Duverger's concept: Semi-presidential government revisited

Abstract The article attempts to follow up the fate of the concept Maurice Duverger created to explain the regime of the French Fifth Republic: semi–presidential government. Duverger expounded the concept in his fundamental book Échec au roi in 1978, trying to illustrate the fact that regimes of this type worked quite differently in the seven Western and Northern European countries that institutionalized it. 'Semi–presidentialism' is now widely, but very often controversially, used. The recent appearance of such regimes in newly democratizing states points to the fact that this form of government is often the preferred solution in times of transition. A critical review of Duverger's concept seems expedient as the diversification of these regimes raises new and perhaps intriguing questions. Due to the rejection of Duverger's concept or its ignorance in parts of the European scientific community, it is necessary to defend it as an important tool for political analysis. Moreover, it opens the opportunity for the examination of fundamental problems in political science.     

The role of civil society in European integration

This paper explores the concept of ‘civic society’ in Western political thought, charting the changing understanding of this concept through history and its manifestation in contemporary political and social life. The paper draws out the inferences for our understanding of the role of government, particularly with the European Union and its relationship with citizens and other representative community‐based and non‐governmental organisations. The paper argues that the fundamental values that are central to civic society underpin the proposed EU Charter on Fundamental Rights and maintains that effective European integration requires responsible participation by Europe's citizens. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

A new political system

Nomination: Trichotomy or dichotomy? by Arend Lijphart, p.125
Nomination: Semi–presidentialism: A political model at work by Gianfranco Pasquino, p.128
Reflections: The political system of the European Unionby Maurice Duverger, p.137     

Government survival in semi‐presidential regimes

As semi‐presidentialism has become increasingly common in European democracies, so have the debates about the consequences of several of its political and institutional features. In particular, in those regimes, cohabitation between presidents and cabinets of different parties and cabinet dismissal powers on the part of presidents are thought to be a source of inter‐branch conflict and government instability. However, so far, most empirical work on government survival has failed to confirm any of these expectations. This article addresses this disjuncture between theory and empirical results by making a twofold contribution. First, it takes into account the internal diversity within semi‐presidentialism, modeling the implications for government survival of different configurations between presidential powers’ of cabinet dismissal, parliament dissolution and cohabitation in European semi‐presidential systems. Second, it reconsiders traditional government survival using the competing risks framework by adding a distinction between two different types of non‐electoral replacement: those where replacements imply a change in the party of the prime minister and those where they do not. Once such an approach is adopted, that presidential powers of parliamentary dissolution and cabinet dismissal indeed emerge as highly relevant for explaining government survival in these regimes.     

The EU Fundamental Rights Policy as a Source of Euroscepticism

This article analyzes how the development of the European Union (EU) fundamental rights policy feeds Euroscepticism—and notably political Euroscepticism—within segments of national political elites in EU Member States. More specifically, it argues that this relatively new policy also gives rise to a new form of political Euroscepticism, which has been defined as “value-based Euroscepticism,” e.g., the perception that the EU via its fundamental rights policy, unduly interferes in matters where value systems and core domestic preferences on ethical issues are at stake. This happens in a context where the EU is resented, by some segments of political elites, for allegedly empowering diverse groups (such as ethnic minorities, immigrants' associations, judges, and so on) at the expense of popular sovereignty. This resentment is exacerbated by the fact that national governments are increasingly submitted to the critical assessment of EU-level actors (e.g., the European Parliament or the European Commission) in terms of democratic credentials.     

Teaching Party Systems: A Culinary Demonstration

Abstract

Duverger’s Law—the principle that first-past-the-post systems tend to promote two major political parties while proportional representation systems tend to promote multipartism—is a commonly taught topic in introductory and some upper-level political science courses across subfields. However, it also contains concepts that are difficult for undergraduate students to grasp, particularly those who are unfamiliar with other electoral systems. In partial response to these concerns, this article introduces a memorable in-class demonstration that utilizes food items to illustrate the logic behind Duverger’s Law. The demonstration serves as a flexible blend between lecture-oriented and active learning techniques, and can be adapted to teach other topics—such as directional and proximity models of voting, the Median Voter Theorem, and other topics in rational choice theory. Preliminary evidence presented suggests that students enjoy the demonstration, remember the concepts, and perform better on assessments related to the topic. The article concludes by challenging political science educators to develop and share more demonstration-type activities, which are commonly used in STEM and other fields.     

