Endogenous Presidentialism

James A. Robinson, Ragnar Torvik

NBER Working Paper No. 14603
Issued in December 2008
NBER Program(s):   POL

We develop a model to understand the incidence of presidential and parliamentary institutions. Our analysis is predicated on two ideas: first, that minorities are relatively powerful in a parliamentary system compared to a presidential system, and second, that presidents have more power with respect to their own coalition than prime ministers do. These assumptions imply that while presidentialism has separation of powers, it does not necessarily have more checks and balances than parliamentarism. We show that presidentialism implies greater rent extraction and lower provision of public goods than parliamentarism. Moreover, political leaders who prefer presidentialism may be supported by their own coalition if they fear losing agenda setting power to another group. We argue that the model is consistent with a great deal of qualitative information about presidentialism in Africa and Latin America.

(351 K)

This paper is available as PDF (351 K) or via email.

This paper was revised on December 21, 2012

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX