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Presidential Or Parliamentary Democracy: Does It Make a Difference?

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Presidential Or Parliamentary Democracy: Does It Make a Difference? PLEASE READ BEFORE PRINTING! PRINTING AND VIEWING ELECTRONIC RESERVES Printing tips: ▪ To reduce printing errors, check the “Print as Image” box, under the “Advanced” printing options. ▪ To print, select the “printer” button on the Acrobat Reader toolbar. DO NOT print using “File>Print…” in the browser menu. ▪ If an article has multiple parts, print out only one part at a time. ▪ If you experience difficulty printing, come to the Reserve desk at the Main or Science Library. Please provide the location, the course and document being accessed, the time, and a description of the problem or error message. ▪ For patrons off campus, please email or call with the information above: Main Library: [email protected] or 706-542-3256 Science Library: [email protected] or 706-542-4535 Viewing tips: ▪ The image may take a moment to load. 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By accessing this password protected document, you are verifying that you are enrolled in this course and are using this document for coursework. The complete text of the U.S. copyright law is on Reserve at both the Main Library and Science Library Reserve Desks. 1 JUAN J. LINZ Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does It Make a Difference? IN RECENT DECADES renewed efforts have been made to study and understand the variety of political democracies, but most of those analyses have focused on the patterns of political conflict and more specifically on party systems and coalition formation;. in contrast to the attention of many classical writers to. if1stitutional arrangements.' With the exception of the large literature on the impact of electoral systems on the shaping of party systems generated by the early writings of Ferdi­ nand Hermens and the classic work by Maurice Duverger, followed by the writings of Douglas Rae and Giovanni Sartori, Rein Taagepera, and Matthew Shugart among others,2 political scientists have paid little attention to the role of political institu­ tions, except in the study of particular countries. Debates about monarchy and re: public, parliamentary and presidential regimes, the unitary state and federalism ., have receded into oblivion and not entered the current debates about the function­ ing of democratic institutions and practices, including their effect on party sys­ tems. When a number of countries initiate the process of writing or rewriting con­ stitutions, some of those issues should regain saliency and become part of what Sartori has called political engineering, in an effort to set the basis of democratic consolidation and stability. Undoubtedly, the constitutional innovations of the postwar period, the German constructive nonconfidence vote, and the constitution of the French Fifth Repub­ lic, whose semipresidential regime reinforces the executive to counter the weak­ nesses of assembly parliamentarism, have attracted imitators and scholarly atten­ tion. But we lack a more systematic and behavioral study of the l._mplications for ths;_ _political process of different institutions on which to base some of the ongoing de­ bates about institutional and constitutional reform. With the notable exception of the book by Kaltefleiter, in which the cases of a bipolar executive like the Weimar Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy 4 Juan]. Linz 5 Republic and the French Fifth Republic are analyzed; the paper by Stefano Bar­ research on the perceptions of both political elites and the public of presidents and tolini,3 on cases of direct election of the head of state in Europe; the writings of legislatures in those regimes. Maurice Duverger and the new book by Matthew Soberg Shugart and John M. It is striking that most of the discussion of presidential government in classic Carey,4 the differences between parliamentary, presidential, and semipresidential works on democratic politics is limited to the United States and comparison be­ regimes have not attracted much attention from political scientists. These differ­ tween that country and the United Kingdom. There is practically no reference to ences receive only limited attention in the two most recent works comparing con­ long experience withi presidential regimes in Latin America.w This gap in the liter­ temporary democracies, those of Bingham Powell and Arend Lijphart,5 who has, ature inevitably weakens my analysis in this essay. It should be taken as a stimulus however, written an excellent chapter on the implications of presidential regimes for further and more systematic thinking and research. for this volume. The neglect is largely due to the fact that with the outstanding exception of the Presidentialism: Principles and Realities United States, most of the stable democracies of Europe and the Commonwealth have been parliamentary regimes and a few semipresidential and semiparliamen­ It has been argued that the terms presidentialism and parliamentarism each cover tary, while most of the countries with presidential constitutions have been unstable a wide range of political institutional formulas, and that the variety among those democracies or authoritarian regimes and therefore have not been included in formulas is such that it is misleading to generalize about either term. Even two comparative studies of democracy.6 Since many social, economic, cultural, and "pure" presidential systems like that of the United States and Argentina, despite the political factors appeared central in the analysis of the crisis and breakdown of influence of the U.S. Constitution on the constitution Argentina adopted in 1853, democracy in those countries, we find practically no mention of the role of insti­ are legally quite different-and even more so in practice-so that Carlos Nino con­ tutional factors in those crises. Only in the case of Chile has there been some refer- trasts the hyperpresidentialism of his country with a more balanced division of ence to the conflict betwee-; President Allende and the congress in the analysis of powers in the United States. 11 The same is probably even truer of parliamentary the breakdown of democracy.? It might or might not be an accident that so many systems when we compare the gouvernement d'assemblee of the Third and Fourth countries with presidential regGnes have encountered great difficulties in establish­ Republics in France with the Kanzlerdemokratie of the Bundesrepublik.I2 There is ing stable democracies, but certainly the relationship between the two main types the temptation in a debate about the two systems to turn to the extreme-and of democratic political institutions and the political process seems to deserve more therefore most questionable-cases for or against the merits of each. As I will show, attention than it has received. It would have been interesting to turn back to earlier there are in modern democracies (even leaving aside the so-called semi presidential debates of constitutionalists and intellectuals, particularly in Latin America, about or semiparliamentary hybrids) some convergencies between the practices of presi­ presidentialism and parliamentarism.8 But we suspect they would not be particu­ dentialism in conflictual multiparty systems (like Bolivia's) and parliamentary sys­ larly helpful for our present concerns because they would reflect, on the one side, tems with a personalization of power or leadership similar to presidentialism when admiration for the great American democratic republic and its presidential gov­ one party has an absolute majority or as in Germany with the "rationalized parlia­ ernment, ignoring to some extent what Woodrow Wilson described as congres­ mentarism" of the Basic Law (the Bonn Constitution). sional government, and on the other, probably bitter criticism of French parlia­ However, this should not obscure the fundamental differences between the two mentarism from the Latin American legal literature; systems. All presidential and all parliamentary systems have a common core that al­ In my own work on the breakdown of democratic regimes, at the stage of cor­ lows their differentiation and some systematic comparisons. In addition, most recting proofs I was struck in rereading O'Donnell's analysis of the impossible presidential democracies are probably more similar to each other than the larger game in post-Peronist Argentina by the extraordinary difficulty of integrating or number of parliamentary democracies are alike, partly because all presidential isolating the Peronists in contrast to the Italian communists, which in spite of all democracies were inspired by the U.S. model and partly because the societies with the strains in Italian democracy never led to comparable consequences. As a result such systems (with the outstanding exception of the United States)
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