Investigacion Entre La Relacion De Planes De Gobierno

VrA


Democracy: Presidential or Parliamentary
Does it Make a Difference?
Juan J. Linz
Pelatiah Pert Professor of
Political and Social Sciences
Yale University
July 1985


Paper prepared for the project, "The Role of Political Parties
in the Return to Democracy in the Southern Cone," sponsored by the
Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center forScholars,
and the World Peace Foundation
Copyright
©

1985 by Juan J. Linz


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INTRODUCTION


In recent decades renewed efforts have been made
to study and understand
the variety of political democracies, but most of those analyses have focused
on the patterns of political conflict and more specifically on party systems
and coalition formation, in contrast to the attention ofmany classical
writers on the institutional arrangements. With the exception of the large
literature on the impact of electorul systems on the shaping of party systems
generated by the early writings of Ferdinand Hermens and the classic work by
Maurice Duverger, as well as the writings of Douglas Rae and Giovanni Sartori,
there has been little attention paid by political scientists tothe role of
political institutions except in the study of particular countries.
Debates
about monarchy and republic, parliamentary and presidential regimes, the
unitary state and federalism have receded into oblivion and not entered the
current debates about the functioning of democra-ic and political institutions
and practices, including their effect on the party systems.
At a timewhen
a number of countries initiate the process of writing or rewriting constitu­ tions, some of those issues should regain salience and become part of what
Sartori has called "political engineering" in an effort to set the basis of
democratic consolidation and stability. Undoubtedly, the constitutional
innovations of the post-war period, the German constructive non-confidence
vote, andthe constitution of
the French 5th Republic with its reinforement
of the executive to counter the weaknesses of assemblary parliamentarialism
and its semi-presidential regime, have attacted imitators and scholarly
attention. But we lack a more systematic and, to some
extent, behavioral
study of the implications for the political process of different institutions
on whica to basesome of the on-going debates about institutional and consti­ tutional reform.
With the notable exception of the book by Kaltefleiter, in
which the cases of bipolar executive like the Weimar Republic and the French
5th Republic are analyzed, and the recent paper by Stefano Bartolini on
cases
of direct election of the head of state in Europe, the differences
between parliamentarypresidential and semi-presidential regimes have not
attracted the attention of political science and receive only limited attention
in the two most recent works comparing contemporary democracies, those of
Bingham Powell and Arendt Lijphart.
That neglect is largely due to the fact that, with the outstanding
exception of the United States, most of
the stable democracies of Europe
and theCommonwealth have been parliamentary regimes and a few semi­ presidential and semi-parliamentary, while most of the countries with
presidential constitutions have been unstable democracies
or authoritarian
regimes and therefore not been included in those efforts of comparative
study of democracy. Since there were many social, economic, cultural and
political factors that appearedcentral in the analysis of the crisis and
breakdown of democracy in those countries, we find practically no mention
of the role of institutional factors in those crises.
Only in the case of
Chile has there been some reference to the conflict between President
Allende and the Congress in the analysis of the breakdown of democracy. It
might or might not be an accident that so many countries...