength of the military posed a large danger to democratic survival.
Cheibub thus calls for a new framework for evaluating democratic systems’ presidential features. He is particularly concerned about those in which presidents are popularly elected to a fixed term in office, and thus are stronger vis a vis the parliament, as opposed to those elected in assembly-confidence systems. Cheibub bases this new framework on two observations: recent scholarship’s demonstration that presidential institutions do not necessarily kill democracy and the historical fact that established democratic systems do not tend to alter their preference for strong presidents. Rather than continue to discuss the merits of strong presidential systems as opposed to strong parliamentary systems, Cheibub argues that the time has come for a more nuanced analysis that recognizes that regardless of the type of system chosen, it is unlikely to change, and thus scholarship should focus on the achievable reforms to presidential aspects of democratic systems that are likely to effectuate desirable policy outcomes.
