Part III Presidential Republics: Their Past and Their Future Introduction

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1 Part III Presidential Republics: Their Past and Their Future Introduction If, as has been argued from the start of this volume, the key characteristic of presidential republics is that they are presidential, the element which defines them above all is the character of the presidency. Indeed, given that presidential republics have emerged primarily in new countries and even if Jackson and Rosberg ( Personal Rule in Black Africa, 1982) are rather uncertain about the ability of presidents to help build the legitimacy of the regimes of these new countries, it remains that presidents and presidents alone are in a position to do so. The hesitation of Jackson and Rosberg in this respect is understandable; indeed, a stringent condition has to be fulfilled for such a legitimisation process to occur from the actions of presidents of presidential republics in new countries. These presidents must exercise their power not merely regularly, but in a manner which is truly supportive of the institutions of the republics of which they are the heads, that is to say by behaving in what has been analysed in Chapter 4 and referred to here as civilian republican leaders. Having considered separately, as it had to be done, the characteristics of presidential republics in the regions of the globe where they have been particularly widespread, we have now to examine jointly how that form of government, the most popular in the contemporary world, has tended to fare overall. Yet the problem appears to be daunting as a result of an apparent enormous gap between what could be described as the purist definition of the presidential model, a model in which the United States emerges as almost the only truly satisfactory example, and a realistic approach which aims at including all the countries in which there are presidents appointed by or acting in the name of the people who run the affairs of their country. 261

2 262 The Presidential Republic The history of the development of the presidential republic seems particularly strange. That form of government started with a big bang, so to speak, as a result of the rapid success, political and economic, of the American republic; but that manifest success was almost immediately followed by much meandering and indeed worse, first during the French Revolution, which ended with the takeover by Bonaparte, and, soon after the French Revolution had taken place, by the uneasy manner in which independence occurred in Spanish America. What occurred a century and a half later, in Africa and still later, in the ex-soviet Union, seemed only to confirm how difficult it is to determine what could be referred to as the real nature of presidential republics: is it to be based on and indeed to resemble closely the American model, of which there have been very few, if any, examples outside the United States itself? Is it on the contrary to include all those presidential systems which have come to constitute a majority of the countries of the contemporary world, although they have remained particularly dominant in three regions, Central and South America, Africa, and the Euro-Asian landmass constituted by the ex-soviet Union? Clearly the purist or even ultra purist approach is too limited: presidentialism has indeed become a worldwide phenomenon, whether we like it or not, largely as a result of the disappearance of colonialism from the early part of the nineteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth. On the other hand, there is no doubt that some countries have adopted what has been referred to in this volume as a form of presidentialism which really amounts to usurpation, a form which, as has just been pointed out, emerged very quickly indeed after the American presidential republic came into being. The answer to this difficulty seems to consist in adopting a middleof-the-road approach. This means going beyond the purist approach and recognising that there are forms of presidentialism which need to be viewed as genuine, even though they differ substantially from the American model, but also in further recognising that the model of the presidential republic is to be distinguished from usurpation. Such an approach implies being able to define precisely, indeed truly tightly, not merely what constitutes usurpation but, more importantly, as well as of greater difficulty, what does not constitute usurpation, a point which first came to be considered in this volume in Chapter 3 when it was noted that presidential republics ranged between parliamentary republics and forms of usurpation: the answer which was then given was, on the one hand, that presidential republics differed from parliamentary republics in view of the strong part played by the president in the

3 Presidential Republics: Their Past and Their Future 263 decision-making process of presidential republics; on the other hand, in presidential republics, in contrast to regimes of usurpation, appointment processes and the tenure duration of presidents were predetermined. There are clearly difficulties at both ends: in order to determine whether a regime is a parliamentary republic or a presidential republic, what constitutes strong involvement of the president must be decided on; in order to determine whether a regime is a presidential republic or constitutes usurpation, what constitutes predetermined arrangements over appointment and tenure procedures has also to be decided on. 1 The two problems which have to be answered about presidential republics Given that presidential republics have thus to be defined as regimes in which presidents have strong powers and are regulated by predetermined rules relating to procedures of appointment and tenure and given that there has been a history of the growth in the number of these regimes, it becomes possible and indeed important to examine two questions. One had to notice that, to begin with in Spanish America, but gradually also in other parts of the world in which presidential republics came to be established, judgements tended to be rather negative about these regimes: while the performance of the presidential republic in the United States was (nearly) consistently regarded as being highly satisfactory, the performance of the presidents of many, possibly most, presidential republics, in particular in the three regions in which they have been dominant, has typically been held not to have been adequate. This could be either because these regimes might from time to time be overcome and be taken over by usurpers; or this might be because the policies followed by these countries were highly unsatisfactory, these two sets of developments being probably connected in many cases. It followed that the presidential republic, outside the United States, was often, if not typically, regarded by many as an unsuccessful form of government. Meanwhile, given that, since they were set up, most Latin American presidential republics had lasted for almost two hundred years and given that there had begun to be a history of African presidential republics since many of these had lasted half a century, it seemed both valid and important to ask two questions. First, is it the case that these regimes, often labelled as unsatisfactory, have shown some improvement, globally, over time? Second, and even more importantly, if there are indeed improvements over time, are these sufficiently large to lead to the conclusion that presidential republics can be regarded as beginning to function

