¹ See, e.g., Haggard, Stephan and Kaufman, Robert R., eds., The Politics of Economic Adjustment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Przeworski, Adam, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Clague, Christopher and Rausser, Gordon C., eds., The Emergence of Market Economies in Eastern Europe (Cambridge, England: Blackwell Press, 1992).Google Scholar

² March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P., “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78 (September 1984), 738.Google Scholar For a pioneering early work exemplifying this approach, see Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties (New York: Wiley, 1954).Google Scholar Other important works that explore the causal relationship between institutions such as electoral systems and political parties, and democratic stability include Sartori, Giovanni, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Rae, Douglas, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Riker, William H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Grofman, Bernard and Lijphart, Arend, eds., Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences (New York: Agathon, 1986)Google Scholar; Taagepera, Rein and Shugart, Matthew Soberg, Seats and Votes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Shugart, Matthew Soberg and Carey, John, Presidents and Assemblies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar An important work in the neo-institutionalist literature that focuses on legislatures and structure-induced equilibrium is Shepsle, Kenneth, “Institutional Equilibrium and Equilibrium Institutions,” in Weisberg, Herbert F., ed., Political Science: The Science of Politics (New York: Agathon, 1986).Google Scholar See also McCubbins, Mathew D. and Sullivan, Terry, eds., Congress: Structure and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

³ There is a growing literature on this question. Much of it is brought together in Linz, Juan J. and Valenzuela, Arturo, eds., Presidentialism and Parliamentarianism: Does It Make a Difference? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming). However, no article in this valuable collection attempts to gather systematic global quantitative data to address directly the question raised in the title of the book and by Przeworski. Linz first appeared in print on this subject in a brief “Excursus on Presidential and Parliamentary Democracy,” in Linz and Stepan, Alfred, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).Google Scholar His much-cited seminal “underground” paper with the same title as his forthcoming book was first presented at the workshop on “Political Parties in the Southern Cone,” Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, D.C., 1984; see also idem, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1 (Winter 1990). See also Mainwaring, Scott, “Presidentialism, Multiparty Systems, and Democracy: The Difficult Equation,” Kellogg Institute Working Paper, no. 144 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, September 1990).Google Scholar

⁴ We agree with Philippe C. Schmitter's argument that there are many types of democracies and that “consolidation includes a mix of institutions.” See Schmitter, , “The Consolidation of Democracy and the Choice of Institutions,” East-South System Transformations Working Paper, no. 7 (Chicago: Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, September 1991), 7.Google Scholar See also Schmitter, and Karl, Terry, “What Democracy Is… and Is Not,” Journal of Democracy (Summer 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The authors list eleven important dimensions that provide a matrix of potential combinations by which political systems can be differently democratic.

⁵ We realize that any effort to operationalize the concept of “democracy” so that it can be used for purposes of classification of all the countries of the world is inherently difficult. Fortunately there have been two independently designed efforts that attempt this task. One, by Michael Coppedge and Wolfgang Reinicke, attempted to operationalize the eight “institutional guarantees” that Robert Dahl argued were required for a polyarchy. The authors assigned values to 137 countries on a polyarchy scale, based on their assessment of political conditions as of mid-1985. The results are available in Coppedge, and Reinicke, , “A Measure of Polyarchy” (Paper presented at the Conference on Measuring Democracy, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, May 27–28, 1988)Google Scholar; and in idem, “A Scale of Polyarchy,” in Gastil, Raymond D., ed., Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 1987–1988 (New York: Freedom House, 1990), 101–28.Google ScholarDahl's, Robert A. seminal discussion of the institutional guarantees needed for polyarchy is found in his Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 1–16.Google Scholar

The other effort to operationalize a scale of democracy is the annual Freedom House evaluation of virtually all the countries of the world. The advisory panel in recent years has included such scholars as Seymour Martin Lipset, Giovanni Sartori, and Lucian W. Pye. The value assigned for each year 1973 to 1987 can be found in the above-cited Gastil, 54–65. In this essay, we will call a country a “continuous democracy” if it has received no higher than a scale score of 3 on the Coppedge-Reinicke Polyarchy Scale for 1985 and no higher than a 2.5 averaged score of the ratings for “political rights” and “civil liberties” on the Gastil Democracy Scale, for the 1980–89 period.

⁶ On the defining characteristics of semipresidentialism, see the seminal article by Duverger, Maurice, “A New Political System Model: Semi-Presidential Government,” European Journal of Political Research 8 (June 1980).Google Scholar See also idem, Echec au Roi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978); and idem, Le monarchie républicaine(Paris: R. Laffont, 1974).

