Alternative Delegation Chains: Intra-Executive Competition and Democratic Accountability in Semi-Presidential Democracies

This study addresses why democratic accountability varies across semi-presidential countries. We develop a new theoretical framework centred on the role of the president in semi-presidential systems. We argue that intra-executive conflict can enhance democratic accountability by activating an alternative chain of delegation between citizens and the government. As a popularly elected actor, the president has incentives to respond to citizens’ preferences and may therefore challenge government decisions that diverge from broader public interests. In doing so, the president can help reconcile competing social interests and provide an additional channel through which citizens’ concerns are represented within the policymaking process. Moreover, presidential intervention in government decision-making may increase the visibility and salience of particular policy issues, thereby enabling citizens and legislative actors to monitor and scrutinise government behaviour more effectively. By expanding opportunities for oversight and contestation, intra-executive conflict may strengthen horizontal, vertical, and diagonal accountability. However, the extent to which these accountability gains materialise is likely to depend on a range of contextual and institutional factors. We evaluate these arguments using a novel dataset on intra-executive conflict covering semi-presidential democracies in Central and Eastern Europe and East Asia. The results provide strong support for our theoretical expectations and suggest that intra-executive conflict can play an important accountability-enhancing role in semi-presidential systems. These findings contribute to broader debates on executive politics, democratic accountability, and participatory democracy.