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Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2013

José Antonio Cheibub ,
Zachary Elkins  and
Tom Ginsburg
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Abstract

The presidential-parliamentary distinction is foundational to comparative politics and at the center of a large theoretical and empirical literature. However, an examination of constitutional texts suggests a fair degree of heterogeneity within these categories with respect to important institutional attributes. These observations indicate that the classic presidential-parliamentary distinction, and the semi-presidential category, may not be systemic. This article investigates whether the defining attributes that separate presidential and parliamentary constitutions predict other attributes that are stereotypically associated with these institutional models. The results suggest the need for considerable skepticism of the ‘systemic’ nature of the classification. Indeed, the results imply that in order to predict the powers of a country's executive and legislature, it is more useful to know where and when the constitution was written than whether the country has a presidential or parliamentary system.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 515 - 544
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (email: cheibub@illinois.edu); Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin (email: zelkins@austin.utexas.edu); Law School, University of Chicago (email: tginsburg@uchicago.edu). The authors acknowledge the support of the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois, the National Science Foundation (SES 0648288) and the Research Council of Norway (FRISAM 222442); they also would like to thank Svitlana Chernykh, Ruth Collier, Robert Elgie, James Melton, Adam Przeworski, Yu-shan Wu, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the Academica Sinica, Taiwan, the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Oslo, and the University Pompeu Fabrea, Barcelona. Carolyn Tan provided excellent research assistance. An online appendix and data replication sets are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S000712341300032X.

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