⁷ For a discussion of the semipresidential constitutional framework, its inherent problem of “executive dualism,” and the exceptional circumstances that allowed France to manage these problems, see Alfred Stepan and Suleiman, Ezra N., “The French Fifth Republic: A Model for Import? Reflections on Poland and Brazil,” in Chehabi, H. E. and Stepan, Alfred, eds., Politics, Society and Democracy: Comparative Studies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,Google Scholar forthcoming).

⁸ Alfred Stepan will develop this argument in greater detail in a book he is writing entitled Democratic Capacities/Democratic Institutions.

⁹ For example, in Arend Lijphart's list of the twenty-one continuous democracies of the world since World War II, seventeen were pure parliamentary democracies, two were mixed, one was semipresidential, and only one, the United States, was pure presidential. See Lijphart, , Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ The norm is a directly elected president with very strong de jure and de facto prerogatives coexisting with a prime minister who needs the support of parliament. As of this writing (April 1993), only Hungary and the newly created Czech Republic and Slovakia had opted for the pure parliamentary constitutional framework. Despite having directly elected presidents, Slovenia, Estonia, and Bulgaria have strong parliamentary features. In Slovakia and Estonia presidents will now be selected by parliament. Bulgaria, however, has moved from an indirectly to a directly elected president. For political, legal, and sociological analyses of constitution making in East European transitions, see the quarterly publication East European Constitutional Review, which is part of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe at the University of Chicago. The center was established in 1990 in partnership with the Central European University.

¹¹ Duration analysis would be particularly appropriate because it estimates the conditional probability of an event taking place (for example, of a democracy “dying,” by undergoing military coup), given that the regime has survived for a given period of time as a democracy. This conditional probability is in turn parameterized as a function of exogenous explanatory variables (such as constitutional frameworks). The sign of an estimated coefficient then indicates the direction of the effect of the explanatory variable on the conditional probability of a democracy dying at a given time. Such models allow us to estimate whether democracies exhibit positive or negative “duration dependence”: specifically, whether the probability of a democracy dying increases or decreases, respectively, with increases in the duration of the spell. Mike Alvarez, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Chicago, is creating the data and the appropriate statistical techniques and then implementing this duration analysis as part of his dissertation. Adam Przeworski, too, has embarked on such research. See also Kiefer, Nicholas M., “Economic Duration Data and Hazard Functions,” Journal of Economic Literature 26 (June 1988).Google Scholar

¹² We consider a country to be a “consolidated democracy” if it has received no higher than a scale score of 3 on the Coppedge-Reinicke Polyarchy Scale for 1985 and no higher than a 2.5 average of the ratings for “political rights” and “civil liberties” on the Gastil Democracy Scale. Countries that met these joint criteria for every year of the 1979–89 decade are considered “continuous consolidated democracies.” See fn. 18 herein.

¹³ Duverger calls Finland semipresidential because the president has significant de jure and de facto powers; it should be pointed out, however, that from 1925 to 1988 the Finnish president was not so much directly elected as indirectly chosen by party blocs. The candidates normally did not campaign in the country, and though parties put the names of their candidates on the ballot, the electoral college votes were not pledges and often entailed deliberations and multiple balloting, leading Shugart and Carey to conclude that the presidential election system in Finland from 1925 to 1988, “given its party-centered character … was not much different from election in parliament.” See Shugart and Carey (fn. 2), 212–21, 226–28, quote at 221, We consider Finland to have been a “mixed” constitutional system until 1988.

¹⁴ Laakso, and Taagepera, , “[Effective] Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to West Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 12 (April 1979).Google Scholar The formula takes into account each party's relative size in the legislature, as measured by the percentage of seats it holds. The “effective” number of parties is “the number of hypothetical equal-size parties that would have the same total effect on fractionalization of the system as have the actual parties of unequal size.” The formula for calculating the effective number of parties (N) is where pi = the percentage of total seats held in the legislature by the i-th party. For each country listed in Table 1, we determined the number of seats held in the lower or only house of the legislature at the time of each legislative election between 1979 and 1989. Then, the effective number of political parties (N) was calculated for each of these election years and multiplied by the number of years until the next legislative election.

¹⁵ Austria, Ireland, and Iceland have directly elected presidents, but we do not classify them as semipresidential; we concur with Duverger that they are not de facto semipresidential since “political practice is parliamentary.” See Duverger, (fn. 6, 1980), 167.Google Scholar

¹⁶ See Vanhanen, , The Process of Democratization: A Comparative Study of 147 States, 1980–1988 (New York: Crane Russak, 1990).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid., 84.

