President Or Prime Minister?
Niranjan Rajadhyaksha -
Sunday, January 11, 2009 11:15 AM
The debate on whether Indian should choose a presidential form of government crops up every now and then. The fractitious nature of our parliamentary politics and the complexities of coalition agreements have led many to believe that we would be better off with power vested in a president, with all the regular checks and balances of a democracy.
The debate is usually presented in terms of the British versus the American model of national governance.
An interesting new paper by Jim Robinson and Ragnar Torvik look into governance models in Africa. They point out --- and this came as a complete surprise to me --- that parliamentary constitutions outnumbered presidential constitutions four to one when various countries in that continent became independent. Yet there has been a broad shift to presidentialism since then, with only three of the 21 countries that started with parliamentarianism not opting to move to a presidential form of governance later. Two of these three countries are Bostwana and Mauritius, rare stories of economic success and political stability in sub-Saharan Africa.
Their conclusion is interesting...
"Our analysis is predicated on two ideas: first, that minorities are
relatively powerful in a parliamentary system compared to a
presidential system, and second, that presidents have more power with
respect to their own coalition than prime ministers do.
These
assumptions imply that while presidentialism has separation of powers,
it does not necessarily have more checks and balances than
parliamentarism. We show that presidentialism implies greater rent
extraction and lower provision of public goods than parliamentarism.
Moreover,
political leaders prefer presidentialism and they may be supported by
their own coalition if they fear losing agenda setting power to another
group."
And earlier:
"As compared to countries in Western Europe or islands in the
Caribbean, which have sustained parliamentary constitutions, the
preferences of different political salient groups in Africa, for
instance, are much more polarized. Political parties are often highly
regional...
It is this which raises the stakes from agenda
setting and makes the majority prefer to have a president to make sure
that they cannot lose agenda setting power to the minority."
(Hat tip: Chris Blattman)
India has a multiplicity of identities and loyalties --- religious, caste and regional --- that both enrich and threaten the broader national identity. Parliamentary democracy has given voice to those who may not have been heard in a presidential system. The pitfall of this is policy tangles in several important areas.
And I have not quite understood why the presidentialism implies greater extraction of rents. Our own experience in India is that parliamentarianism has led to enough rent-seeking from minorities that support a coalition government.
That said, the African experience is worth pondering over. And I wonder how the Asian tigers to the East do on this score.
As always, comments are welcome...