INTRODUCTION

Before proceeding with our analysis of the relationship between presidents and assemblies more generally, we now consider the performance of premier-presidential government as well as a few systems that we deem president-parliamentary. Such a task is necessary in order to illustrate more clearly the nature of the regime types, and their distinction from both presidentialism and parliamentarism. This is so particularly because premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism have been discussed infrequently in the comparative literature, and may be unfamiliar to many readers. When students of democratic institutions have spoken of premier-presidentialism (what others have called “semipresidentialism”), they have rarely shared a specific, common idea of its institutional structure. And, of course, regimes that we define as president-parliamentary have been described a number of ways: as presidential, semi-presidential, parliamentary, and as hybrids. In Chapter 2, we provided definitions that we believe are exhaustive and generalizable for all these regime types. We begin here with a general discussion of the thorniest institutional problem that is, in effect, built into premier-presidential government – the possibility of a divided executive.

Where the president and the cabinet are of opposing parties or blocs, premier-presidential government faces a challenge somewhat similar to that of presidentialism under divided government. The specific tensions among political adversaries, the dangers to regime stability, and the potential means of resolving those threats, however, are all different under premier-presidential and president-parliamentary as opposed to presidential systems.