Constitutional Power and Competing Risks: Monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and the Termination of East and West European Cabinets

Abstract

S ome European constitutions give cabinets great discretion to manage their own demise, whereas others limit their choices and insert the head of state into decisions about government termination. In this article, we map the tremendous variation in the constitutional rules that govern cabinet termination and test existing expectations about its effects on a government's survival and mode of termination. In doing so, we use the most extensive government survival data set available to date, the first to include East and West European governments. Our results demonstrate that constitutional constraints on governments and presidential influence on cabinet termination are much more common than has previously been understood and have powerful effects on the hazard profiles of governments. These results alter and improve the discipline's understanding of government termination and durability, and have implications for comparative work in a range of areas, including the survival and performance of democracies, electoral accountability, opportunistic election calling, and political business cycles.The Queen can hardly now refuse a defeated minister the chance of a dissolution any more than she can dissolve in the time of an undefeated one, and without his consent. (Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1872, 329) [L]e droit de dissolution est une des prérogatives personnelles du Président de la République . . . ce droit s'exerce pratiquement sans limitation . . . (Maurice

Executive Leadership in Semi-Presidential Systems

“…They find that there is an association and that intra-executive conflict is particularly destabilizing in president-parliamentary countries relative to premier-presidential countries. By contrast, in a comparative study of parliamentary and semi-presidential regimes in Europe Schleiter and Morgan-Jones (2009c) find no relationship between the type of semi-presidential regime and government survival. However, they do find that if the president has the power to dissolve the legislature then there is a greater likelihood of governments being replaced between elections.…”

“…For example, even though there is very robust evidence that president-parliamentarism is more dangerous for democracy than premier-presidentialism, there is no large-n systematic study of the effects of these two sub-types of semi-presidentialism relative to their presidential and parliamentary counterparts. Recently, there have been studies that have focused on the variation within semi-presidentialism relative to parliamentarism (Cheibub and Chernykh 2008;Schleiter and Morgan-Jones 2009b;2009c; Finally, whether the analysis focuses purely on semi-presidential countries or comparisons of semi-presidential, presidential and parliamentary countries, there is a need to deepen and broaden the scope of scholarship. In terms of depth, more data are needed.…”

Reassessing Duvergerian semi-presidentialism: An electoral perspective

“…The second result -the possibility for presidents to intervene in the legislative sphere through dissolution -has already been identified as an important factor (Schleiter and Morgan-Jones, 2009a). In the next section, I will analyse how useful these findings are helping us better understand the institutional equilibria in this kind of regime.…”

“…The difference may lie in some slight differences not picked up by the dichotomous Siaroff variables. For example, in Poland it is possible to dissolve the legislature, but not in a discretionary way, whereas in Croatia this is not the case (Schleiter and Morgan-Jones, 2009a). However, deviations from the predicted trend may also be due to the particular history of the countries studied.…”

“…This has triggered an increasing comparative literature on semi-presidential regimes, compared with the previous case-oriented literature. Semi-presidential regimes -compared with parliamentary ones -are characterized by presidential authority in negotiating the formation and behaviour of government (Duverger, 1980;Sartori, 1994;Elgie, 2004;Shugart, 2005;Amorim Neto and Strøm, 2006;Schleiter and Morgan-Jones, 2009a). This article analyzes 28 semi-presidential regimes in order to clarify which institutional features determine presidents who can play a relevant role in controlling the government.…”