Semi-presidential systems

This thesis deals with the topic of semi-presidential systems. As the title suggests, semi-presidential modes oscillate somewhere on the border between parliamentarism and presidentialism. Considering the fact that even the scholars have no consensus how to define this term, the whole study is conceived as a comparison of the opinions of prominent Czech as well as international constitutional lawyers and political scientists. Nowadays the necessity to define the semi-presidential model clearly becomes important because there has been a lengthy discussion after implementation of new constitutional phenomenon in the Czech Republic (the direct election of the head of the state) about how it affected the constitutional system of the state. Both the public and many prominent experts have the opinion that it is the direct presidential election that has changed the constitutional system of the Czech Republic from a purely parliamentary model to a semi- presidential model or at least, it significantly leads to it. The objectives of this study are modest. Since the number of mutually different definitions of this system from the perspective of many constitutional lawyers and political scientists is really large, it was impossible to cover such a broad topic completely, therefore this work is devoted to the..