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Countries with a semi-presidential system

Presidential republics with a full presidential system.

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The semi-presidential system is a system of government in which a president and a prime minister are both active participants in the day-to-day administration of the state. It differs from a parliamentary republic in that it has a popularly elected head of state who is more than a purely ceremonial figurehead, and from the presidential system in that the cabinet, although named by the president, is responsible to the legislature, which may force the cabinet to resign through a motion of no confidence.

The term was first used in a 1978 work by political scientist Maurice Duverger to describe the French Fifth Republic, which he dubbed a régime semi-présidentiel.^[1]

Division of powers[link]

The powers that are divided between president and prime minister can vary greatly between countries. In France, for example, in case of cohabitation when the president and the prime minister come from opposing parties, the president is responsible for foreign policy and the prime minister for domestic policy.^[2] In this case, the division of powers between the prime minister and the president is not explicitly stated in the constitution, but has evolved as a political convention. In Finland, by contrast, this particular aspect of the separation of powers is explicitly stated in the constitution: "foreign policy is led by the president in cooperation with the cabinet".

Cohabitation[link]

Further information: Cohabitation (government)

Semi-presidential systems may sometimes experience periods in which the President and the Prime Minister are from differing and opposing political parties. This is called "cohabitation", a term which originated in France when the situation first arose in the 1980s. In most cases, cohabitation results from a system in which the two executives are not elected at the same time or for the same term. For example, in 1981, France elected both a Socialist president and legislature, which yielded a Socialist premier. But whereas the president's term of office was for seven years, the National Assembly only served for five. When, in the 1986 legislative election, the French people elected a right-center Assembly, Socialist President Mitterrand was forced into "cohabitation" with a rightist premier.

Cohabitation can create an effective system of checks and balances or a period of bitter and tense stonewalling, depending on the attitudes of the two leaders, the ideologies of their parties, or the demands of their constituencies. As a typical example, Sri Lankan politics for several years witnessed a bitter struggle between the President and the Prime Minister, belonging to different parties and elected separately, over the negotiations with the LTTE to resolve the longstanding civil war.

See also[link]

• List of countries by system of government

Notes[link]

• Prof. Robert Elgie of Dublin City University (School of Law and Government) is a leading academic on Semi-presidentialism

References[link]

• Steven D. Roper. Are All Semipresidential Regimes the Same?
• Maurice Duverger. 1978 .Échec au roi. Paris.
• Maurice Duverger. 1980.’A New Political System Model: Semi-Presidential Government’ European Journal of Political Research, (8) 2, pp. 165–87.
• Giovanni Sartori. 1997. Comparative constitutional engineering. Second edition. London: MacMillan Press.
• Horst Bahro, Bernhard H. Bayerlein, and Ernst Veser. Duverger's concept: Semi-presidential government revisited. European Journal of Political Research. Volume 34, Number 2 / October, 1998.
• Matthew Søberg Shugart. Semi-Presidential Systems: Dual Executive and Mixed Authority Patterns. Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. September 2005.
• Dennis Shoesmith. Timor-Leste: Divided Leadership in a Semi-Presidential System Asian Survey. March/April 2003, Vol. 43, No. 2, Pages 231–252
• J. Kristiadi. Toward strong, democratic governance . Indonesia Outlook 2007 - Political June 30, 2008 The Jakarta Post
• Frye, T. 1997. A politics of institutional choice: Post-communist presidencies. Comparative Political Studies, 30, 523-552
• Goetz, K.H. 2006. ‘Power at the Centre: the Organization of Democratic Systems,’ in Heywood, P.M. et al.. Developments in European Politics. Palgrave Macmillan
• Arend Lijphard. 1992. Parliamentary versus presidential government. Oxford University Press
• Nousiainen, J. 2001. ‘From Semi-Presidentialism to Parliamentary Government: Political and Constitutional Developments in Finland.’ Scandinavian Political Studies 24 (2): 95-109 June
• Rhodes, R.A.W. 1995. "From Prime Ministerial Power to Core Executive" in Prime Minister, cabinet and core executive (eds) R.A.W. Rhodes and Patrick Dunleavy St. Martin's Press, pp. 11–37
• Shugart, M.S. and J.Carrey. 1992. Presidents and assemblies: Constitutional design and electoral dynamics. Cambridge University Press.
• Canas, Vitalino - “The semi-presidential system”, Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht (Heidelberg Journal of International Law), Band 64 (2004), number 1, p. 95-124.

External links[link]

• Governing Systems and Executive-Legislative Relations. (Presidential, Parliamentary and Hybrid Systems), United Nations Development Program (n.d.).
• Blog of Robert Elgie

Maurice Duverger (born June 5, 1917) is a French jurist, sociologist and politician. He was born in Angoulême, Charente.

Starting his career as a jurist at the University of Bordeaux, Duverger became more and more involved in political science and in 1948 founded one of the first faculties for political science in Bordeaux, France. An emeritus professor of the Sorbonne and member of the FNSP, he has published many books and articles in newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, El Pais, and especially Le Monde.

Duverger has studied the evolution of political systems and the institutions that operate in diverse countries, showing a preference for empirical methods of investigation rather than philosophical reasoning.

He devised a theory which became known as Duverger's law, which identifies a correlation between a first-past-the-post election system and the formation of a two-party system. While analysing the political system of France, he coined the term semi-presidential system.

From 1989 until 1994 he was a member of the Group of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament.

In 1981 he was elected a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Career[link]

A member of Doriot’s fascist Parti Populaire Français from age 20, Maurice Duverger completed his studies in from the Bordeaux Department of Law in 1942, before lecturing in law at Poitiers in 1942, and Bordeaux in 1943 (where he would, in 1948, found the Institut d’Études Politiques as its first director). He also taught at Vichy France’s Institut d’Études Corporatives et Sociales.

In his first publication, "The Constitutions of France" (1944), he explained that the French constitution of 1940 created a "de facto government“. However, towards the end of the war, Duverger grew close to the Resistance, and in Libération analyzed the legitimacy of the new government of France and devoted himself to social-scientific theory.

After the War, he taught in the faculty of law and economic sciences in Paris, 1955 to 1985, and contributed to Libération and Le Monde. From 1989 to 1994, he sat in the European Parliament as an MEP for the Italian Communist Party.

In 1946 he expanded his theses, with a special interest in the relation between electoral systems and party systems. This interest is at the heart of his most important publication: "The Political Parties" (1951). The work is one of the classics of party research, translated into several languages. That thesis led to Duverger's law, and later he coined the term "semi-presidentialism".

Political parties[link]

Having as a point of reference their structure, Duverger in his book Les Partis Politiques (1951) distinguished parties between elite-based parties and mass-based parties.

Elite-based parties rather prefer the quality of their members over their quantity, their affiliates being people of great influence on local or national scale. They have flexible and disorganized structures, in general are weakly disciplined and lack developed pragmatic content, allowing each of their members to benefit from an enormous freedom of action. Their funding is generally provided by a sponsor, and as their strength comes from their elected representatives, they are typical parties of parliamentarian creation, which depend on the reputation and support of their benefactors.

Mass-based parties possess a secure organization and a strong structure arranged as a pyramid, with superposed hierarchically-arranged levels. Their members identify themselves more with the party’s ideology than with its leader, so they have an abstract adhesion. Their decisions are based on the participation of each one of its members, and its founding is granted by their members' payments, a situation that leads them to gain as many adherents as possible.

These parties tend to develop on a par with suffrage and democracy. For instance, elite-based parties execute an often sporadic political labor, focused on elections. However, the disadvantage this implies in relation to their contestant parties (which denote permanent labor and a disciplined and organic structure), impels them to modify their organization to become mass-based parties.

Works[link]

• Les partis politiques (1951)
• La participation des femmes à la vie politique (1955)
• Les finances publiques (1956)
• Méthodes de la science politique (1959)
• De la dictature (1961)
• Méthodes des Sciences sociales (1961)
• Introduction à la politique (1964)
• Sociologie politique (1966)
• La démocratie sans les peuples (1967)
• Institutions politiques et Droit constitutionnel (1970)
• Janus: les deux faces de l'Occident (1972)
• Sociologie de la politique (1973)
• L'autre côté des choses (1977)
• King's Mate (1978)
• Les orangers du lac Balaton (1980)
• Factors in a Two-Party and Multiparty System, in Party Politics and Pressure Groups (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), pp. 23–32.
• Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State
• The Study of Politics ISBN 0-690-79021-X
• La République des Citoyens (1982) ISBN 2-85956-311-3
• Lettre Ouverte aux Socialistes (Collection Lettre ouverte) ISBN 2-226-00326-6
• Modern Democracies: Economic Power Versus Political Power ISBN 0-03-077280-X
• La Cohabitation des Français ISBN 2-13-041498-2
• Europe des Hommes: Une Métamorphose Inachevée (1994) ISBN 2-7381-0262-X
• The Idea of Politics: the Uses of Power in Society
• The French Political System
• L'Europe dans tous ses Etats (1995)

See also[link]

• Duverger's law
• Micromega rule

External links[link]

• Short biography (in French)
• Classification of political parties (in Spanish)