December 5, 2011
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES ENDOGENOUS PRESIDENTIALISM James A. Robinson Ragnar Torvik Working Paper 14603 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14603 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 December 2008 We thank Daron Acemoglu, Daniel Diermeier, Pohan Fong, Bård Harstad, Simon Hix, John Huber, Benjamin Jones, Anne Sartori, Ken Shepsle, seminar participants at Cambridge, LSE, Northwestern and Norwegian University of Science and Technology for useful suggestions, and María Angélica Bautista, Scott Gehlbach and Sebastián Mazzuca for help with the literature. James Robinson would like to acknowledge financial support from CIFAR. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2008 by James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Endogenous Presidentialism James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik NBER Working Paper No. 14603 December 2008 JEL No. H1 ABSTRACT We develop a model to understand the incidence of presidential and parliamentary institutions. Our analysis is predicated on two ideas: first, that minorities are relatively powerful in a parliamentary system compared to a presidential system, and second, that presidents have more power with respect to their own coalition than prime ministers do. These assumptions imply that while presidentialism has separation of powers, it does not necessarily have more checks and balances than parliamentarism.
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