From another point of view, the better form of Democracy is the one which costs less.

Dear I think, it depends on the nature of the society and the level of people's maturity.

I believe that both of them is good, but for conscious people.

Every system of Government whether Parliamentary or Presidential democracy has its own merits and demerits. As an Indian citizen, I prefer Parliamentary democracy of India.

From one point of view, the more representative form, concerning the main question.

Regards

I prefer Parliamentary .

I think, For low level of people maturity the presidential form is better and vice versa.

I think Presidential Democracy is better. A presidential system is that the head of state is usually elected through a direct mandate.

There is a lot of literature on this question, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Here are a few contributions, which you may want to read: Juan J. Linz, 'The Perils of Presidentialism', Journal of Democracy, I (1990), 51-69; Donald L. Horowitz, "Comparing Democratic Systems', Journal of Democracy, 1 (1990), 73-79; Matthew Soberg Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

As for myself, I would suggest that the answer to your question also depends on how both types of regimes are organised. For example, the functioning of a parliamentary regime may differ a lot depending on what electoral system it uses.

Wise reply, Julien. The net of it is that there is only one presidential democracy that has proved stable: the USA. There are a couple of dozen others but none have managed to last.

Latin America is nearly all presidential and is a mess. Why have parliamentary Canada, Australia and New Zealand prospered but not presidential Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela. etc, etc? They are in a very serious mess and will never escape. The same goes for all the former Soviet countries that went presidential except Lithuania. The ones that went parliamentary are managing all right except Hungary.

Look at the Philippines and South Korea and stay tuned for Indonesia (that will be a big one when it goes). It sounds democratic to directly elect the chief executive but it is an invitation to demagoguery. The presidential system is actually a universal failure—except the US and it’s quite a mixed bag. I speculate that the reason the US has survived is somehow because it is federal and the states are jealous of each other.

Your remark about the functioning of a parliamentary regime depending on its electoral system is right, too. No country has ever prospered with single-member electoral districts comprising a single parliamentary chamber. There have been some horrific failures. If there are single-member districts then there needs to be an upper house.

If there is only one house then a multi-member proportional electoral system is needed. Indeed, it is possible to argue that no established democracy with multi-member districts has ever failed. (Counter-examples are Germany 1933 and Hungary today but both were/are not really established.)

Consider semipresidential.

Adding to the comments by Julien Navarro and Agnieszka Dudzińska we recently conducted a performance test across parliamentary, premier-presidential, president-parliamentary and presidential regimes on democracy and gvt performance. The outcome was clearly in favour of parliamentarism and premier-presidentialism. That is, and in line with Linz (1990) our data suggest that in general parliamentary and semi-presidential countries with weak presidential powers are favourable over presidential or semi-presidential regimes with powerful presidents. One might identify a few individual countries deviating from this pattern, of course. Sedelius & Linde (2018): Article Unravelling Semi-Presidentialism: Democracy and Government P...

Thank you, Thomas Sedelius, for pointing to your paper at

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317044345_Unravelling_Semi-Presidentialism_Democracy_and_Government_Performance_in_Four_Distinct_Regime_Types

which relates presidential power to democratic performance for 173 countries. It’s objective and fairly comprehensive. Linz first pointed out the perils of presidentialism nearly thirty years ago. Your research confirms him. Maybe it’s time the news escaped the academy.

Millions live in squalor for one basic reason: they have a presidential system. I suspect this can mostly be reduced to the fact that they have a popularly elected president. Look at, say, the Philippines: the rubbish in the streets, the cement block hovels, the ubiquitous hawkers. What a way to live. In addition there are the thousands murdered by police and vigilantes. Or take South America: squalor, starvation, vast areas terrorised by gangs, mass murder, every politician corrupt, dams collapse killing hundreds, the national museum burns down. It’s grotesque and it’s unnecessary and the root cause—presidentialism—should be publicly exposed.

