Government survival in semi-presidential regimes

What is it about?

This article examines the post-War political history of twelve European semi-presidential regimes. It uses survival analysis to determine how presidential powers, cohabitation, and their interaction affect the risks of cabinets falling. Besides looking at the competing risks for a cabinet of ending through a parliamentary dissolution or through a cabinet replacement without elections, we also look at two types of replacement: one where the new cabinet involved a change in the PM’s party, and one where it did not. We find that, in semi-presidential systems where presidents enjoy the discretionary power to dissolve parliament, the risk of a government being terminated through a parliamentary dissolution increases massively. Furthermore, the effects of “president-parliamentarism” (presidents than can dismiss cabinets) emerge with clarity in our study: although such power does not affect the risk of “generic” cabinet replacement, it does increase the risk of replacements that involve a change in the partisan control of the government. Finally, we find that “continuity replacements” (the cabinet is replaced without elections, but the partisan control remains the same) become more likely in the combination of premier-presidentialism and unified government, a finding that fits nicely with several arguments presented by Samuels and Shugart on how premier-presidential regimes work when the same party controls the presidency and the cabinet.

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Why is it important?

Semi-presidential regimes are those where heads of state are popularly elected but where there are also prime ministers responsible before the legislature. Many works have suggested, with the help of sheer logic but also deeply researched case studies, that two things tend to be particularly inimical of government stability under semi-presidential regimes: whether presidents can dismiss governments at will (what Shugart and Carey famously coined as a “president-parliamentary” regime, in contrast with “premier-presidentialism”) and whether the president’s party is absent from the cabinet (what has been called “cohabitation”). However, previous studies using the statistical tools normally employed to systematically examine the determinants of government survival show that neither presidential powers (including cabinet dismissal but also parliamentary dissolution) nor cohabitation seem to make much of a difference in that respect. Our data, our treatment of presidential powers, and our redefinition of two types of cabinet replacements helps reconciling these two literatures, and reveal that presidential powers are indeed consequential, in different ways, for government survival.