Revisiting Shugart and Carey’s Relation of Executive Powers and Democratic Breakdown

This work reassesses the central thesis of Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies, that weak presidencies make stronger, more lasting democracies. We argue that a thorough review of the literature that has evaluated this thesis thus far reveals a persistent methodological flaw that has hindered an adequate conclusion on its accuracy. While many scholars have revisited the role of presidential systems in democratic failure, comparative analyses of presidential systems have relied on additive, rather than combinatorial, measures of presidential power. We demonstrate why this produces misleading inferences about presidential power, and offer a novel methodology for its assessment. Following an investigation and replication of Shugart and Carey’s original work that incorporates the progress of the cases they studied since 1992, we test our new method on their hypothesis, and find little support for their argument. However, our combinatorial approach invites future researchers to make their own theoretically informed arguments about the relative weight of different presidential powers within a methodological framework that avoids the errors of previous work on the topic.