Your paper isn’t about such illustrations; it seeks to check the overall situation statistically. Let me paraphrase and summarise what I got from it.

You define “president” as someone who is popularly elected nationally. You have three kinds: weakly presidential, strongly presidential and pure presidential. In weak pres the president cannot dismiss the government; in strong pres both president and the parliament can dismiss the government; and in pure pres only the president can dismiss the government. Objective, rule-based definitions.

And so you allocate countries to four categories: parliamentary (where parliament can dismiss the government), weak pres, strong pres and pure pres. The country counts are 68, 28, 25 and 52 for a total of 173. One of the 52 is incorrect: Switzerland does not have a popularly elected president—so 51 pure presidential. (Where to put Switzerland? There nobody can dismiss anybody.)

You adopt Doyle and Elgie’s presidential power ratings (which fall in the range of 0 to 1) for the 173 countries and state the averages for four types as 0.18, 0.25, 0.46, 0.47. That big difference in the president’s power between weak and strong would seem to fully justify the distinction.

I would have liked to have seen the actual power figure for each country. I hunted through Elgie’s blogs but all I could find were two lists, less complete and with large discrepancies between them.

You go on to correlate the power ratings with several democracy and governance indicators and confirm, statistically, Linz’s assertion: parliament good, president bad.

With regard to those four averages, you point out that the difference between the first two (i.e., between parlt and weak pres) is not statistically significant, and nor is the difference between strong pres and pure pres. So what matters statistically is the dichotomy of parliamentary versus presidential where presidential means nationally elected and having the power to dismiss the government. I wonder what the correlations would be using that simple dichotomy of 96 to 76 countries.

I transferred the four lists of countries to an Excel sheet and went over them tacking on various labels. I put a big D against those I judged to be established democracies (stable at least since the late 1940s). There are 16 (of 68) parliamentary democracies, 3 (of 28) weak pres, 2 (of 25) strong pres and 1 (of 51) pure pres.

So democracy is biased to the parliamentary list. If the concept of “established” is relaxed, the bias becomes greater.

That lone pure presidential is, of course, the USA. This is the only pure presidential country to have made democracy work. The other 50 countries have failed. Of these, many are relatively new, however 19 of them are not new. 19 are of European heritage, countries occupied centuries ago when the US and Canada were. These 19 settler countries had every opportunity that the US and Canada had. Why have they failed?

They are all Latin American. You calculate governance and democracy correlations with British colonies but not with Latin colonies. I bet the Latin correlations would be stronger than the British ones.

It may be that most people blame the shambles in south and central America on Latin culture. That misses the mark. Latin France, Spain and Portugal manage all right and even Italy is paradise compared with Latin America. The problem is not their culture but their directly elected powerful presidents. This single institutional fact has brought them measureless sorrow—as it has to the Philippines, Sri Lanka, numerous African countries and former Soviet Union states.

There are two established democracies among the 25 strong pres group (which, according to your averages, is no different from pure pres). They are Austria and Iceland. They may be de jure powerful presidents but they function as normal, straightforward parliamentary democracies. The good performance of those two countries and of Switzerland must be making the presidentialism correlations look less bad than they otherwise would. China, which you don’t mention, would make presidentialism look worse.

Though Austria and Iceland do not behave as presidential in any practical sense, we might wonder about the danger of their presidents exercising the nominally strong power in the event of a crisis. At any rate, there is no prospect of all those other strong or pure presidential countries imitating Austria/Iceland by pretending to be parliamentary.

What of the three big-D democracies in the list of weak presidents? They are Finland, France, and Ireland. The Finn and Irish presidents are figureheads and those two countries are functionally totally parliamentary. France is largely parliamentary but the de jure weak president can be powerful if the president’s party has a legislative majority. I note Turkey is in this list: a de jure weak president is in reality an autocrat.

The net conclusion? All the decent, stable, democratic countries, with the sole exception of the US, function as parliamentary democracies. Presidentialism does not work.