Three decades of populist radical right parties in Western Europe: So what?

The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the so‐called ‘verrechtsing’ (or right turn) of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This lecture provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here PRRPs should be seen as catalysts rather than initiators, who are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the introduction of stricter immigration policies. The lecture ends by providing various explanations for the limited impact of PRRPs, but it is also argued that populist parties are not destined for success in opposition and failure in government. In fact, there are at least three reasons why PRRPs might increase their impact in the near future: the tabloidisation of political discourse; the aftermath of the economic crisis; and the learning curve of PRRPs. Even in the unlikely event that PRRPs will become major players in West European politics, it is unlikely that this will lead to a fundamental transformation of the political system. PRRPs are not a normal pathology of European democracy, unrelated to its basic values, but a pathological normalcy, which strives for the radicalisation of mainstream values.     

Rough days in democracies: Comparing protests in democracies

Abstract.  Democratic political institutions are generally designed to channel public opinion; yet citizens often take to the streets in protest. Why would citizens, provided with formal mechanisms to affect the policy process, resort to extraordinary means? This article argues that the strength of representative institutions influences the likelihood of protest. The democratic institution literature does not address the issue of protest and in the protest literature effects of the democratic governmental structure have been largely underestimated. However, the diversity in government formats across democratic states and the corresponding variation in amount of protests leads one to question the relationship between them. This article identifies the variation in the scale of protests among democratic regimes in Western European countries using the European Protest and Coercion Data and explains protest using variation in the forms of government. Protesters in democratic countries with a weak legislature find it difficult to deliver their demands to government due to the institutional environment. Therefore, they are more inclined to protest than citizens in countries with a strong legislature. This argument is tested along with other structural variables and supported by results from testing models using ordinary least squares with panel-corrected standard errors.     

Party government in Europe? Parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies compared

Control over government portfolios is the key to power over policy and patronage, and it is commonly understood to lie with parties in European democracies. However, since the democratic transitions of the 1990s, Europe has had nearly equal numbers of parliamentary and semi-presidential regimes, and there is evidence that the ability of parties to control government posts in these two regime types differs. As yet, political scientists have a limited understanding of the scale and causes of these differences. In this article a principal-agent theoretical explanation is proposed. Data are examined on 28 parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies in Europe that shows that differences in party control over government portfolios cannot be understood without reference to the underlying principal-agent relationships between voters, elected politicians and governments that characterise Europe's semi-presidential and parliamentary regimes.     

Collective and Private Resources and the Inequalities of Non-violent Political Protest in European Countries

Abstract

Political participation is deemed to be a fundamental component of democratic regimes. The literature on political participation has shown that some social groups of citizens tend to be less involved in politics than other social groups, and the consequence is that the interests of these specific groups of less involved citizens are underrepresented in the political process. Given the increasing popularity of non-violent protest in contemporary democracies, it is important to understand whether political inequalities are present in this form of political engagement. In this article, we argue that non-violent protest may present inequalities, that examining the consequences of public social spending can help in understanding the cross-national differences in the levels of non-violent political protest, and that political inequalities in non-violent protest may vary according to public social spending. We test our argument using sources that include the European Values Study (1980–2009), multilevel models, and contextual data provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.     

Sense on Federalism

Debate on the relevance (or otherwise) of federalism to the development of the European Union is often characterised by mutual incomprehension on either side. Close inspection, however, reveals that the high temperature of argument may not be solely due to differing visions of the finalite politique. For the precise meaning of the federal concept in political science remains unsettled. This article looks back to the earliest origins of federalism, in order to establish a firm basis for suggesting improvements. The idea of divided sovereignty, ‘invented’ in America and now thought to lie at the heart of the federal concept, is identified to be a false construction. On these grounds, it is proposed that the definition of federalism be clarified today as not ‘a division of sovereignty between two levels of government’, but instead ‘a division of the powers flowing from sovereignty between two levels of government of equal status’.     

