Cohabitation and intra-executive conflict in semi-presidential systems

The present contribution sets out to test to what extent and in what ways cohabitation affects the level of intra-executive conflict between the president and the prime minister in stable semi-presidential systems in Europe and Asia. The French term ‘cohabitation’ is commonly used to describe situations in semi-presidential systems where the prime minister and the president represent different political parties. It is far from self-evident how cohabitation should be operationalized, however. For instance, a president and a prime minister can represent different parties, but the parties can have a long tradition of working together in government coalitions. In other cases, the president and prime minister represent different parties, but the president’s party is included in the coalition government. Another variant is that either the president or the prime minister (or even both) are unaffiliated with political parties. In line with previous research, we make the basic assumption that cohabitation enhances the level of conflict between the president and the prime minister. In the framework of the present study, however, we set out to assess to what extent the strength of the association between cohabitation and intra-executive conflicts is dependent on whether cohabitation is narrowly or broadly defined. Accordingly, we make use of three different operationalizations of cohabitation. In addition, we examine to what extent times of crisis and tranquility impact this relationship. We use an updated dataset on intra-executive conflict as developed by Sedelius & Mashtaler (2013), Elgie (2018), and Yan (2023) combined with an extensive macro-level data set on dual executives as developed by Anckar (2022). The research population covers the period 1990 to 2023 and consists of eighteen democratic countries and 357 country-year observations where a popularly elected president exists alongside a prime minister responsible to parliament.