Presidentialism och demokrati: Valsystemets effekt. En statistisk analys av valsystemets påverkan på sambandet mellan presidentialism och demokrati

Abstract

Several studies suggest a negative correlation between presidentialism and democracy, that is, presidentialism generates lesser democratic states than parliamentarism does. According to this theory, presidentialism has some flaws that might result in impairment of the democratical state of a country to a higher extent than parliamentarism would. An additional theory suggests that presidentialism risks to impair the democracy of a country to a greater extent with a fragmented party system, which is a parliament with several parties. Since the number of parties in the parliament is affected by the electoral system of a country, this paper will investigate how the presidentialism-democracy correlation is affected by the electoral system of different countries. It was executed through a statistical regression- and interaction analysis with cross-section data of 138 countries. The purpose of the study is to investigate whether the strength of the correlation between presidentialism and level of democracy depends on a country's electoral system. The results demonstrate that presidential countries in general tend to be less democratic than parliamentary or semi-presidential states. But they only tend to do that for countries with mixed or proportional electoral systems. Regarding countries with a majoritarian electoral system, presidential countries do not seem to be less democratic than parliamentary or semi-presidential countries. On average, the correlation between presidentialism and level of democracy tends to be accurate for countries with proportional and mixed electoral systems but not for countries with majoritarian electoral systems.