What are Presidentialism and Parliamentarism?

What are presidentialism and parliamentarism? What are their virtues and vices? Which system is more suitable to new democracies, and why? Do we have a universal answer for all countries?

Presidentialism and parliamentarism are two major forms of democratic government systems. Nearly all political systems in the world are modeled on them. (Mahler, 2000) The former is best respresented by the United States while the latter one is represented by the United Kingdom. The discussion in this essay is based on pure presidentialism and pure parliamentarism, excluding those political forms which contain only some features of these two systems. The focus of this essay is on the virtues and vices of both systems and the suitability of which system to new democracies.

In presidentialism, the president has both the political power and symbolic authority for the country as the head of state. (Mahler, 2000) By Sartori’s (1994) definition, presidentialism should have the head of state popularly elected for a fixed time span, he is also the head of government. The parliamentary can neither appoint nor remove the president, vice versa. The executive branch and legislative branch are chosen by two independent elections and they can neither overthrow nor affect each other. Both the terms of the president and the legislature are fixed so that they have power security.

On the other hand, in parliamentarism, the government is appointed, supported and dismissed by parliamentary vote. (Sartori, 1994) The head of state, has the symbolic authority and the chief executive of government (usually called the prime minister), has the real political power. The former one is usually chosen out of hereditary tradition, elected by a governmental body or self-selected. (Mahler, 2000) The executive and legislative branches are merged in the sense that people can only elect the legislators in parliamentarism. The head of government is then elected by the legislators. Thus the leader of the

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