Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination

Abstract

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.