Variation In Political Practice

There are problems with the president-parliamentary/premier-presidential distinction. Most notably, while the within-category variation is reduced relative to semi-presidentialism, there is still variation in political practice within both president-parliamentarism and premier-presidentialism. For example, the president-parliamentary category includes Austria and Iceland, both of which have figurehead presidents. Indeed, Samuels and Shugart (2010) excluded Austria from their empirical analysis, precisely because the gap between constitutional form and actual political practice was so great. What is more, even though the list of premier-presidential countries includes classic semi-presidential cases, such as France and Romania, it also includes

When it comes to exploring the impact of variation in presidential practice, such scholars choose to estimate the effects of presidential power (Doyle and Elgie 2015 ) rather than regime types. For example, both Shugart and Carey (1992) and Siaroff (2003) provide a set of presidential power scores for different countries using a particular set of indicators. The former are based on purely constitutional powers. The latter are based at least partly on the practice of political power. The use of such composite indices to measure presidential power in individual countries has its limits, as argued forcefully by Fortin (2013). For the purposes of the current discussion, though, the key point is that these measures do not estimate the effect of semi-presidentialism or the effect of Shugart-and-Carey-like varieties of semi-presidentialism. They are estimating the effect of presidential power on a country-by-country basis. When making this move, scholars are no longer considering the effect of institutional variation based on any form of taxonomic classification. They are engaging in an exercise based on a different way of thinking about presidential

As we have seen, the distinction between presidential, semi-presidential and parliamentary democracies is the result of a taxonomic exercise. These taxonomic classifications are derived from a reading of country constitutions. Almost all countries, including non-democracies, have a constitution. Certainly, some of these constitutions are unusual. For example, during Muammar Gaddafi’s autocratic rule in Libya the country was formally run according to the highly idiosyncratic Green Book. Most, though, take a form that is recognizable in terms of the presidential, parliamentary, semi-presidential taxonomy. This means that almost all non-democracies can be classed as constitutionally presidential, parliamentary or semi-presidential. Indeed, if they are constitutionally semi-presidential, then they can be further classed as either president-parliamentary or premier-presidential. Thus, in this sense non-democracies can be taxonomically