¹⁸ We use the date of independence since it was usually within one year of independence that new constitutions were drafted and approved in these countries. We exclude from our analysis those countries that became independent after 1979 because we want to see which of these countries were then continuously democratic for the ten-year period 1980–89. This gives us a sample of time between World War II and 1979.

¹⁹ Myron Weiner observes that “most of the smaller, newly independent democracies … are also former British colonies” and puts forth the hypothesis that “tutelary democracy under British colonialism appears to be a significant determinant of democracy in the Third World.” See Weiner, , “Empirical Democratic Theory,” in Weiner, Myron and Özbudun, Ergun, eds., Competitive Elections in Developing Countries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), esp. 18–23Google Scholar, quote at 19. This question is also addressed by Dominguez, Jorge, “The Caribbean Question: Why Has Liberal Democracy (Surprisingly) Flourished?” in Dominguez, , ed., Democracy in the Caribbean: Political, Economic, and Social Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).Google Scholar Dominguez discusses how these Caribbean democracies have faced (and survived) severe economic crises. He attributes their democratic stability to the legacy of British institutions (including, but not limited to, the Westminster parliamentary model) and the prodemocratic disposition of the countries] leadership.

²⁰ The five former British colonies that chose presidential systems within one year of independence were Zambia, Cyprus, Malawi, Seychelles, and South Yemen.

²¹ See Blondel, Jean, Government Ministers in the Contemporary World (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985)Google Scholar, esp. appendix II, 277–81; Dogan, Mattei, Pathways to Power: Selecting Rulers in Pluralist Democracies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Suárez, Waldino C.: “Argentina: Political Transition and Institutional Weakness in Comparative Perspective,” in Baloyra, Enrique A., ed., Comparing New Democracies: Transition and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe and the Southern Cone (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987)Google Scholar; idem, “El gabinete en América Latina: Organización y cambio,” Contribuciones, no. 1 (January-March 1985); and idem, “El Poder ejecutivo en América Latina: Su capacidad operativa bajo regímenes presidentialistas de gobierno,” Revista de Estudios Políticos, no. 29 (September-October 1982).

²² See Duverger (fn. 2).

²³ For a discussion of Duverger's proposition in the context of modern industrialized democracies, see Lijphart, Arend, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 156–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ There is a growing literature of case studies examining the influence of constitutional frameworks on stability and/or breakdown in developing countries. See, e.g., Lipset, David M., “Papua New Guinea: “The Melanesian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1975–1986,” in Diamond, Larry, Linz, Juan J., and Lipset, Seymour Martin, eds., Democracy in Developing Countries: Asia (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989), esp. 413.Google Scholar Lipset discusses how the constitutional framework came into play to prevent regime breakdown in Papua New Guinea. See also Dominguez (fn. 19).

²⁵ Schmitter and Karl (fn. 4) quite correctly build into their definition of democracy the concept of accountability. But with the exception of the U.S. where a president can be directly reelected only once, no president in any other long-standing democracy in the world, once in office, can be held politically accountable by a vote of the citizens' representatives. The accountability mechanism is so extreme and difficult—with the political-legal-criminal trial that needs exceptional majorities (impeachment)—that the accountability principle in presidentialism is weaker than in parliamentarianism.

²⁶ For theoretical differentiation between crises of government and crises of regime, see Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), esp. 74.Google Scholar

²⁷ See O'Donnell, , “Democracia Delegativa?” Novos Estudos CEBRAP, no. 31 (October 1991).Google Scholar

²⁸ These numbers were calculated using the Laakso/Taagepera formula and the data reported in Keesings Record of World Events (1990); and Banks, Arthur S., ed., Political Handbook of the World (Binghamton; CSA Publishers, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991).Google Scholar

²⁹ This argument is developed in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepán, “Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and South America” (Book manuscript), pt. 1.

³⁰ This is developed in Stepan and Suleiman (fn. 7).

³¹ For a discussion of how both the political culture and the institutional structure in Brazil contributed to the country's weak party system, see Mainwaring, Scott, “Dilemmas of Multiparty Presidential Democracy: The Case of Brazil,” Kellogg Institute Working Paper no. 174 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1992).Google Scholar See also idem, “Politicians, Parties, and Electoral Systems: Brazil in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 24 (October 1991); and his forthcoming book on Brazilian political parties.