Executive Power Sharing in Constitutional Monarchies, 1800ꟷ2018

Whereas the concept of semi-presidentialism has been widely discussed and debated for at least four decades, the issue of executive power sharing in monarchies has received very little scholarly attention. In most categorizations, all democratic regimes with monarchs who have inherited their position are generally classified as parliamentary. In many ways this make perfect sense; since there is no place for a powerful hereditary monarch in a democratic system, one could argue that such systems do not qualify as democracies. Nevertheless, there are examples of political systems, classified as democracies by most reputable categorizations or indices, where the monarch has, or has had, more or less the same position as a president in semi-presidential systems. The aim of the present study is to identify all democratic regimes in which power is shared between a monarch and a prime minister during the time period 1800-2018 and confer these cases to a separate regime category, labeled semi-monarchies. Having identified the population of cases, the regime type is discussed in terms of historical and geographical dispersion.