Presidents, Voters, and Non-Partisan Cabinet Members in European Parliamentary Democracies.

Although Europe is the heartland of parliamentary democracy, it has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. And the new democratic regimes that have emerged in Europe since the mid-1970s have overwhelmingly adopted republican constitutions, and many of them feature popularly elected presidents, a regime type Duverger (1980) termed semi-presidential. The actual power of presidents in semi-presidential systems seems to vary considerably, both cross-nationally and over time. In this paper we examine the impact of popularly elected presidents on a critical and distinctive process in parliamentary democracy: the appointment of cabinet ministers. It is in the appointment of cabinet members that parliamentary systems most critically depart from presidential ones, and it is perhaps here that the role of political parties is most critical. Semi-presidentialism alters both of these features fundamentally and consequentially. We develop a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointment under semi-presidential government. This model identifies the conditions under which presidents can influence the policy process, specifically through their influence on the selection of cabinet members. We test the implications of our model against a sample of 134 cabinets representing 12 semi-presidential and 12 pure parliamentary regimes in the 1990s and find support for most of the predictions of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]