Designing Presidential Succession: Ensuring Legitimacy and Stability in Times of Crisis

Presidents across republican political regimes are central to the proper functioning of the political executive. Even in systems where presidents are not the chief executive, they provide a crucial check and balance on the political process and hold important reserve powers in times of crisis and emergency. Since any stable and effective political system depends on the continuous exercise of power, the – temporary or permanent – inability of presidents to exercise their office for whatever reason can pose major practical and constitutional dilemmas. The same problem arises when presidents are removed from office through impeachment or when a presidents’ fixed term of office ends before a successor has been elected. While these problems have often been discussed in the context of individual presidencies (most prominently in the US and Latin America), there are hitherto only very limited comparative insights in the design of practice of (temporary) presidential succession. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, by drawing on insights from political science and comparative constitutional law it argues that any political system seeking to ensure a legitimate presidential succession must balance demands for (1) authority, (2) transparency, and (3) efficacy in its respective constitutional provisions. Second, the paper uses a new data set to provide a first comparative overview of constitutional designs and uses case studies from several countries and continents to highlight the potential for constitutional crises in the case of poorly designed stipulations. Thereby, the paper outlines the political preconditions for the effective functioning of different ideal-typical constitutional solutions.