Does political trust matter? An empirical investigation into the relation between political trust and support for law compliance

Scholars have repeatedly expressed concern about the consequences low levels of political trust might have for the stability of democratic political systems. Empirical support and the identification of causal mechanisms for this concern, however, are often lacking. In this article, the relation between political trust and law‐abiding attitudes is investigated. It is expected that citizens with low levels of trust in the institutions of the political system will find it more acceptable to break the law. As a result, low levels of political trust might undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of government action and its ability to implement legislation. Based on survey data from 33 European countries using the 1999–2001 European Values Study (N = 41,125), the relation between political trust and legal permissiveness is examined using a multilevel ordered logistic regression analysis. The results show that respondents with low levels of political trust are significantly more likely to accept illegal behaviour such as tax fraud than respondents with high levels of political trust. Since it is known from earlier research that actors who are permissive towards law‐breaking behaviour are more likely to commit these acts themselves, the hypothesis that low levels of political trust will be associated with less law compliance within a society is supported.     

Bush,Blair and Hitler? A review of comparative self‐presentation

• This article (while emphatic in stressing the absence of any political or ethical connection between two recent governments, those of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and one historic one, the genocidal empire of Adolf Hitler), argues that the Nazi regime did in fact anticipate many communications methods pursued subsequently. The Nazis sponsored a communications revolution. The conscious production of political imagery and tableaux, government via symbolic strategies, the rhetoricizing of civic culture and the centrality of the rhetorical vision, all these have become part of our political truth as well as the Nazis'. Such a reality, then as now, is underpinned by spin, rapid rebuttal, duplicity and the construction of a nirvana of statistics and benevolent data. The ultimate fate of all these regimes was bound up with an ethos of government that placed symbolism centre‐ stage; a parallel universe of imagery and symbolism is no basis on which to construct an edifice of permanence. The methodologies of these regimes do sustain comparison, the ends, of course, do not.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Clarity of responsibility: How government cohesion conditions performance voting

Recent literature has shown that the long established link between economic performance and electoral outcomes is conditioned by a country's institutions and government, what is often termed ‘clarity of responsibility’. In this article two distinct dimensions of the clarity of the political context are identified: institutional and government clarity. The first captures the formal dispersion of government power, both horizontally and vertically. The second captures the cohesion of the incumbent government. Analysing survey data from 27 European countries, it is shown that voters' ability to hold governments to account, for both the economy and management of public services, is primarily influenced by the extent to which there is an identifiable and cohesive incumbent, whereas formal institutional rules have no direct impact on performance voting.     

Duverger's Laws: Between social and institutional determinism

Abstract. The purpose of this article is to relocate Duverger's Laws within the debate about the effects of electoral systems on the number of parties. Although Duverger's theory has always been seen as the best example of a purely institutionalist approach to the issue, it is possible to argue that this is only true if one overemphasises the meaning of the laws without considering Duverger's justification and explanations for them. However, if one takes into consideration not only the laws, but also Duverger's theories about the effects of electoral systems on the number of parties as a whole, one can argue that his theses do not have a purely institutionalist character and can therefore coexist with theories that try to take into account variables other than electoral rules.     

How Authoritarianism Intensifies Punctuated Equilibrium: The Dynamics of Policy Attention in Hong Kong

The punctuated equilibrium theory contends that government attention allocation is universally leptokurtic in that long periods of stability are punctuated by bursts of rapid and radical change; the empirical evidence in support of this claim is however exclusively drawn from democratic systems. The absence of electoral politics and institutional decentralization in authoritarian regimes could presumably affect institutional friction; whether and how this might pose as a qualification to the thesis is of major interest. By analyzing four streams of government actions in Hong Kong from 1946 to 2007 straddling the colonial and postcolonial regimes, we have found that government processes are generally leptokurtic even under authoritarian regime institutions, with the degree of the dispersion of decision‐making power across the streams of actions affecting the magnitude of punctuation. We have also found that punctuation was greater when the political system was more centralized but declined as the political system democratized.     

