Parliamentary Procedures in Presidential and Parliamentary Systems

In research on democracy a general distinction is drawn between the agendas of democratic transition and democratic stability. The explanatory factors in order to explain democratic stability in recent analyses are varied. Among the most prominent hypothesis are the ones about parliamentary or presidential systems to favor stable democracy. But, the literature shows rather conflicting results on whether parliamentary or presidential systems favor stability. What has to be taken into consideration, however, is the fact that the United States of America and Great Britain are among the few countries that come close to the ideal types of parliamentarism and presidentialism, respectively. Categorizing a country as either parliamentary or presidential does not account for much of the differences neither within parliamentary not within presidential systems. In this paper I argue that parliamentary procedures account for some of the conflicting results in the literature about parliamentarism/ presidentialism and democratic stability. Rather than focusing on the different executive-legislative relations in parliamentary and presidential systems I concentrate on the different legislative rights and resources of legislative actors. I present new data on parliamentary procedures which allows for a more detailed look at and comparison of parliaments in both presidential and parliamentary systems around the world. First results show considerable differences of parliamentary and presidential systems when it comes to their parliamentary procedures which might help explain some of the rather conflicting results in the literature.