4 264 The Presidential Republic adequately? At the end of a volume such as this, at least a tentative judgement must be passed on whether presidential republics are condemned or not in the end to pose insoluble problems and do so indefinitely. As was pointed out in Chapter 2, there is currently, as a matter of fact, apart from usurpation, no real alternative to the presidential republic for countries emerging from colonial rule, typically referred to as new countries. Thus the two questions which have just been mentioned do not merely need to be examined: they must also be solved positively. There are no alternatives, first because monarchical regimes, be they absolute, constitutional, or parliamentary, can clearly be ruled out in the context of these new countries; but even parliamentary republics raise such problems that it is unrealistic to expect these states to adopt successfully that form of government, as parliamentary republics require following carefully complex unwritten rules and conventions ; indeed, to enjoy a satisfactory development, parliamentary systems also require the pre-existence of strong institutions such as political parties and substantial numbers of large autonomous social groups. In this respect presidential republics are at an advantage, as their presidents can have immediately or at least very quickly a marked popular appeal; they can as a result help to sustain institutions, such as parties, during the period in which these still lack significant support among the population. Given the number of countries which have adopted a presidential model in the contemporary world, it is obviously important that this form of government be successful: yet, even if evidence showed that the performance of presidential republics had tended to improve somewhat over time, it would be unrealistic to expect that system of government to constitute a success if improvements in that performance were slow, patchy, often limited, and, even worse, if some of the rules under which presidential republics had to operate prevented these republics from functioning adequately. This is why the answer to the second question which is being raised here is largely dependent on the answer to the first: only if there has been, not just improvement, but substantial improvement over time, can there be hope that presidential republics will provide a genuine solution to the problems which have to be faced by contemporary governments, especially in new countries. 2 Presidential republics, democracy and the question of the regularity of appointment and tenure arrangements Early in the first chapter of this volume, it was emphasised that the key problem which presidential republics had to face was not whether these

5 Presidential Republics: Their Past and Their Future 265 forms of governments were or were not democratic: the key issue which needed to be addressed, as was made abundantly clear while examining what had taken place across the world, was whether presidential republics were able to avoid leading and leading repeatedly to usurpation. It followed that what had to be determined was whether, over time, presidential republics could (ideally would) come to acquire enough internal strength to remain presidential republics and not to sink into usurpation ; this internal strength had to be built gradually despite the fact that, being typically new countries, presidential republics were confronted more than occasionally with major policy problems which would be likely to render their political process chaotic; as a result some of their citizens may even be seriously tempted to choose usurpation as an alternative. Thus what had to be ascertained was not whether presidential republics could or would be democratic but whether there was an empirical basis on which to justify the claim that that form of government could be expected to function adequately, not merely in some countries and some of the time, but in a routine manner. This is why it was stated that what had to be achieved was regularity in the way in which presidential republics functioned. Such a regularity could be achieved if one concentrated on the way in which the key institution of the presidential republic, the presidency, was being set up and on how presidential candidates were to be selected, appointed and replaced: hence the emphasis on the predetermination of these processes, since, by following predetermined arrangements, one would ensure that usurpation would not take place. If predetermined arrangements were followed, presidential republics would then constitute a true intermediate form of government, as was suggested in Chapter 3 and has also just been alluded to, between parliamentary republics and regimes of usurpation. The use of predetermined arrangements as the factor characterising presidential republics does indeed make it possible to operationalise concretely the key invention of presidential republics, namely the existence of a direct relationship between president and people, while the insoluble problem posed by having to discover the empirical definition of democracy could be avoided: in particular one would not need to decide in favour of an answer which would be either too demanding or not demanding enough. 1 Indeed, more generally and going beyond the problem of what presidential republics are based on, it might even be regarded not just as very difficult to specify empirically but as highly contentious to suggest that one particular form of government, such as the presidential republic, could truly embody democracy. It is in

