Authoritarian Diffusion of Presidential Powers: Common Patterns in the Post-Soviet Eurasia

With a history spanning 250 years, written constitutions have become the norm and the expansion of written constitutions provides a large number of readily available examples of constitutional texts and amendments for constitution-making and constitutional amendments. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that state actors often look beyond their own borders when rewriting a constitution. In a region like post-Soviet Eurasia, with several proximate constitutional changes, the diffusion of constitutional descriptions on presidential powers is highly likely for several geographical, political, and historical reasons and scholars have started to investigate constitutional diffusion also in hybrid regimes such as in Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine in which democracy has tended to fluctuate between full democracy and full autocracy. While scholars first restricted their interest towards the evidently influential role of constitutions part of democratic regimes, they have increasingly come to appreciate that constitutions part of hybrid or authoritarian contexts have a function beyond mere window-dressing. While the content and function of constitutions may differ depending on the extent of democracy, constitutions seem to matter. During the 1990’s, the countries of post-Soviet Eurasia experienced a surge in constitutional reorientation. The vast majority of these recently independent states adopted a constitution featuring a popularly elected president, often adopting the semi-presidential regime type in which the president rules alongside a prime minister and a cabinet responsible to the parliament. Ever since the seminal contribution of Linz, cautioning about the detrimental effects of regimes with elected presidents, scholars have continued to study the effects of presidents in presidential and semi-presidential regimes, often highlighting the potential danger of regimes that invest strong powers in the president. While most of the countries in the region have since maintained a political regime including a popularly elected president, countries like Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine have continued to fluctuate, exhibiting volatile levels of democracy and fluctuating roles for the elected representatives. While these five countries have all changed the constitutional powers invested in the presidency, Armenia and Georgia have transformed into fully parliamentary regimes. In all, while scholars have come to investigate constitutional change in authoritarian and hybrid contexts, we still lack studies tracing the diffusion of presidential powers in hybrid contexts. This study contributes by carefully tracking the sequence and content of constitutional changes in terms of constitutional prescriptions of the president’s position in the hybrid regimes of post-Soviet Eurasia, connecting the patterns of constitutional change to fluctuations of democracy levels in these contexts. Using quantitative and qualitative text analysis of changes in the constitutionally anchored role of the president, this study contributes to our understanding of how changes in presidential powers have spread across post-Soviet Eurasia and to what extent they have been part of democratization or autocratization processes in the region. In that way, the study will contribute to much-needed insights, feeding into the fields of institutional, democratization, and autocratization studies.