Does presidentialism facilitate populism?: institutions and survival of democracies – 05/03/2023 – Marcus Melo

There is an important debate about whether certain political institutions prevent or favor the rise and/or permanence of radical populist leaders. Many proposals for institutional reform have been defended based on these discussions. Do one-party governments, unitary countries, constitutional courts or presidential systems favor populists?

Many suggest that multiparty parliamentarism tends to impede extremist parties because the party fragmentation resulting from proportional representation (PR) means that such parties only come to power in coalitions with non-extremist parties.

In this way, such governments lose much of their radical nature. More importantly, traditional non-extremist parties adopt cordon sanitaire policies, refusing to form coalitions with extremists. In Europe, in the 50’s and 60’s, this happened with the communist parties, until then anti-system and pro-USSR. Recent notorious cases are the FPO, in Austria, and the PVV, in the Netherlands, parties of the radical right.

The symmetric case would be that of countries that adopt single-member electoral districts and are bipartisan. The expectation here is that the political dispute will produce a convergence at the center. Strictly speaking, this debate is classic. It emerged in the 1930s and informed many of the reform ideas in post-war Europe. Many attributed the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler to the adoption of PR in 1920. The remedy would come in the German Constitution of 1949: the abandonment of PR and the adoption of a mixed system.

The recent debate in the US turns this classic argument on its head. There is a near consensus among analysts that Trump’s rise was facilitated by the American two-party system. The argument here is that the introduction of open primaries in the 1970s allowed radical minorities in the Republican—and Democrat—party to gain influence that they did not have in the party. Primaries give voice and power to party members who have preferences that deviate from the median preference of party voters. Once the choice of candidate was made, almost all of the voters supported his name. Many propose abandoning the primaries and alternative voting (RCV), recently adopted in New York, as a solution.

Here comes the discussion of systems of government. Evidence from the Democratic Erosion Dataset, however, does not point to strong causality between illiberal leaders and presidentialism, as suggested by Cheibub and Hicken et al. Democracies survive because of varying combinations of institutional and contextual elements.

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