The Psychological Effects of Presidentialism

There is a long-standing debate about the relative merits of presidential vs. parliamentary systems of government. This debate resurfaced in the early 1990s during the wave of democratization at that time as many states sought to craft either their first post-independence or post-communist constitution. Which form of government was best for securing the survival of these new democracies – presidentialism or parliamentarism? It has been very difficult however, to test the competing interpretations of constitutional format on democratic survival as the causal mechanism for many of these arguments is ultimately rooted in the psychological effect that different constitutions might exert on the executive. As such, previous studies have been limited to often noisy observable implications, or proxies, for the underlying mechanism. In this paper, we are interested in the degree to which presidential systems and parliamentary systems incentivize divergent behavior among executives. We report the results of two experiments that test the psychological effect of institutional format on individual behavior; the first experiment was run in the CESS lab at Oxford, while the second experiment was based on an online panel. We hypothesize that the two major unique institutional features of presidentialism, direct election and the fixed-term mandate, dependent upon the level of executive power and the party system, incentivize behavior among executives operating under these institutional systems that is notably different from those who hold executive office in parliamentary systems.