The 68 parliamentary countries aren’t perfect. Cambodia and Myanmar are in a sorry state and Hungary is a disgrace to the genre. What have they in common? Strong men. The essence of the problem is concentration of power. As Elgie remarks somewhere, a super prime minister could be as bad as a super president. It is just that a super PM is less likely to arise—and Hungary is in nothing like the mess Latin America is in.

The very meaning of democracy is power dispersal. The legitimacy and egotism associated with popular election of a national leader is (however weak the de jure power) an invitation to demagoguery. The concept of “leadership” is itself inherently anti-democratic. Switzerland, which is stable, extremely prosperous and by far the world’s most democratic country, has no leader at all.

Parliamentarism might not be a guarantee of democracy but some forms are not far from it. And though presidentialism is not a guarantee of chaos—as pure presidential Singapore proves—all versions of it open the door. So I also wonder how the democracy and performance correlations would come out if you used the extremely simple dichotomy of parliament versus presidential, i.e., 68 versus 104. If they are strong then presidentialism does indeed reduce, statistically, to popular election. This would make the distinctions between the various kinds of presidentialism superfluous and it would be readily grasped at a popular level.

From another point of view, the better form of Democracy is the one which costs less.

In my opinion, the best form of democracy when you can leave your country to a better one, and that permission must be covered by the government itself

Thanks for your elaborative reading of our paper, Mike Pepperday. A basic idea behind our study was to examine democratic performance among various types of presidential regimes, defined by formal and not actual powers. In particular, we catered around the two subtypes of semi-presidentialism. You are absolutely right that the findings are anything but good news for those who might argue for introducing strong presidencies.

We should remember though that choosing a certain type of constitutional form is not a tabula rasa event where all options are really on the table. Historical-institutional, contextual and actor-oriented factors indeed influence the final choice. For example, in the (non-Baltic) post-Soviet context in the 1990s the conditions for choosing parliamentarism, or at least weaker presidencies, were anything but favourable. Strong leaders from the former Soviet regime took the lead in the constitutional process and safeguarded their positions by introducing a strong presidency in a context of rapid independence processes, extremely weak party systems, lack of previous democratic experiences and rule of law, and where the populations were generally in favour of strongman leadership. And as we know, somewhat similar conditions characterized the transitions from military rule in Latin America in the 1970s and in Africa in the 1980s.

Thus, when analyzing performance of democracy under various constitutional regimes, we are certainly facing endogeniety challenges and a causality dilemma. To what extent is it really the constitutional regime that causes the outcome? Yet, comparative case studies suggest that even under extremely unfavourable conditions, a shift from a president dominated system to a premier-presidential or parliamentary one is positive for power sharing and democratization (cf. Hale 2015; Elgie and Moestrup 2016).

The presidential system is better for democracy than the parliamentary one because of its separation of powers, the role of the judiciary, and government accountability to its people. A presidential system is advantageous because of the relationship between the executive and the legislature

@ Nirmala S.V.S.G.

The problems, theoretic and practical, of presidentialism are outlined in my post above. Your putative advantages are imaginary. The evidence is that parliamentary systems are superior by a wide margin.

Parliament -because the presidential form of government sometimes become a autocratic government on the other hand the members of parliament are elected by mass people so the parliament always thought what is good for his people by this way parliament can not become a autocratic.

I agree much with Tahmina. A presidential system often leads to accumulation of power in hands of the President. In a parliamentarian system power of the government does not sit this dominant with the government, particularly not, if power is based on coalition governments.

The downside then is the instabilities is can cause when too many parties are involved in government. Also the time it takes to reach consensus can be longer. However I also feel that the depth of discussions increases when power sharing is required. The effort to convince seems to be greater, what do others think...?

Dear Dr.

I agree with parliamentary is very good.

Warm regards

A parliamentary system is better , but on condition that it depends on how civil rights are guaranteed .