Yesterday when I was writing about Tayyip Erdoğan’s big electoral setback, I started going off on this long tangent about how he wants to transition Turkey from a mostly parliamentary system (with a weak presidency) to a mostly presidential system (albeit with a prime minister and cabinet appointed from among the parliament sharing executive responsibilities). This started to turn into a thing about the pros and cons of each system, at which point I snapped out of it and realized that I was well on the road to writing some 2000 word monstrosity that was mostly devoted to a digression. But rather than delete the digression, I thought I’d make it into a separate post for those who are interested.
Within the context of democratic or mostly democratic systems, the simple definition of “parliamentary” government is a government where executive authority rests with a prime minister and cabinet who are drawn from the party or coalition that holds a working majority in the legislature/parliament. These kinds of governments will usually have a separate “head of state,” which could be a hereditary monarch or a ceremonial president (who could be popularly elected or elected by the legislature) whose only real jobs are things like formally calling for elections, picking the member of parliament who gets to try to form a government and be PM, receiving foreign diplomats, signing legislation into law (he or she may also have veto authority, which I suppose goes along with signing legislation into law, but they generally have to be judicious in how they use it). Lots of democracies opt for a parliamentary system, including democracies in countries whose governments have been built with considerable US involvement, like post-WWII Japan and Germany, and Iraq today. Consider the implication here, that the US doesn’t think highly enough of its own system of government to encourage other nations to adopt it. Then consider that the most recent example of the US trying to help a country form a presidential government is Afghanistan, and maybe you’ll begin to understand why the US doesn’t push presidential systems harder (and why Afghanistan is considering reinstating the post of prime minister and moving back in a parliamentary direction).
In presidential systems it can be hard to contain the power of the office of the president, even when the holder of the office has good intentions, so corruption and the threat of lapsing into dictatorship are both lessened in parliamentary systems, in theory. In countries with major demographic divisions (ethnic, religious, etc.), it can be easier on those divisions to embed executive power into the popularly elected legislature rather than collect it in one person who may well be seen as representative only of one of that country’s demographic groups. And of course, in normal operations parliamentary systems are more efficient, avoiding the kind of gridlock that can cripple a presidential system, not that I’m referring to any government in particular here. If the executive and the legislature are gridlocked in a parliamentary system, you simply call for another election. That can lead to its own kind of gridlock, but we’re getting to that.
Of course, parliamentary systems have their own drawbacks, which explains why lots of other democracies opt for presidential or semi-presidential systems. These are systems where the elected president has something more than just ceremonial authority and is in fact the real executive power in the country. Many presidential systems, like the US and many Latin American countries, eschew the prime minister altogether, and though the cabinet is still there its members are not also elected members of the legislature. There are real advantages to this. People get to vote for their national leader directly rather than indirectly via their party, for one thing. I suppose that could be bad, but there’s something to be said about the voters having the opportunity to vote for their man or woman directly. The gridlock I described above, which is bad, stems from something that’s good, the ability of a separate executive to be a check on the legislature and vice-versa, at least in theory. Also, in times of real crisis (I know, define “real crisis”), it’s arguably good to have a unitary executive that can assume almost dictatorial (in the ancient Roman sense) powers for a short period of time. If quick decisions have to be made and you don’t have time to appease some backbench MP from Snausages-on-Flaubertine or wherever in order to get to work, then a president is what you need.
There’s also the question of stability, which could go either way really depending on how great a value you place on stability. Political science literature suggests, as I understand it (and I am not a political scientist, so caveats apply) that presidential systems lend themselves to the eventual formation of two-party states, where parliamentary systems can fragment into many small parties. Two party states are good for stability, but can be pretty terrible from the standpoint of making voters feel like they’re being properly represented, and there’s also the risk that they’ll begin to slide into one-party control, which is undesirable for obvious reasons. Many little parties can be good for representation but can also be bad for stability, as they force parties into often unwieldy coalitions in order to establish a majority, and then leave the government under constant threat that one of the coalition partners will bolt and bring the government down. The solution there is to hold a new election, but then there’s no guarantee that the voters will return a new parliament that’s any more stable than the failed parliament was. A government that’s paralyzed by a fragile coalition is just as paralyzed as one that’s dealing with heavy partisan gridlock.
There are also lots of “semi-presidential” systems, which basically means that a popularly elected president exists alongside a PM/cabinet, but it seems to me that these systems shade toward either parliamentary or presidential systems depending on how the PM and cabinet are selected and how the PM and president divide responsibilities. It’s rare to see a real division of duties, although it does happen sometimes (most often in France, where the PM and president can be forced to “cohabitate” when they come from opposing parties).
As far as Erdoğan goes, though, none of this really matters (“then why the hell did I just have to read thi-” you think, and to be honest I don’t know). There’s no indication that he actually thinks Turkey would run better with a more presidential system than it has under its mostly parliamentary one. What he does care about is the fact that his Justice and Development Party (AKP) maintains a 3 term limit on its elected members of parliament, one of the reformist features it adopted before it won its first majority in 2002. Erdoğan served his three terms, and rather than render AKP’s 3 term limit void and staying in parliament, he elected to abide by the party’s rule, leave parliament, and run for president instead, hoping he would then have the chance to amend Turkey’s constitution to give that office some real power.
What Erdoğan really wants is to run the damn country, oppressively if necessary, and he doesn’t care what title he has to assume in order to do that. In this way he was really looking to turn Turkey into a semi-presidential system like Russia’s, where the actual “democracy” is purely optional and the only defining feature of the government is that whatever office Vladimir Putin occupies is the most powerful office in the country. However, owing to the fact that Turkey has a more established (though it is admittedly checkered by military coups) democratic tradition than does Russia, Erdoğan can’t really just make up the rules as he goes along like Putin has more or less done. He really needs to amend the constitution if he wants to legally run the country as president, and it seems pretty clear in the aftermath of this election that he won’t be doing that anytime soon. I’m not sure what AKP’s rules are about a term-limited member of parliament leaving parliament and then running again later, but depending on how the next couple of years go it seems to me that it wouldn’t be totally out of the question to see Erdoğan try to move himself back into the PM gig at some point.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 