In this chapter we undertake a process of assessing just how powerful a president is in constitutional terms. We identify two basic dimensions of presidential power: one concerning power over legislation, the other encompassing nonlegislative powers, including authority over the cabinet and calling of early elections for congress. Additionally, because the latter powers are directly related to the question of separation of powers, we provide a comparison of presidential powers over the composition of cabinets to separation of executive from assembly. There are two main, related lessons we shall be able to draw from this exercise. First, systems that score high on presidential powers, and in particular those that are extreme on presidential legislative powers, are often those systems that have exhibited the greatest trouble with sustaining stable democracy. Second, systems that give the president considerable powers over the composition of the cabinet but also are low on separation of survival of assembly and executive powers likewise tend to be among the “troubled” cases. There are thus left two basic clusters that, we argue, are “safer” for the success of democracy: (1) those with high separation of survival of powers but low presidential legislative powers; and (2) those with low separation of survival but also low presidential authority over the cabinet. These categories happen to be those approximating the (more or less “ideal”) types we have discussed in previous chapters: presidential and premier-presidential, respectively.

This book has been devoted to the study of those democratic constitutional designs in which there are two agents of the electorate. The common idealtypical parliamentary regimes have only one such agent, the assembly, which in Linz's expression, is “the only democratically legitimated institution” (Linz 1987:5). Many other democratic regimes provide for two agents of the electorate, one of which is the assembly, while the other is a president with some power over the composition of governments or legislation, or both. Wherever the electorate has two agents, it becomes critical for the relative powers to be spelled out clearly in the constitution. We have seen a great range of powers provided in actual constitutions featuring popularly elected presidents.

In considering different constitutional designs, we have stressed that among the purposes of democratic institutions is to provide what Powell (1989) refers to as “citizen control” over representatives. Citizens may control their representatives through elections according to two basic models. The first provides that voters should have the ability to assess clear responsibility on the part of an incumbent government and either return it to power or toss it out in favor of an alternative government. Institutions that provide voters this form of control are deemed to provide electoral efficiency. A second basic model of citizen control assumes that voters should have a large menu of partisan choices from which to select, in order that nearly every voter has a party close to his or her ideal policy point.

Having defined what presidentialism is, as well as what other types of regimes have popularly elected presidents, we now turn to the scholarly debate about the merits of presidential regimes. In this chapter we concern ourselves primarily with the ideal type of presidentialism that we defined at the beginning of Chapter 2. We address the criticisms of this regime type, then offer responses. Our purpose here is to determine whether it is even worth considering presidentialism as a viable option for democracies, especially new democracies. For, if scholars such as Di Palma (1990) are correct that regimes with elected presidents are “dangerous,” especially for new democracies, then there would be little point in considering possible advantages of such regime types. In short, we do not find the criticisms of presidentialism, which have been launched in a nearly one-sided debate thus far, to be unassailable. After responding to these criticisms as they relate directly to pure presidentialism, we turn to the ways in which premier-presidentialism addresses the criticisms, and perhaps offers remedies for some of presidentialism's more dubious qualities.

THE CASE AGAINST THE PRESIDENT

The myriad criticisms brought against presidentialism have been elaborated in various combinations in a number of recent essays criticizing the system. We understand presidentialism's problems, as described in the current literature, to fall into three broad categories. The fundamental deficiencies of the system are its:

1. temporal rigidity;

2. majoritarian tendencies;

3. dual democratic legitimacies.

Any thorough analysis of presidential systems must first establish clear criteria for what presidentialism is. In this case, the task is especially critical because we shall later examine a number of variations on the institutional arrangements of presidential government, as well as proposals for modifications as yet untested.

The tasks of this chapter, then, are as follows: First, we provide a definition of presidentialism, drawing on the theoretical heritage of The Federalist and contrasting ours with other institutional definitions of the regime type. Next, we define premier-presidentialism in contrast to pure presidentialism. We then discuss some hybrid regime types that exhibit combinations of qualities from both the presidential and premier-presidential types. Finally, we introduce a simple typology of regimes based upon two dimensions: (1) the degree of separation of powers, and (2) the nature of the cabinet. We return to this typology in greater detail in Chapter 8.

PRESIDENTIALISM ACCORDING TO ITS FOUNDERS: SEPARATE ORIGIN AND SURVIVAL

Beginning with The Federalist, the central defining characteristic of presidentialism has been the separation of legislative from executive powers. Indeed, this theme predates presidential government. The authors of The Federalist based much of their faith in the separation of powers on Montesquieu's arguments for legislative control over a king's ministers. Later, the idea of presidentialism as the separation of powers in a republican government is clearly delineated first in The Federalist, and this idea will remain central to our definition of presidentialism.

