Semi-presidentialism: Concepts, Consequences and Contesting Explanations

The science of politics is an inexact one. All the same, over the last 25 years, there have been some advances. The most important development has been the (re)discovery that ‘institutions matter’. There are various more or less contentious manifestations of this realisation: historical institutionalism, sociological institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism and so forth (Hall and Taylor, 1996). However, what links these competing viewpoints is the belief that institutions should be treated as the most basic explanatory variable of political analysis. This is not to say that variables such as culture, ideas and interests do not matter. They do. It is merely to say that the study of political life should always include an institutional component. In this context, it is certainly the case that there is still a great deal of academic conflict and incoherence about the precise importance of institutions both generally and in particular cases. All the same, the demonstration that the study of political life is essentially incoherent without an appreciation of how institutions induce stability into an otherwise inherently unstable political process (Riker, 1980) is perhaps the most important step forward that political science has ever taken