Divided Government: America is Not "Exceptional"

America is thought to be an exceptional political system, and, in many of its particulars, it certainly differs from the institutional arrangements found in most of the world's democracies. Its separation-of-powers regime is thought to have spawned, in recent decades, the phenomenon of divided government in which partisan control of political institutions is divided between the major parties. By implication, it is suggested that this robust regularity in which Democrats control the legislature and Republicans the executive is a consequence of its institutional arrangements and, therefore, distinguishes America from its parliamentary counterparts elsewhere. In this article, the authors suggest that parliamentary regimes, too, experience divided government. Specifically, minority governments, in which the executive is controlled by parties that, between them, control less than a legislative majority, is the closest analogue to divided government in America. In each case, the executive needs to seek support in the legislature beyond its own partisan base. Thus, divided government per se does not distinguish parliamentary and separation-of-powers regimes. What does, however, are the constitutional roots of this phenomenon: divided governments are negotiated in parliamentary regimes whereas they are mandated electorally in separation-of-powers regimes.     

全球化与行政管理制度变迁

政府转型是国际政治和国内政治互动过程中的重要问题,而政府在面对国际制度挑战中处于核心角色,形成和国际制度相适应的协调制度是政府转型的主要特征.通过大量的实证材料和个案分析,在对国际制度、公共政策协调和发展型政府理论进行理论综述的基础上,阐述了国际制度下的政府转型现象.这种现象指的是在发展型政府国家,国际制度为国内政策制定引入了全球化因素,并促使国家内部建立与国际制度联系的对口协调部门或制度.这些都有利于国际制度进一步塑造国内决策环境.伴随着国际制度的发展,发展中国家决策过程日益专业化和多元化,政府转型成为全球化时代中的一个显著特点.主要采用文献分析和实证研究相结合的方法,在实证研究中采用文本分析和深度访谈的方法.发现,国际制度会通过议事日程和规则的变化、新的配套协调决策机构的建立等来影响部门利益的表达、部门与跨部门的知识(信息)的建构、以及各部门对最后决策形成的意见、建议、交换,并导致新的国内制度的产生.     

Free Speech,Political Equality,and Campaign Finance Reform: A Paradox for Democracy?

Liberty to speak free of government interference and political equality are both essential to democracy. Yet political equality requires governmental regulation of resources needed for political speech. Analysis of Supreme Court cases, supplemented by considerations from democratic theory, suggest that this apparent paradox is better understood as a tension within the idea of free speech itself: between liberty to speak and the need for government to oversee fair distribution of resources necessary for politically effective speech. Although it is a tension worth negotiating with care, democracy simply requires fairness in distribution of politically relevant resources. The Supreme Court has erred in not reading the Constitution as mandating political equality as a fundamental right, and also in not incorporating real political equality as a compelling state interest. Therefore, the public should seek a 28th Amendment that would mandate political equality regardless of economic circumstance as a fundamental right, and inscribe into the document, for the first time, the word “democracy.”     

Does the UK Have Influence in the EU Legislative Process?

The UK has influenced some major EU policies, such as the creation of the single market and enlargement. But how influential are the UK government and British MEPs in the day‐to‐day EU legislative process? To answer this question, this article analyses recent data from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. The evidence is mixed. In the Council, in recent years the UK government has been outvoted more often than any other EU government, yet UK officials remain well connected ‘behind the scenes’. In the European Parliament, British MEPs are now more likely to be on the losing side than are the MEPs of any other member state, yet British MEPs still win key committee chairs and rapporteurships. The evidence suggests that if the UK votes to remain in the EU, Britain's political elites will need to re‐engage with Brussels politics if the UK is to avoid becoming further marginalised from mainstream EU politics.