Credible No-confidence Vote Threats as a Sufficient Condition to Prevent Incumbent Takeovers

Abstract

The strong empirical pattern that parliamentary systems are less vulnerable to self-inflicted democratic breakdowns (“incumbent takeovers”) does not necessarily imply a confident choice between institutions because of the existence of significant outliers. This paper aims at finding a sufficient condition for preventing such takeovers that is uncontroversial for institutional design purposes. By using an exhaustive approach to the data, this paper finds that incumbent takeovers have never happened in any parliamentary systems without an excessively large party. I theorize why the perfect immunity of these systems is not accidental by introducing a formal theory that connects politicians’ individual accountability to legislatures’ collective accountability. I show graphically that the probability for an anti-democratic prime minister to survive no-confidence votes is practically zero under a moderately sized governing party and that the impeachment threats in presidential and semi-presidential systems cannot effectively suppress the probability of anti-democratic moves.

1. IntroductionIt has been repeatedly verified that parliamentary democracies tend to last longer than

presidential ones in a large number of cross-national studies (Przeworski et al., 1996; Svolik, 2008; Kapstein and Converse, 2008). Maeda (2010) and Svolik (2015) added more nuances to the literature by distinguishing two different types of breakdowns, those in which the elected government was overthrown and those in which it became dominant. They show that formal institutions actually have little explanatory power over the former, namely coups or “exogenous terminations” (Maeda) perpetrated by non-elected forces. However, the risk of the latter type, namely “incumbent takeovers” (Svolik) or “endogenous terminations” (Maeda) perpetrated by the elected governments themselves, are significantly more likely when there exists an executive presidency. Such a typology of breakdowns not only sharpened the statistical patterns, but also improved our theoretical understanding of why countries with a strong presidency fail more frequently. These findings are enormously valuable for countries facing a choice of executive types, especially in light of the recent alarming presidential behavior in Turkey, the Philippines, and even the United States.

However, because of the small probability nature of democratic breakdowns, patterns found in statistical analyses often cannot translate into confident institutional proposals. The fact that parliamentary systems are relatively more resistant to incumbent takeovers may have been accidental or temporary, and may not be applicable to newer democracies. The task of this paper, therefore, is to find a sufficient condition to prevent incumbent takeovers that is ready to use for institutional design purposes. I show that parliamentarism itself is far from a safety guarantee, but the risk of incumbent takeovers in such a system is practically zero unless the largest party has an excessive size. Among the 21 unambiguous cases of incumbent takeovers that happened

in the Post-War era around the world, 15 happened under a presidential or semi-presidential system and 5 happened under a parliamentary system whose governing party had more than 80% of the seats immediately before the breakdown. Only one parliamentary system with a modest majority party (58% of the seats) experienced an incumbent takeover, but the party was facing an extremely fragmented opposition. The pattern is strong enough for me to conclude that the credible threat of a no-confidence vote on the chief executive is a highly effective mechanism to deter self-inflicted breakdowns, which also implies a country can be immune to such breakdowns by adopting a parliamentary system with a proportional electoral system.

I offer a formal theory to explain the near-perfect immunity of parliamentary systems without an oversized party to the risk of incumbent takeovers. Inspired by how the Condorcet Jury Theorem (see List and Goodin, 2001) theorizes low-probability events, I deduce the probability of power abuse by a hypothetical collective body from such probability of individual policy-makers within that body. The resulting mathematical relationship suggests that when a majority of the legislators are needed to implement an incumbent takeover (under the provision of no-confidence vote), the former probability is a function with an S-shaped curve that approaches zero when the majority party’s size decreases.

I also show that when legislative majority support is not needed to implement an incumbent takeover, the risk for that to happen is strikingly high. In a system where an abusive chief-executive can only be impeached by a super majority of legislators, the probability for the abuse to happen is a sharply increasing function of the impeachment threshold.

