Prime Ministerial And Presidential

Power relationships in the executive and vis-à-vis the legislature are structured differently in parliamentary and presidential democracies. In presidential systems, presidents, combining the roles of head of state and head of government, are dominant in the executive, but due to an institutional separation of powers they have to find majority support for their policy preferences on an issue-by-issue basis in the legislature. In parliamentary systems, the power of prime ministers is much more circumscribed in the executive but their government enjoys majority support in the legislature (although this may need careful maintenance in [Page 531]the case of coalition governments where coalition partners' wishes have to be taken into consideration or where minority governments are supported by nongovernmental parties in the legislature on the basis of issue-by-issue negotiations).

Because in presidential systems the executive and the legislature are voted into office independently from each other, two constellations may occur: unified government, where the president and the majority of members of the legislature belong to the same political party or party bloc; and divided government, where party-political orientations of the executive and the legislature diverge. Divided government has become the norm in the United States in recent decades, with at least one chamber deviating from the president's party orientation. There are two schools of thought as to whether this matters. The traditional view is that effects are huge, because party politics leads to policy gridlock. Divided government makes purposeful presidential action based on an agenda next to impossible. Legislators with a different party-political orientation not only have divergent policy preferences, they also have a strategic interest in seeing the presidency of a political opponent fail. The opposite position is taken by David Mayhew. In a study of major policy initiatives in the United States since World War II, he finds that in terms of policy outputs there is no dramatic difference between unified and divided governments. The U.S. president has always to overcome considerable obstacles no matter how Congress is composed in party-political terms. The necessity of putting together a coalition of actors is a fact of political life whether government is unified or divided.

Stalemate situations following from the party-political complexion of the executive and the legislature may be more problematic in less stable presidential systems than the United States. In a famous article, Juan Linz has argued that policy gridlocks are a major cause of the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America. This view has increasingly been challenged in recent years. It has been pointed out that empirically there is no systematic relationship between minority presidencies and regime crises. Latin American presidents have increasingly learned the art of coalition politics in order to find majority support for their measures. In cases where seeking a compromise is costly, many presidents have extensive decree powers at their disposal.

Prime ministers in parliamentary democracies have a securer power basis in the legislature. In most cases they come into office as a result of majority support in the legislature—either as a single-party government or as a coalition government. However, minority governments are formed surprisingly often—in about one third of cases. Minority governments are most often formed based on longer-term agreements between government parties and so-called legislative support parties with regard to essential parliamentary votes. Sometimes legislative support has to be sought virtually on a day-by-day, issue-by-issue basis. Obviously, majority coalition and minority governments increase the need to negotiate and in that way constrain the power of a prime minister beyond the extent that is to be found in cases of single-party governments, in which prime ministers have to take into consideration intraparty policy differences. However, if cabinet durability can be understood as a crude measure of the executive's power, it is not the case that coalition and minority governments necessarily reduce this any more than intraparty constraints do in the case of single-party majority governments. The power of prime ministers and their party depends less on their seat shares in the legislature than on their policy position regarding the major issue dimensions of the party system. A small minority government may be in a relatively safe and advantageous situation as long as it is located in a relatively centrist position and has potential coalition partners on both its left and right sides.

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