Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Does the distinction between presidentialism, parliamentarism, and semiresidentialism predict how executive-legislative relations are structured in constitutions? Is there a fair degree of hybridization across cases in the three classical constitutional types? We investigate this expectation empirically on the basis of data from the Comparative Constitutions Project at the University of Illinois. We examine design choices for each of 38 features of the constitutional allocation of powers and authority between the executive and the legislature in 542 contemporary and historical presidential, parliamentary and semipresidential constitutions. We study whether these categories in fact capture consistent institutional configurations by examining the internal similarity of constitutions in each of them. Our findings suggest that semi-presidentialism is in fact a relatively coherent category when compared with presidentialism, but that it is not distinct from parliamentary constitutions in any significant way. Any observed differences in the performance of parliamentary and semipresidential systems do not originate in the way their constitutions structure executive-legislative relations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay analyzes Rousseau’s writings on Geneva, Corsica, and Poland. I show that Rousseau’s advocacy of economic and cultural autarky in these “semi-peripheries” derives from his critique of Stoic cosmopolitanism, but that the side-effect of Rousseauvian autarky is xenophobia.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper focuses on the impact of semi-presidential regimes on governance, delegation and accountability by examining under which conditions presidents take over from assemblies in these regimes, and form presidentially chosen technical cabinets. One interpretation is that these episodes of presidential governance illustrate the agency risks inherent in semi-presidentialism: delegation to two electoral agents creates tensions, which presidents may in the worst-case scenario resolve by marginalizing the assembly. A second interpretation is that these technical cabinets illustrate the flexibility of semi-presidential regimes in generating a wide variety of governance solutions, from president-led to fully assembly based cabinets. Alternatively, the formation of technical cabinets may reflect the staying power of initial historical choices, and the path dependence of politicians’ subsequent decisions. This paper offers the first empirical assessment of the conditions under which presidents take control over governments and the implications which this has for governance, delegation and accountability in what has recently become Europe’s most commonly chosen regime type.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A universal category and organizational form comparable with, though distinct from, the nation-state itself is now systematically discernable within the international system. These entities have their own national populations, territories, and governments. Their leaders have their own measures of domestic sovereignty. Their populations are animated by the forces of nationalism. And their existence and fate frequently have pivotal importance with widespread international implications. These entities are referred to here as “federacies”. This paper will argue that the incremental and pervasive appearance of federacy arrangements since the late nineteenth century constitutes the emergence of a new constitutive unit in the international system in addition to the state. I will first address some of the general conditions that provide for the genesis of federacy arrangements based on the meta processes that are at work within states and outside of them in the international system. Second, the paper will argue that states with federacies are now in some sense like the “multiperspectival polities” of the medieval age before the modern state system. Lastly, I will show how federacies are “like-units” with similar functional, capacity, and hierarchical characteristics.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Much of the comparative politics literature assumes that semi-presidential governments, like parliamentary ones, are made and broken by political parties. We argue that this ignores the fact that governments in semi-presidential regimes have two popularly elected principals: president and assembly. We integrate both actors into a theory of government composition in semi-presidential regimes and examine what shapes their relative power to determine cabinet composition, under which conditions primary control of the cabinet shifts from assembly parties to the president, and how presidential influence alters the party government-relationship. Using data on 207 cabinets in 15 East and West-European countries, our analysis demonstrates that attention to the president is fundamental to a fuller explanation of the nature of cabinets and of the basic mechanisms of delegation in the semi-presidential regimes of West and Eastern Europe.

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