2. The existing institutional explanations on democratic stabilityIt is hardly controversial that democracy tends to be more durable under parliamentary

systems. Every cross-national statistical analysis so far finds significant coefficients on executive types when comparing life expectancy of democracies (Przeworski et al., 1996; Svolik, 2008; Kapstein and Converse, 2008). However, earlier explanations for such an observation often suffer a lack of theoretical subtlety because they do not distinguish the two different types of democratic breakdowns, those in which the governing party was undermined or overthrown and those in which the governing party managed to monopolize political power. It is certainly hard for any single theory to account for these two opposite scenarios. When running empirical tests, the pooling of the two types of breakdowns also necessarily drives down the statistical significance because of the vague connection between the independent and dependent variables.

To address these problems, Maeda (2010) divides democratic breakdowns into “exogenous terminations” and “endogenous terminations”, depending on whether “the event springs from within the government.” He reports that presidential systems are nearly 12 times as likely to experience endogenous terminations as parliamentary systems (Madeda,2010: 1141). And these events seem truly “endogenous” in the way that they are uncorrelated with non-institutional factors such as growth rate, development level, or ethnic fragmentation. In contrast, exogenous terminations are equally likely across executive types. Svolik (2015) uses a different set of terms to categorize democratic breakdowns, namely “coups” and “incumbent takeovers”, but conceptually they are very similar to those in Maeda’s typology1. He has similar findings that executive types only explain the latter type but not the former and that incumbent takeovers are about ten times more likely in presidential systems than in other systems (Svolik, 2015: 734). The two studies’ results are slightly different in the way that Maeda’s data suggest that semi-

1 I will use the term “incumbent takeover” in the rest of the paper.

presidential systems have similar hazard ratio as presidential systems while Svolik codes both semi-presidential systems and parliamentary systems into a general category of non-presidential systems. But that does not undermine the striking consistency between the two scholars regarding presidential effects. These findings obviously have strong implications for the choice of political institutions. If one agrees that the top priority of institutional design is, according to James Madison (2003:319[1787]), to “oblige it (the government) to control itself”, presidential systems’ inability to prevent incumbent takeovers apparently is a source of concern.

However, the found statistical pattern does not necessarily lead to a clear normative choice between different executive systems. First, the small sample size that has haunted all cross-national studies makes it hard to rule out that such patterns are not just accidents that result from uncontrolled variables. As Mainwaring and Shugart (1997) and Cheibub (2007) warn, presidential democracies tend to be adopted in world regions where more obstacles to democracy were present in the first place. Shugart (1998) also specifically links the original weakness of political parties to the likelihood of adopting presidentialism. It is certainly possible to control as many confounding factors as necessary to rule out the endogeneity problem. But that would leave us with very low degrees of freedom and fragile statistical relationships, considering there are only no more than a hundred longtime democracies in the world.

Given the constraint on the sample size, even a few outliers could undermine our confidence in making institution-based predictions. When a new democracy struggles to choose between regime types, it is hard to ignore those very unstable parliamentary systems such as Thailand and Turkey (semi-presidential since 2014 and presidential since 2017). Incumbent takeovers are less common in parliamentary systems, but the only few cases are sufficiently alarming. For example, the suspension of constitution in Malaysia 1969 dragged the country’s polity score from 10 sharply down to -1. Even though elections were reinstalled after a few years, the country has never recovered its original Polity rating and its governing party has yet to lose a single election. Despite the statistical pattern, it is still premature to assert parliamentarism as a superior system on the grounds of democratic stability.

In order to take a closer look at the outliers, my strategy is to take advantage of the small sample size by using an exhaustive approach to the data. Exactly because there are not many cases, it is possible to identify certain necessary institutional conditions that all incumbent takeover cases invariably meet, which would imply a more clear-cut institutional prescription for preventing these cases.

Besides the inconclusive empirical pattern, an even more important reason to be skeptical about the executive type effect is the lack of developed theories. There exist many convincing criticisms of presidentialism (Linz, 1994; Lijphart, 1999; Cox and McCubbins, 2001; Gerring and Thacker, 2008; Samuels and Shugart, 2010), but they are not directly targeting the durability phenomena discussed in the aforementioned empirical studies. I will review a few of them to show what is still missing.

