Detrimental Double-carriage Politics? Intra-executive Competition and Government Survival in Semi-presidential Democracies

This study addresses why the survival of governments varies across semi-presidential countries. While recent literature verifies the effect of constitutional rules and political circumstances on government survival, intra-executive competition and its relation with the government’s duration are not clearly identified. This study differentiates the types of early government termination into early election, endogenous, and exogenous collapse. The risk of government failure through endogenous collapse decreases when intra-executive competition tends to be higher, as presidential intervention in the prime minister’s areas of responsibility will facilitate the unity of a government against the president. By contrast, intra-executive conflict raises the president’s willingness to cooperate with the parliamentary opposition to unseat the government, thus increasing the risk of a cabinet to be toppled through exogenous collapse. However, the effects may exist only for minority governments, as they must rely on the support of non-governing parties to remain in office and are vulnerable to opposition challenges through a motion of no confidence accordingly. This study confirmed hypotheses using a novel dataset for intra-executive conflicts, covering 21 semi-presidential democracies, and employing competing risk survival analysis. This finding offers a number of implications for the study of government—opposition relationship, democratic accountability, and semi-presidential government duration and termination.