Varieties of Parliamentarism: Towards a Typology of Parliamentary Government

The classic typology of presidential and parliamentary forms continues to represent a key differentiation of democratic governments in political science. Their value and relevance have also met with several waves of critique. On the whole though, political science remains far from abandoning these categories, and rightly so. The structural-functional organization of executive and legislative division of powers and especially the type of linkage of the former to the latter bear relevance for understanding different government forms, but also patterns of politics. However, the variation in modes of creation and removal of executives for one, and the extent of their (in)dependence vis-à-vis legislatures for another, have led to repeated attempts to refine the typology or extend it with further types. They include most notably semi-presidential systems but also ‘presidential-parliamentary’ or ‘premier-presidential’ to name a few, which thus appear otherwise to eschew clear-cut classification. Taken together, such tendencies may confuse rather than clarify types of executive-legislative arrangements and thus hinder the systematic typologisation of democratic governments. Against this backdrop, we pursue a two-fold analytical endeavour. For one, we propose making the classification as parliamentary form of democracy ultimately contingent upon a primary criterion: the possibility of parliament to remove the head of government (i.e. typically by vote of no confidence or functional equivalent) due to political reasons. By prioritising this feature, we provide for a more parsimonious approach. In a second step, we then develop a typology for parliamentary systems, focussing on intra-executive organization of division of powers between the head of government with cabinet and the head of state. While counter-intuitive prima facie, we argue that the structure of the executive branch in particular requires a more systematic typologisation in order to categorise various forms of parliamentary government. Parliamentary democracies (i.e. all of those conforming to our single, but decisive feature) can be categorised accordingly. With regard to the executive position of head of state, there are parliamentary systems (1) with monarchic head of state; with a republican head of state that is installed either (2) by special procedure (usually by the legislature) or (3) by direct popular vote, or (4) without a separate head of state at all. As a second executive feature, parliamentary systems can also be differentiated by their heads of government, i.e. as ones created either (1) by the parliament or (2) by popular vote. Consequently, instead of conceiving further hybrids or exceptions, our approach allows for classifying clearly without disregarding the basic parliamentary-government character of the executive-legislative relationship.