The Survival of Minority Government under Semi-Presidentialism: A Perilous Combination of Powerful President and Parliament

This article answers why the survival of minority government varies across semi-presidential democracies. While recent literature verifies the effect of cohabitation on semi-presidential government survival is conditional on the president’s cabinet dismissal power and power to dissolve the parliament, their relations with minority government’s duration are not clearly identified. This paper, therefore, proposes (1) whether president’s party is in the government and (2) who holds power to end a cabinet determine the lifespan of a minority government. First, this research differentiates types of early government termination into early elections and non-electoral replacement which is further divided into endogenous and exogenous collapse. Second, the risk of a minority government termination through exogenous collapse decreases when the president and the parliament could not effectively exercise cabinet termination power. By contrast, considerable and symmetrical power to end a cabinet increases the hazard of a minority government’s termination through exogenous collapse because both sides claim constitutional legitimacy to rein in the cabinet, and the risk is much higher if the president’s party is not in the government. This paper verifies hypotheses using data on semi-presidential democracies after 1990 and employing competing risk survival analysis. Moreover, this study measures the power to end a cabinet and, thus, makes a threefold contribution. First, this paper develops an index of cabinet dismissal power on the basis of Goplerud and Schleiter’s seminal works. Second, considering how cabinet dismissal power interacts assembly dissolution power, this paper determines how much power to end a cabinet the president and the parliament enjoys. Third, this paper integrates party system into this analysis and measures how the president and the parliament effectively exercise this power, or in other words, real cabinet termination power. This research concludes that an effective constitutional design to lower the risk of exogenous collapse should provide executive-legislative power interaction.