The multiple veto players with independent legitimacy have been widely cited as a reason for inter-branch gridlocks and conflict in presidential systems (Linz, 1990; Cox and McCubbins, 2001). However, the connection between such gridlocks and democratic breakdowns is far from clear. It could be argued that, in order to counter the constraint by other branches that have different policy preferences, a president may resort to unilateral moves to undermine the institutional norm. However, that would almost suggest that it is not the presidents, but the constraints on the presidents, that are responsible for the instability in these countries. Would the risk of incumbent takeovers be reduced if a president has strong decree power that can help him

overcome the gridlocks? The answer is a straight no. The Russian Federation, for example, has an extremely president-friendly constitution to start with, granting the president nearly unlimited unilateral law-making power (Colton and Skach, 2005), yet it did not stop President Putin from seeking even more power by silencing the oppositions and the media. In fact, it is often found that the decree power is a significant risk factor for democratic stability because it can be used by presidents to encroach the role of the legislatures (Conaghan et al., 1990; O'Donell, 1994; Kubiček, 1994). In order for the dual legitimacy argument to be complete, one has to explain why it is safer to remove the presidency, but not the legislature.

The winner-takes-all nature of presidential elections may also have contributed the dissatisfaction of minorities (Linz, 1994; Lijphart, 1999) and eventually undermine the legitimacy of the elected government. However, as Mainwaring and Shugart (1997) point out, parliamentary systems can also suffer high level of disproportionality. Consider the UK parliament, where it is quite common for the governing party to enjoy less than 50% of the popular voters. It is true that the minority parties are represented in the parliament, but their policy-making power can be minimal.

Of course, the winner-takes-all argument may be able to explain why parliamentary systems with multi-party coalitions normally have a “kinder and gentler” distributive outcome (Liphart, 1999) because the winning coalition is subject to realignment (see the “beauty of cycling” argument by McGann, 2006). But there is no clear connection between such outcomes and the self-inflicted democratic breakdowns studied in the paper. Why should we expect winner-takes-all governments to be more likely to undermine democratic institutions? As the majority already “takes all” through a democratic method, why bother abolishing democracy? Would that not hurt the interests of the majority itself by undermining their policy-making power? Since incumbent takeover hurts both the majority and the minorities, it is more a principal-agent problem than a distributive problem between majorities and minorities.

There are also extensive discussions regarding the most defining feature of parliamentarism, namely the no-confidence vote that subjects the executive to premature removal. The following quote from Linz (1994) highlights its importance.

If I had to summarize the basic differences between presidential and parliamentary systems, I might point to the rigidity that presidentialism introduces into political process and the much greater flexibility of that process in parliamentary systems. (Linz, 1994: 8-9)

Samuels and Shugart (2010) develop a more refined theory regarding how the lack of a fixed term for chief executives results in a better “mandate representation”. It is harder for the prime minister in a parliamentary system to betray his campaign promise since he constantly needs the collective support of the governing party/coalition. If we consider ending democracy to be a special type of promise-breaking behavior by politicians, Their theory certainly sheds light on the better life expectancy of parliamentary democracies.

However, the executive accountability explanation only begs more puzzles. It is true the governing party in a parliamentary system can collectively hold the chief executive accountable between elections, but who holds the governing party accountable? What if they can collectively benefit from an incumbent takeover? Why should we expect a governing majority in a parliament to be more restrained than a directly elected president? In order to answer these questions, one has to prove that collective accountability is more reliable than individual accountability. In other words, the size of the agency must have played a role, which has not been theorized. This is why I offer a model showing how the accountability of individuals can

aggregate in a collective decision-making body and affect the likelihood of intentional termination of the principal-agent relationship, in this case the democratic institutions. Before presenting the model, however, I will first discuss a strong empirical pattern from an exhaustive list of self-inflicted breakdowns.

3. Which democracies are subject to self-inflicted breakdowns?As shown by Maeda (2010) and Svolik (2015), coups and incumbent takeovers have to be

studied separately because of their completely different mechanisms. In order for the first scenario to happen, there often needs to be some exogenous factors at play, such as the existing ethnic conflict (Horowitz, 1985; Jenkins and Kposowa, 1992), poor economic development (Maeda, 2010), or the social roots of the military (Janowitz, 1964). Singh (2014) models military coups as a coordinate game of the disgruntled officials, whose ranks play an important role in determining coup outcomes. Identifying an institutional explanation for such events is necessarily difficult because of the large number of exogenous treatments, many of which are beyond the control of the elected government.

In this paper, I will only focus on the incumbent takeover scenario, not just because of the space limit, but also because such events are more directly linked to the accountability structure of the government and therefore are more important for institutional designers. If an elected government intentionally chooses to bring an end to democracy, there must be some inherent risk factors built in that country’s institutional structure. Exogenous shocks certainly cannot be ruled out completely even if the governing party orchestrates the breakdown, but they should not be the determinant factor.

Following Maeda (2010), I use Polity ratings, instead of the criteria by Pzreworski et al (2000), to define democratic systems. Since Pzrewoski et al. retrospectively code a system as authoritarian as long as the country has not experienced power alternation under the same system, the incumbent takeover cases in which a democracy is hijacked by the first elected government without a formal regime change cannot be captured. However, considering democracies are most fragile at the beginning of its installation (Svolik 2008, 2015), such a coding method would exclude many cases that have important implications for institutional design, including Bangladesh in 1974, Belarus in 1995, and Turkey in 1954.

However, a downside of Maeda’s breakdown criteria is that it is oversensitive to brief changes in Polity ratings. Therefore, instead of counting all the changes from democracies to non-democracies, I ignore the cases in which high Polity ratings were briefly interrupted but reinstalled in two years. For example, the Polity ratings of Dominican Republic from 1993 to 1996 are 6, 5, 5, and 8. The drop of its rating in 1994 was caused by alleged election irregularities. But the governing party agreed to rerun the election in 1996 and accepted the loss, which resulted in a significantly improved rating. It is misleading to consider this type of events as breakdowns because the short-term fluctuation of democracy scores is most likely caused by temporary factors and not a clear sign of institutional flaws. The fact that democracy was quickly reinstalled may even be a sign of a strong institution that is resilient to short-term disruptions.

For these reasons, I define a breakdown as an event in which a country’s Polity score drops from 6 or higher in the previous two years to 5 or lower (the cutoff used by the Polity team, Marshall et al., 2015) and remain so for two more years (see Table 1).

Table 1: Criteria to identify a democratic breakdown

Year -2 Year -1 Year of breakdown

Year 1 Year 2

Polity score

>5 >5 <=5 <=5 <=5

There are 53 cases that satisfy such criteria in the entire Post-war period for which Polity scores are available (1946-2015). In order to isolate the cases of incumbent takeovers, I use all breakdown cases minus those during which the incumbent party was removed, which leaves us with 23 cases. I also remove the two special cases in which the original country with a high polity score disappeared after becoming a part of a less democratic country, Singapore joining Malaysia in 1962 and Syria joining Egypt in 1957. These two countries never reached the original level of democracy even after becoming independent again, but I do not count them as incumbent takeover cases because of the international factors that played the key role. After these adjustments, we now have 21 cases in which democracy was unambiguously ended by the incumbent government. Table 2 is an exhaustive list of these cases, with the fourth and fifth columns showing the seat shares of the two largest parties each country at the time its democratic breakdown happens.

There is much variation in the characteristics of these events. Some breakdowns are relatively mild, with a relatively quick recovery of Polity scores, such as Sri Lanka from 2003 to 2005 and Malawi from 2001 to 2003. Some started mild, but failed to recover due to subsequent coups or self-coups, such as Brazil in the 1960s and Uruguay in the 1970s. Some are more gradual, such as the gradual concentration of power in Russia in the recent decade. Some are sudden and intense, such as Uganda’s abrupt suspension of constitution in 1966. However, it is also true that these observations all share some similar features. The most typical signs include more regulations on the press, more discretion for the law enforcement, more restrictions for opposition parties, more electoral fraud, and more power for the chief executives. No matter how exactly the institutional and policy changes unfold in these cases, they are always attributable to the elected government, especially the executive branch, itself.

Table 2 reveals a striking pattern that is hard to dismiss even without a fully specified multi-variate regression. In all of the incumbent takeover cases, there existed either a fixed-term chief executive or a dominant majority party. The lower 15 cases, happened under presidential systems or semi-presidential systems, both of which features an executive presidency. The upper 6 cases did happen in parliamentary systems. But they all experienced an extremely oversized majority party prior to the breakdown. In five of them, the majority party had more than 80% of the lower house seats. The governing party of Greece in 1949, HPE, did not have quite as large a seat share (206 of the 354 seats), but it is worth mentioning that the opposition parties at the time were highly fragmented. The second largest party, EPE, was only 1/3 as large as HPE in terms of its seat share. Summarizing these cases, we can say that parliamentary systems have never experienced an incumbent takeover when the size of their largest party is below three times as large as the second largest party.

Table 2: An exhaustive list of incumbent takeover cases in the post-War period

Country Year Executive type Largest party seat share

Second largest party seat share Number of

years before recovery

Greece 1949 parliamentary 58.2% 19.2% 26Turkey 1954 parliamentary 91.6% 5.6% 7Malaysia 1969 parliamentary 85.6% 8.7% 39Bangladesh 1974 parliamentary 97.7% 0.3% 16Sri Lanka 1982 parliamentary 83.3% 4.8% 19Uganda 1966 semi-presidential More than 2/3* No reliable data -Belarus 1995 semi-presidential 92.1% 7.9% -Haiti 1999 semi-presidential 80.7% 2.4% -Sri Lanka 2003 semi-presidential 47.6% 39.6% 3Russia 2007 semi-presidential 70.0% 12.7% -Sri Lanka 2009 semi-presidential 64.5% 31.4% 6Brazil 1961 presidential 21.2% 14.1% 24Uruguay 1971 presidential 50.5% 41.4% 14Honduras 1985 presidential 50.0% 47.0% 5Peru 1992 presidential 34.4% 29.4% 9Armenia 1995 presidential 46.3% 5.3% 4Zambia 1996 presidential 78.6% 15.7% 12Malawi 2001 presidential 47.3% 33.8% 3Venezuela 2006 presidential 69.5% 10.8% -Ecuador 2007 presidential 28.0% 24.0% -

* The Uganda People’s Congress Party did not win a majority of the seats in the previous (and only) election, but soon enlarged significantly after persuading a large number MPs to switch party membership. The exact number cannot be found, but according to the deposed president’s memoir (Mutesa, 1967), the party’s seat share reached more than 2/3.

It is obvious then that a common condition of the incumbent takeover cases is that their chief executives are virtually free from the risk of no-confidence votes by the legislature. In the top five cases, although a parliamentary system is in place, the extremely large governing party means that the passage of any no-confidence vote would require the defection of a large number of governing party members as well as a perfect coordination by the opposition parties.

In presidential and semi-presidential systems, the directly elected presidents by definition enjoy a high level of job security until the next election. Their legislatures in some cases have certain ex-ante screening power over the cabinet members through the investiture process, but have little power to control their behavior once they are appointed. In semi-presidential systems, even though the cabinet led by the prime minister is accountable, theoretically, to both the president and the legislature, presidents are normally the dominant player with the exception of the periods of cohabitation. As shown in Shugart (2005: 336-337), most of the semi-presidential systems, in order to prevent the awkward two-boss scenarios, place restrictions on no-confidence

votes or give the president the power to dissolve the parliament in case of conflict. The coattail effect of presidential elections and intra-party hierarchy that normally puts a presidential candidate at the top of his/her party also make parties “presidentialized” and the executive branch at the disposal of the president (Samuels and Shugart, 2010:16).

Semi-presidential systems during cohabitation are harder to categorize. Cohabitation happens when a legislative majority is against the president and the parliament has the exclusive constitutional authority to dismiss the cabinet. In such a scenario, the system behaves more like parliamentary systems because the prime minister no longer gives high priorities to presidential preferences (Elgie, 1996; Shugart, 2005). The Uganda case in Table 1 is the only case of incumbent takeover happened under cohabitation, although not a very typical one2. Since the suspension of the constitution was mainly perpetrated by the prime minister, who was subject to a no-confidence vote, it is arguable that the no-confidence vote arrangement in the Uganda constitution failed to serve as a constraint. However, this case does not alter the general pattern shown in the Table considering the prime minister did have a comfortable parliamentary majority, just like the top five cases. It further shows that the accountability mechanism through no-confidence vote may not be effective if the governing party has a dominant seat share in the legislature.

What, then, is the puzzling aspect of the above pattern that requires an additional theory? It is not the emergence of the cases listed in Table 2. There is no reason for us to expect these democracies to be free from power abuse by the incumbent party, considering the concentrated executive power and the job security of their national leaders. So their occasional self-inflicted breakdowns are hardly surprising. It is the opposite phenomenon that is most puzzling: why are certain types of systems so immune to such problems? What prevents incumbent takeover from happening even once in any parliamentary systems without an overly large party? Why is it so hard for a prime minister to overshadow the system unless his or her party first wins a vast supermajority in the parliament?

In the rest of this paper, I will present a model to explain how no-confidence vote can serve as an extremely effective mechanism to deter high-profile power abuse. I argue that although individual legislators, as a part of the governing elite, can potentially benefit from incumbent takeovers, the probability for a majority of them to collectively support such a move is remarkably low. This is because the institutional constraints on multiple agents can be aggregated through a process similar to the “miracle of aggregation” and result in a highly predictable collective behavior.

4. A model of collective accountability

The logic behind how no-confidence vote deters power abuse by the executive is elaborated in detail by Samuels and Shugart’s (2010). By comparing the frequency of chief executives’ removal in different systems, they argue that “parliamentarism limits the danger of moral hazard because executives do not sit for fixed terms.” In contrast, presidents, without worrying about being fired by either the legislature or the governing party, could get away with nearly everything they do until the next election. Impeachment as a last resort for accountability is

2 The president’s party and the prime minister’s party were originally in a pre-election coalition. However, the two leaders fell into open conflict prior to the coup conducted by the prime minister. The president was nearly killed and forced to leave the country.

rarely a credible threat because the embarrassing process of criminal investigation would hurt not only the president, but his whole party.

However, this argument does not preclude a possible risk in parliamentary systems: what if the governing party as a whole is vulnerable to the moral hazard? A prime minister that engages in personal corruption could incur reputation costs on the party and hurt its reelection chance, which is certainly unlikely to gain sympathy from his co-partisans. However, if the goal of the PM is to undermine the democratic process to the point that it can manipulate future elections or even stop holding elections, the spoils can potentially spread to the whole party, at least by increasing the collective job security of the party members.

Therefore, using the no-confidence vote feature to explain democratic survival depends on a non-trivial assumption: A legislative majority must be less likely to favor an incumbent takeover than the chief executive does. If the two players are equally interested in the spoils from authoritarianism, subjecting the latter to a no-confidence vote should not have any effect because it simply transfers the power to abuse from the executive to the legislature. If the legislature is more abusive than the executive, the former can even use no-confidence vote to force the executive to end democracy and install one-party rule. Therefore, the whole idea of parliamentarism depends on one’s faith in collective accountability versus individual accountability. Such an assumption is far from obvious. The legislature in a typical parliamentary system, with a few exceptions, are normally elected locally and necessarily represent certain special interests. Why should we trust the majority party/coalition in a legislature more than trusting a directly elected president? In addition, the data in the previous section shows that once a party’s size reaches 80% of the seats, there will be a visible risk of incumbent takeover. It means that collective accountability is not always reliable and must be affected by other factors besides executive types, which have yet to be theorized.

Qualitatively, it may not be hard to deduce the effect of the size of the incumbent party. With a larger governing party, a successful no-confidence vote, or a credible threat of it, simply requires a larger share of party members to defect, and therefore is less frequent. The prime minister, then, will have more freedom to adopt controversial policies. Such a logic may explain the relative risk posed by excessively large parties, but does not explain the perfect invulnerability of normal parliamentary system without such a party. Even if a governing party just reaches the 50% seat share or has a minority of seats but a loyal coalition partner, it is still a logical possibility that the governing party/coalition may bandwagon with the national leader and refrain from passing a no-confidence motion if the spoil can be shared. There must be a quantitative logic that can restrict the probability of such events to reach practically zero, which is implied in Table 2. The following models aim at tackling this puzzle.

