Abstract
The oldest definition of semi-presidentialism requires a president possessing considerable constitutional power. Subsequent research has listed presidential competences, but has not empirically set their respective weighting. In order to assess the relevant competences that determine presidential power, this article presents an indicator of relative turnout in 28 parliamentary democracies with a popularly elected president. The core hypothesis is that if presidents have considerable power, the turnout is higher for presidential elections than for legislative ones. The results show that presidents are deemed ‘strong’ when they play a central role in foreign policy. This finding is compatible with different analyses of presidential regimes and provides a clear and coherent criterion for identifying semi-presidential regimes.
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Notes
The Shugart and Carey (1992) method is somewhat more complex. It provides a list of 10 legislative presidential powers, each of which is measured on a scale of 0 to 4. However, this does not affect the argument.
Two alternative interpretations are possible here. First, according to the second-order model, a first-order election is defined by the perception of citizens about who is the ‘chief’. People vote more where the perceived consequences of the electoral result are ‘important’. Because national legislative elections are first order, the relative turnout in presidential elections measures how ‘important’ presidents are considered by citizens. Second, it is possible to provide a weaker interpretation: we are just measuring the power of presidents compared with that of parliament. In this case, we need to consider the ‘quite strong power’ condition as limited to the comparison of the president power with the legislative power.
The behavioural aspect of the Siaroff measure is not the same than in Duverger's Condition (ii). The first derives from a constitutional ambiguity and may be replaced with a clear constitutional competence, whereas the second is too vague to be translated in a specific set of formal competences.
The dummy variables are equal to 1 if the country is unicameral (0 if it is bicameral) or if it has a proportional electoral system (0 if majoritarian). The classification has been provided by Golder (2005).
As this estimation is based on cross-sectional time-series data, the clustering corrections do not allow us perfectly to take into account the effect of time. The main difficulty is that time periods are not common to all panels and are, on average, composed of 4.5 elections. Introducing a simple lagged independent variable, the results do not change and the variable proves to be insignificant. The problem with this variable is that 28 observations are lost, corresponding to the first election of each country included in the analysis. Therefore, the lagged independent variable will be not reported here, but more detailed results can be sent on request.
The Weimar Republic corresponds to this pattern. It is the only case known.
The second exception is Czechoslovakia in two different periods: 3 years just before the Second World War and 2 years just after the end of the communist regime. These periods are too short to provide an understanding to how the system works.
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Magni-Berton, R. Reassessing Duvergerian semi-presidentialism: An electoral perspective. Comp Eur Polit 11, 222–248 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.19