In this and the following three chapters we discuss institutional variations related specifically to elections. The way in which the checks and balances of presidentialism or the relations between president and cabinet in premier-presidentialism play themselves out depends in part on how likely it is that the president confronts an assembly that does not reliably conform to the president's will on legislation. As we shall see, such factors as the method of electing the president and assembly and the relative timing of elections to the two branches are crucial factors in affecting the number of competitors. Thus we must return to the issues with which we started this book and which constitute one of its major themes: the ways in which the processes of electing representatives and of executive formation interact. Here we deal with electoral dynamics, by which we mean the ways in which the practices used for electing the assembly interact with the form and powers of the executive to shape the functioning of democratic regimes. This chapter concerns itself primarily with presidential systems, while the following three deal with both presidential and premier-presidential regimes.

We begin this chapter by reconsidering the tension between representation based on parochial interests versus that which articulates national policy perspectives. We develop an archetype of a presidential system in which the two forms of representation coexist.

INTRODUCTION

As defined in Chapter 2, a principal aspect in which presidential regimes are distinct from parliamentary, premier-presidential, and various hybrid regime types is in the separate origin and survival of executive and assembly. Recall that a requirement for presidentialism is that the chief executive be elected by popular vote. However, in a number of regimes that have generally been considered presidential or hybrid systems, the chief executive has been constituted according to various means, which sometimes modify and sometimes preclude the criterion of popular election. In this chapter, we shall examine in detail various means of constituting chief executive power in presidential and hybrid systems, reviewing a number of case studies to illustrate the possible variations. We undertake this exercise for two main reasons. First, we demonstrate that there are any number of ways to constitute executive power in regimes that are neither presidential nor premier-presidential, nor parliamentary. Second, and more important, the cases highlight the impact that various rules guiding the origin of the executive have on the incentives that drive political behavior. As we shall see, the nature of the party system and of coalition building, as well as the means of replacing the chief executive, all depend largely on the constitutional means by which the executive originates.

The 1980s were a time of growth in a subfield of political science that has come to be known as the “new institutionalism” (see March and Olsen 1984; Grofman 1987). Often drawing in a matter sometimes more, sometimes less formal, from microeconomic understandings of rational behavior and individual responses to incentive structures, this subfield has placed political, rather than social or economic or cultural, variables at the center of explanation for political outcomes. There is a renewed focus on the importance of political institutions in accounting for the success or failure of democracy. Recent advances of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and other parts of the globe have given impetus to the study of designing constitutions and the consequences of institutional choice. Old, long unchallenged assumptions about the efficacy of presidentialism in Latin America have been seriously challenged in recent years. Mindful of the spirit of resurgent interest in constitutional design, we have launched this book as a treatise on how various institutional designs for representative democracies affect the ways in which the political process operates.

This book focuses on a set of regimes that, in our assessment, have received too little attention from comparativists. It deals primarily with systems in which there is an elected president. These regimes differ from the common parliamentary type in that there are two agents of the electorate: an assembly and a president.

We have seen how presidentialism permits a nationally endorsed executive while still allowing the representation of minority or regional interests to be expressed through the assembly. We have also seen that premier-presidentialism entrusts presidents, with their electoral mandate, to form a government, but only if the government can hold the confidence of the assembly. There are, of course, no guarantees that the president's party or coalition must hold a majority of seats. This chapter will consider electoral cycles in presidential and premier-presidential regimes and how they may effect patterns of governance. The longest-lived premier-presidential regimes (e.g., France and Finland) have had their elections and terms for president and parliament on wholly different cycles, as have some presidential systems (e.g., Chile before 1973 and the current regime of Korea). Presidents in such systems are elected for longer terms than are parliaments, although in most of the premier-presidential systems the president has the option to dissolve parliament and call new elections. In France, the president also may shorten his own mandate and call a new presidential election. Even when such options exist, an important characteristic of actual premier-presidential regimes is that there is no constitutionally prescribed harmony in the timing of elections and therefore terms, despite the importance that electoral cycles were shown in Chapter 10 to have. Under the nonconcurrent cycles and varying-length terms used in these systems, some assemblies are likely to be elected in the president's honeymoon and others at midterm or late in the term.

In Chapter 9, we noted that Chile for many years combined a multiparty congress and, ordinarily, two-candidate competition for the presidency. In this chapter we generalize this observation with analysis of electoral rules. Students of electoral systems have long noted that plurality elections in oneseat districts tend to polarize electoral choices around two principal contestants, while systems of proportional representation are generally associated with multiparty systems. This chapter considers the implications of different electoral rules for party systems in presidential democracies. We have indicated already (in Chapter 2) that presidentialism does not by definition require that there be only a one-seat executive; however, the prevailing practice is to use districts of magnitude one (M=1) for the presidency. A district of M = 1 requires that the electoral system be some form of plurality or majority. Empirically plurality rule is more common, although majority runoff systems have been widely adopted among newer democracies since around 1980 in Latin America, and 1989 in Europe and Africa.

