Duverger, semi-presidentialism and the supposed French archetype

The concept of semi-presidentialism was first operationalised by Maurice Duverger. There are now 17 countries with semi-presidential constitutions in Europe. Within this set of countries France is usually considered to be the archetypal example of semi-presidentialism. This article maps the main institutional and political features of European semi-presidentialism on the basis of Duverger’s original three-fold schema. The most striking feature is the diversity of practice within this set of countries. This means that semi-presidentialism should not be operationalised as a discrete explanatory variable. However, there are ways of systematically capturing the variation within semi-presidentialism to allow cross-national comparisons. This diversity also means that France should not be considered as the archetypal semi-presidential country. At best, France is an archetypal example of a particular type of semi-presidentialism. Overall, Duverger’s main contribution to the study of semi-presidentialism was the original identification of the concept and his implicit insight that there are different types of semi-presidentialism. In the future, the study of semi-presidentialism would benefit from the development of theory-driven comparative work that avoids a reliance on France as the supposed semi-presidential archetype

Elections and Ethnic Civil War

Existing research on how democratization may influence the risk of civil war tends to consider only changes in the overall level of democracy and rarely examines explicitly the postulated mechanisms relating democratization to incentives for violence. The authors argue that typically highlighted key mechanisms imply that elections should be especially likely to affect ethnic groups’ inclination to resort to violence. Distinguishing between types of conflict and the order of competitive elections, the authors find that ethnic civil wars are more likely to erupt after competitive elections, especially after first and second elections following periods of no polling. When disaggregating to the level of individual ethnic groups and conflicts over territory or government, the authors find some support for the notion that ethno-nationalist mobilization and sore-loser effects provoke postelectoral violence. More specifically, although large groups in general are more likely to engage in governmental conflicts, they are especially likely to do so after noncompetitive elections. Competitive elections, however, strongly reduce the risk of conflict. </jats:p

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie