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10 Const. Pol. Econ. 3 (1999)

handle is hein.journals/constpe10 and id is 1 raw text is: Constitutional Political Economy, 10, 3-26 (1999) © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Party Fragmentation and Presidential Elections in Post-Communist Democracies MIKHAIL G. FILIPPOV Dept. of Political Science, Washington Univ., St. Louis, Mo., USA PETER C. ORDESHOOK H&SS, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., USA OLGA V. SHVETSOVA Dept. of Political Science, Washington Univ., St. Louis, Mo., USA Abstract. Despite its controversial status as a stable governmental form, many of today's societies attempting to make the transition to democracy have or will, for a variety of reasons, choose presidentialism. Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that the combination of presidentialism and multipartism is especially dangerous for demo- cratic stability (Mainwaring 1994). The question this essay addresses, though, is whether presidential elections themselves serve to encourage a fragmented party system, at least in the initial stages of democratization. In transitional political systems presidential elections encourage party fragmentation, but in a way different from that of highly proportional purely parliamentary mechanisms. Specifically, parties proliferate to support the pres- idential aspirations of political elites. Multivariate regression analysis on cross-sectional aggregate electoral data, supported by extensive outliers diagnostics and assessments of the role of country-specific effects is applied. A nested model is used to discriminate among the secondary hypotheses. Controls include: parliamentary election rules (district magnitude, threshold for representation, adjustment districts, ballot structure), relative timing of presidential and parliamentary elections, and basic societal cleavage structure. Using as our data source the recent elections in East and Central Europe and the European part of the former Soviet Union, we show that presidential elections consistently significantly increase party fragmentation. At the same time, the data are consistent with the hypothesis that presidentialism does encourage the overall consolidation in party systems through voters' abandonment of some parties, akin to Duverger's 'psychological effect.' JEL classification: H1. Introduction Although we might dispute specifics, there is clear evidence that presidentialism has not been a notably successful democratic governmental form, at least in comparison to parliamentary systems: the analytically separable propensities of presidentialism ... work to impede democratic consolidation (Stepan and Scatch 1993, see also Linz 1994, but see Horowitz 1992). A variety of explanations have been offered for this fact, but perhaps the most compelling is the one offered by Jones and others; namely that While the optimal number of parties ... can be debated, once the presidential form of government is chosen there can be no debate. High levels of multipartism most often lead to disastrous consequences (Jones 1995:10; see also Mainwaring 1993, Mainwaring and Scully 1995). But generally these explanations treat presidentialism and multipartism as independent characteristics of a polity in which the extent of party fragmentation depends on other variables such as the magnitude of legislative election districts, the timing of presidential and parliamentary

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