6 266 The Presidential Republic any case markedly more realistic to claim that the characteristic of the presidential republic consists simply in establishing a direct relationship between people and president; that characteristic is obtained if the form in which the president is chosen and remains in office is organised in such a way that the people know in advance the processes and the mechanisms of the coming to power and of the duration of the prospective tenure of prospective presidents. One might of course also surmise that states, having adopted a particular form of government, may become gradually somewhat more democratic than they had previously been: such a standpoint should apply, however, not just to presidential republics, but to some other regimes as well, and in particular to parliamentary systems. 3 Could tenure predetermination be dysfunctional? It seems therefore sensible to adopt the view that, for presidential republics to develop satisfactorily, presidential appointment and tenure arrangements should be applied in the way they had been predetermined, such an approach being markedly less contentious than attempts based on adopting democracy as the criterion in need of being used. Such an approach makes it possible and is more realistic than an endeavour to base the analysis on democratic characteristics to assess whether the practices of presidential republics have improved over time in the various regions of the globe where that regime has come to be in use. However, as was already begun to be intimated in Chapters 2 and 3, even the elaboration of what constitutes predetermined arrangements raises problems about their precise empirical content: these matters have therefore to be examined in detail in the coming chapter. There is more, however. As one moves further, in the subsequent chapter, to the question of improved performance having or not taken place over time and as the question is then raised as to whether the presidential republic is likely to become a form of government which is widely acceptable across the world, the very notion of the effect of the predetermined tenure of presidents on the political system may be regarded as contentious. This point has been forcefully made by Linz and Valenzuela in their volumes on The Failure of Presidential Democracy (1994) in which it is stated that predetermined tenure itself is one of the key causes of the problems of presidential government. In their opinion, the fact that the president s tenure is fixed in advance renders presidential republics fundamentally rigid and, presumably as a result, leads to pressure for the replacement of presidents before the end of

7 Presidential Republics: Their Past and Their Future 267 their predetermined term. This is also said to be associated with the idea that, in a presidential republic, the winner takes all the advantages which accrue from power. Linz and Valenzuela also pointed out that the presidential model was likely to lead to major difficulties in at least two other domains, but these related to the American conception of the presidential republic, a conception which, as we saw, was in use widely in Latin America but not in Africa or the ex-soviet Union. These two domains were that the system was unnecessarily exaggerating conflict as a result of the separation of powers principle and that the long process of selection of presidential candidates inevitably led to the internal division of parties. These consequences may well have been inevitable in the case of the United States, but, as a matter of fact, they did not appear to have affected in a truly serious manner the American presidential system. In any case, as we saw, the presidential republic does not need to operate under these constraints; indeed, it is not axiomatic that such constraints are a means of rendering presidential republics more democratic than they would otherwise be. It is therefore the constraint of the predetermined character of the tenure arrangements, and only that constraint, which needs to be examined if one is to assess whether its presence has the effect of preventing the presidential republic from operating smoothly. In other words, the question which arises is: are predetermined tenure arrangements likely to be the cause of the breakdown of many presidential republics? Is that rule too stringent in the context of states which are often new, in the sense which was given to the notion of new countries in the course of this volume? We found that, in these new countries, a sharp distinction had to be drawn between Latin American states, in which the duration of presidents in office tended to be short, indeed shorter than predetermined tenure arrangements typically prescribe, while, in Africa and in the ex-soviet republics, on the other hand, there was a tendency for prolonging the tenure of presidents in the direction of what might be regarded as unacceptable stability. This may also mean that the rule of predetermined tenure duration was not followed, as many presidents may have lasted in office well beyond the duration which that rule stipulated. If it is found that, over time, there has not been much progress in the extent to which the countries which adopted in principle the model of the presidential republic did in fact follow the rule of predetermined duration, then it might well have to be concluded that Linz and Valenzuela were correct in that such a rule could have been an unacceptable constraint and, therefore, that the presidential republic was not

8 268 The Presidential Republic a workable model of government, except in very special circumstances, typically those embodied almost exclusively in the United States The assessment which is provided by the coming two chapters aims at helping to reach a conclusion, as empirically realistic as possible, about the merits of the model of the presidential republic, a conclusion based in particular on the fact that that model had been in existence nearly two hundred years, in the Latin American case, and about half a century in the African case. The concluding chapter of the volume which follows the two chapters relating to the extent to which presidential republics have or have not tended to adopt gradually the rule of predetermined tenure, will have to take note of the findings of these two chapters to suggest whether the invention made in the United States in the late eighteenth century can truly be considered as being a satisfactory arrangement and whether such an arrangement did lead to the solution of the problems confronting the new countries which mushroomed across the planet in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.