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This 1997 book addresses the current debate regarding the liabilities and merits of presidential government. Does presidentialism make it less likely that democratic governments will be able to manage political conflict? With the unprecedented wave of transitions to democracy since the 1970s, this question has been hotly contested in political and intellectual circles all over the globe. The contributors to this volume examine variations among different presidential systems and skeptically view claims that presidentialism has added significantly to the problems of democratic governance and stability

Starting from recent analyses that have argued that presidentialism is less favorable for building stable democracy than parliamentary systems, this article argues that the combination of a multiparty system and presidentialism is especially inimical to stable democracy. None of the world's 31 stable (defined as those that have existed for at least 25 consecutive years) democracies has this institutional configuration, and only one historical example—Chile from 1933 to 1973—did so. There are three reasons why this institutional combination is problematic. First, multiparty presidentialism is especially likely to produce immobilizing executive/legislative deadlock, and such deadlock can destabilize democracy. Second, multipartism is more likely than bipartism to produce ideological polarization, thereby complicating problems often associated with presidentialism. Finally, the combination of presidentialism and multipartism is complicated by the difficulties of interparty coalition building in presidential democracies, with deleterious consequences for democratic stability.

A fundamental political-institutional question that has only recently received serious scholarly attention concerns the impact of different constitutional frameworks on democratic consolidation. Little systematic cross-regional evidence has been brought to bear on this question. This article reports the findings of the analysis of numerous different sources of data, all of which point in the direction of a much stronger correlation between democratic consolidation and the constitutional framework of pure parliamentarianism than between consolidation and pure presidentialism. The systematic analysis of these data leads the authors to conclude that parliamentarianism is a more supportive constitutional framework due to the following theoretically predictable and empirically observable tendencies: its greater propensity for governments to have majorities to implement their programs, its greater ability to rule in a multiparty setting, its lower propensity for executives to rule at the edge of the constitution and its greater facility in removing a chief executive if he or she does so, its lower susceptibility to a military coup, and its greater tendency to provide long party-government careers, which add loyalty and experience to political society. In contrast, the analytically separable propensities of presidentialism also form a highly interactive system, but they work to impede democratic consolidation by reducing politicians' degrees of freedom.

Despite optimistic expectations that the new states of the world will, increasingly, become democratic and peace-loving in the "new world system" created after the collapse of all the modern empires, we see growing signs of pervasive violence. Efforts to support the consolidation of existing democracies need to be augmented by struggles to prevent their collapse. Two crucial problems recur in these struggles: how to legitimize states that are often viewed by unwilling subjects as oppressive and lacking the authority or ability to govern effectively, and how to share power in countries where it is concentrated, unrepresentatively, in the hands of ambitious minorities. Democracies that cannot respond to the urgent needs of their citizens should expect them to resort to resistance, terrorism, and revolutionary violence. Two main forms of democratic governance exist on the basis of western examples: the presidentialist design illustrated by the United States, and parliamentarist forms developed in Western Europe. The argument advanced here is that the presidentialist formula is inherently less able than parliamentarism to support the degree of representativeness and legitimacy required as a minimal basis for the survival of democratic governance. Some of the exceptional reasons why, despite the high rate of collapse of other presidentialist regimes, the US constitutional system has survived so long are explained. Because it is, indeed, very difficult to transform any presidentialist regime into a parliamentary one, the US example is used to support lessons concerning the costs that must be paid for presidentialist regimes to survive.