Revisiting Shugart and Carey’s Relation of Executive Powers and Democratic Breakdown
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Author | Amaury Perez,Scott Morgenstern,Maxfield Peterson |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919875059 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919875059
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(1) 125 –144
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919875059
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Revisiting Shugart and Carey’s
Relation of Executive Powers
and Democratic Breakdown
Scott Morgenstern, Amaury Perez
and Maxfield Peterson
Abstract
This work reassesses the central thesis of Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies, that weak
presidencies make stronger, more lasting democracies. We argue that a thorough review of the
literature that has evaluated this thesis thus far reveals a persistent methodological flaw that has
hindered an adequate conclusion on its accuracy. While many scholars have revisited the role
of presidential systems in democratic failure, comparative analyses of presidential systems have
relied on additive, rather than combinatorial, measures of presidential power. We demonstrate
why this produces misleading inferences about presidential power, and offer a novel methodology
for its assessment. Following an investigation and replication of Shugart and Carey’s original work
that incorporates the progress of the cases they studied since 1992, we test our new method on
their hypothesis, and find little support for their argument. However, our combinatorial approach
invites future researchers to make their own theoretically informed arguments about the relative
weight of different presidential powers within a methodological framework that avoids the errors
of previous work on the topic.
Keywords
legislatures, assemblies, presidencies, executive power, institutions
Accepted: 10 June 2019
Among the many reasons Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies was founda-
tional was its theoretical and empirical criticism of Linz’s “Perils of Presidentialism.”
Part of the authors’ destruction of Linz’s hypothesis was based on explaining that presi-
dential systems are highly variant, presidential powers range across a spectrum, and the
parties and party systems with which the presidents contend are not of a single cloth.
Out of this discussion emanated a central conclusion about how the type of presiden-
tial systems related to democracy, with Shugart and Carey (henceforth S&C) arguing that
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Corresponding author:
Maxfield Peterson, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
Email: mjp161@pitt.edu
875059PSW0010.1177/1478929919875059Political Studies ReviewMorgenstern et al.
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
126 Political Studies Review 18(1)
presidentialism per se was not a problem, but that strong presidents are dangerous to
democratic stability. This contingent result clearly separated them from Linz who con-
demned all presidential systems, and others who drew other conclusions based on divid-
ing presidentialism and parliamentarism by a bright line (e.g. Cheibub, 2007).
With the advantage of 25 years of hindsight, this article updates their analysis and
considers whether their compelling findings about the relation of weak presidents sup-
porting democracy have held up. We find, overall, that there is no strong empirical sup-
port for the thesis, at least not without taking other factors into account. To come to this
conclusion, we update the database, reconsider the dichotomous democracy variable in
their analysis, and respond to some of the methodological critiques of the S&C. On this
last front, we provide a novel formalization of the measurement of presidential power as
an alternative to the S&C model which untenably assumes that all presidential preroga-
tives—such as their sway over vetoes, decrees, and budgets—are of equal value. Better
measurements of the independent and dependent variables, we argue, is necessary for
evaluating S&C’s critical question of how institutional powers affect the stability of dem-
ocratic governance.
While our findings are not supportive of the S&C theory, we do demonstrate that one
combination of presidential powers (consistent with semipresidential regimes) is corre-
lated with democratic stability. However, we do not find any consistent support for the
notion that stronger presidents are more prone to failure. Data limitations still prevent us
from fully testing our propositions, but even our hesitant results suggest that there is no
simple relation between an additive measure of presidential power and democratic stabil-
ity. This does not imply that institutional variables are unimportant—but it does suggest
that these factors must work in tandem with non-institutional or informal variables and
mechanisms to determine democratic success, failure, or quality. While this conclusion is
somewhat critical of S&C, it also fails to validate Linz’s view that all presidential systems
are problematic.
The Original S&C Finding: An Inverse Relation of
Presidential Powers and Democracy
The most central S&C result is based on a graph (Figure 8.1 in the original) that plots
presidents’ legislative (LT) versus nonlegislative (NLT) powers. The range for these two
axes is based on the authors’ careful coding of constitutional provisions, harkening the
neoinstitutional era. Unlike older institutionalists (Blondel, 1987; Duverger, 1980;
Neustadt, 1960), who generally listed constitutional provisions, here the authors opera-
tionalized their concepts and, while acknowledging the limitation of a small-n study, they
provided a quantitative test of their hypothesis. To do this, they collected data on numer-
ous powers, scaled them from weak to strong, and divided them into LT and NLT types.
Then, to enable cross-system comparisons, they summed the individual powers for each
dimension to generate a ranking. This ranking allowed evaluation of the impact of presi-
dential powers on democratic breakdown. Their important finding was that countries with
high scores on both LT and NLT rankings were associated with a higher propensity for
breakdown.
This finding was built on an empirical test that lacked full theorizing. Without calling
attention to the contradiction, Linz condemned presidentialism by arguing that both weak
and strong presidents were problematic. Citing an inherent incongruity between presiden-
tialism and democracy, he argued that presidents who were too weak to avoid gridlock
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