As indicated in Chapter 9, systems of proportional representation, in which the district magnitude must by definition be greater than one (M > 1), are typical for assemblies even in presidential and premier-presidential systems. Before presenting empirical data on the effects of these electoral systems, we should review the most widely discussed statement on this matter, known as “Duverger's law” or “Duverger's rule.”

We turn now exclusively to regimes with single-person, separately elected presidencies. While separation of the origin and survival of the executive from the legislative branch was seen by the authors of The Federalist as imperative, the notion of checks and balances implied to them some overlap of functions, even to the extent that the Federalists did not see Senate “advice and consent” in the president's cabinet appointments as a violation of the principle of separate powers. Among presidential systems, however, this provision is rare: Complete separation of the origin of executive office from the assembly is the norm. There are many other regimes, such as the president-parliamentary systems, however, in which the principle of separate survival is obviated.

In this chapter, we shall consider three means by which separation of origin and survival has been limited in some systems:

1. assembly involvement in the appointment of cabinet ministers,

2. censure of cabinet ministers by the assembly, and

3. dissolution of the assembly by the president.

The latter two attributes, in particular, can entail sharp deviations from the Madisonian ideal that each branch, secure in its independence, will without hesitation check the other in the lawmaking process. Yet it can be argued that the possibility of both censure and dissolution encourages cooperation between branches, as each anticipates the likely reaction of the other to its actions.

INTRODUCTION

Regarding the subject of presidential power in the legislative process, we are interested in two main themes: the extent of constitutional (entrenched) presidential power, and the extent of legislative power delegated to the president by congress. These two types of legislative power are not unrelated. In particular, we argue that the presence of the former may encourage the delegation of the latter, suggesting also that students of presidential systems have regularly mistaken delegated authority for the usurpation of political power by presidents. We recognize that any delegation of authority implies the potential for agency loss but intend to demonstrate that the conditions under which delegation takes place can greatly constrain presidents from defying congressional will.

The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the distinction between entrenched and delegated legislative powers in parliamentary and presidential systems. We then proceed to examine the scope and configurations of presidential powers among systems with elected presidencies, focusing on the veto, the authority to introduce legislation, decree power, and emergency powers. It is in the areas of decree and emergency powers that the question of delegation versus entrenched authority is most pertinent. Where relevant, we include in the discussion the legislative powers of presidents in premier-presidential systems. However, most such presidents are accorded no such constitutional powers, and where delegation of legislative authority takes place in such systems, it generally involves delegation from the assembly to the premier or the cabinet.

As mentioned in Chapter 10, most studies of the relationship between votes and seats have not taken into account the possibility that presidential and parliamentary systems might differ on the relations being investigated. Indeed, most have been based overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, on data from parliamentary systems. The empirical results of Chapter 10 suggest that presidential systems might make a difference in two ways. The first, and most obvious, is that, unlike parliamentary systems, presidential systems have separate elections for two separate agents of the electorate. The second, which flows directly from the first, is that these elections need not be at the same time; we have seen that the timing of elections, the electoral cycle, makes a difference in the number of parties. If the number of parties varies, so perhaps do such outcomes as the extent and quality of representation and the stability and effectiveness of the system. If concurrent elections by PR are employed along with plurality for the president, those wishing to articulate minority viewpoints might find themselves forced either to join a large presidential contender's party or else suffer electorally as a third party. Then, perhaps, the degree to which the system represents diversity may be undercut. On the other hand, if nonconcurrent elections are used, presidents might find they rarely have majorities in the congress.

ROLE OF ASSEMBLIES AND THE NUMBER OF PARTIES

A principal theme of this book has been that assemblies do not exist in institutional isolation within their political systems.

We saw in Chapter 10 that in Costa Rica, the rule requiring a candidate to obtain at least 40% of the vote or else face a runoff has led to a pattern of competition almost identical to that seen in straight plurality presidential systems. The Costa Rican rule thus contrasts rather starkly with majority provisions, in which there is a runoff in the event that no candidate obtains at least 50% plus one of the votes. In such majority runoff systems, the vote shares of the first and second finishers in the first round tend to be considerably lower than in plurality rules, including the Costa Rican variant.

Is this outcome fortuitous, or is there something to the 40% rule that encourages broad preelection coalitions as does pure plurality? This question is worth investigating, especially given that there is only one case of a system using the 40% rule. Perhaps Costa Rica, where a runoff has never been required, is a special case because of its single well-organized mass party, the Party of National Liberation (PLN). Perhaps this party has a “natural” share of the vote that approximates 50% anyway. If so, it might ordinarily win elections (which it certainly does), and it could only lose to a united opposition – that is, one that could itself approach the magical 50% mark. Indeed, in six of the ten elections since 1958, the PLN has obtained an absolute majority.