Let me assume that there are two types of politicians in a country. The first type is anti-democratic, who would support an incumbent takeover as long as they are in the governing party. The second type would not support it even if they are in the governing party. Both types, of course, would not support it if they are outside the governing party.

The probability for a country to elect the first type of politicians is P1. The exact value of P1

is hard to estimate, but it must be larger than zero because politicians, by standard assumptions, can derive utility from longer tenures and more exclusive power. However, such a probability must also be well below one because of the potential disutility that may arise from the regime change. First, authoritarian politics, although less competitive, is not free from intra-party conflict that can be deadly. Apparently not all top leaders can expect to survive that fight intact. Second, the screening mechanisms of the elections should be able to give rise to at least some

politicians that derive utility from normative achievement and would feel guilty to participate in a conspiracy against democracy.

Next I assume that in a parliamentary system, if and only if a parliament has a majority of members that are anti-democratic, an incumbent takeover will happen before the term ends. Assuming the assembly size to be an odd number S, the requirement for the parliament to collectively choose incumbent takeover is that at least (1+S)/2 legislators favor it. Also denote the seats controlled by the governing party as sg. Obviously, if sg<(1+S)/2, incumbent takeover cannot happen whatsoever. Now I will calculate the probability for incumbent takeovers to happen (PIT) if sg (1+S)/2.

The probability for any given number (i) of legislators to prefer incumbent takeover should be:

Pi=C (sg, i)× P1i ×(1−P1)

(s¿¿ g−i)¿

Any i that is equal to or larger than (1+S)/2 will result in an incumbent takeover. Therefore the total probability for a parliamentary majority to favor incumbent takeover to happen should be the sum of all the Pi when i≥(1+S)2:

P¿= ∑i=(1+S)/2

S g

Pi= ∑i=(1+S )/2

S g

C (sg , i) P1i (1−P1)

sg−i

Figure 1: How the governing party’s size affects the likelihood of incumbency takeovers in parliamentary systems

In order to visualize the above relationship, let us first assume a legislature with 99 seats and plot the relationship among PIT, sg, and P1.

As is visible from Figure 1, the probability for a majority to jointly agree on an incumbent takeover is practically zero unless the governing party has an excessively large seat share or the

probability of electing anti-democratic legislators in that country is extremely high. For example, when the governing party has 70 out of 99 seats and the probability to elect anti-democratic politician is as high as 0.5, the probability for the legislature to collectively choose an incumbent takeover during their term is only 0.0002.

Also note that when P1 is sufficiently low, as shown in the lowest curve, even if one party controls all the seats, the probability for an incumbent takeover to gain majority support is negligible. The logic underlying the P1=0.4 curve is no other than the Condorcet Jury Theorem: As long as individual voters have a better chance of making right decisions than coin flips, the probably for a majority of a large voter group to make wrong decisions is close to zero. Of course, whether a legislator supports incumbent takeovers is not a purely cognitive issue but involves conflict of interests. So we cannot safely assume individual legislators are better than flipped coins (P1>0.5). But a P1 lower than 0.5 should be fairly common at least in most of the older democracies.

Figure 1 explains why incumbent takeover in moderately majoritarian parliamentary systems, let alone fragmented ones, is not only rare, but virtually non-existent. Now I will compare the above systems with presidential and semi-presidential systems, in which no-confidence vote either is not provided or not a credible threat. The most important mechanism for the latter systems to keep the executive branch within the democratic norm is normally the impeachment provisions. Besides other institutional details, the most important difference between impeachment and no-confidence vote is that the former almost always requires the approval of a super majority of the legislators3. This means fewer legislators’ support is needed in order for a president to survive impeachment than for a prime minister to survive no-confidence vote.

What will happen if an abusive president has enough legislative support to survive impeachment, but does not have enough to pass anti-democratic legislation? I assume that legal barriers by themselves cannot stop incumbent takeovers. It is important to keep in mind that an executive president, even with separation of power, has enormous unilateral power to restrict political competition. First, as repeatedly observed in Russia, the president can easily instruct, sometimes implicitly, the law enforcement to keep a blind eye on cases in which a political figure is assassinated or attacked (see the numerous unsolved cases in the recent years summarized by Dorell (2017). It is within the executive branch’s power to divert resources from certain criminal cases. Second, the president can easily order the investigation of certain unimportant variations, which everyone more or less commits, as a way to punish political opponents (Dardon, 2001). Such investigations can disrupt the life of an opposition politician even without any successful conviction. Finally, it is not unheard of that the law enforcement can actively use force without legal basis. The famous self-coup by Peru’s Fujimori can serve as a good example. With his personal popularity, especially among the armed forces, he could easily order the shutdown of the legislature with tanks and mass arrests (Lane, 1992). Based on these phenomena, it is safe to assume that if a president happens to be an abusive type, which is by no means uncommon, and the legislature chooses to not impeach him/her even after observing the abuse, the incumbent takeover will happen with certainty during their term in office.

I denote the number of legislators a president needs to survive impeachment as ssv. Now I calculate the probability for more than ssv to support the president during incumbent takeover Psv.

3 Impeachment sometimes requires the violation of the law by the president, as in the US. However, in the event of authoritarian reversal, such violation should not be hard to find anyway. The super majority requirement can be considered the only effective barrier for impeachment.

Psv=∑i=s sv

S g

Pi=∑i=ssv

S g

C(sg ,i)P1i (1−P1)

s1−i

In order for incumbent takeover to happen in these systems, two conditions have to hold: First, the president himself has to favor incumbent takeover. Second, he has to have at least ssv

legislators to support him to prevent impeachment. Assuming the president has the same P1 as individual legislators, the probability of incumbent takeover, PIT, should be:

P¿=P1 P sv=P1 ∑i=ssv

Sg

C (sg ,i)P1i (1−P1)

sg−i

Assuming a unicameral legislature, ssv could be expressed as the assembly size (S) minus impeachment threshold (sim) plus 1.

P¿=P1 ∑i=S−sℑ+1

S g

C(sg ,i)P1i (1−P1)

s g−i

Figure 2: How the numerical barrier for impeachment affects the likelihood of incumbency takeovers in presidential and semi-presidential systems

Figure 2 shows the relationship between PIT and the impeachment threshold, assuming a legislature with 99 seats and 55 of them belonging to the governing party. The shapes of these curves suggest that impeachment procedures are far from enough to deter a president from engaging in power abuse. When barrier for impeachment is at the high end, the probability of incumbent takeover is almost entirely determined by the president’s personal preference because Psv is very close to 1. But even when the impeachment threshold is moderate, there is a visible

risk of incumbent takeovers. Taking the P1=0.5 curve as an example, that risk is non-negligible unless impeachment threshold is under 63. When Pim=66 (a typical two-third majority requirement for impeachment), the probability for incumbent takeover can be 0.026. It may not look like a large number, but the dire consequence of being caught in such an event makes it highly alarming. If we take into accounts additional veto players in the impeachment games, such as another legislative chamber, such a risk can be unbearably high.

If we do not have high confidence over politicians’ self-discipline, meaning P1 is large, a low bar for presidential impeachment may be necessary to keep a democratic system safe from incumbent takeover. However, setting a low bar would be unsettling itself: What if a benign president is impeached by the legislature for political reasons? Considering the presidential legitimacy implied in the direct elections, easy impeachment necessarily implies a disrespect of voters’ choice. As Samuels and Shugart (2010: 116) observes, an impeachment without sufficient justification can even alert international players and result in foreign intervention, unlike the much less sensational no-confidence votes in parliamentary systems. In other words, the direct election of chief executives necessarily implies a fixed term length and a high bar of impeachment. And that high bar further implies a high probability of executive power abuse.

5. Conclusion

The literature has established that parliamentary systems are less vulnerable to democratic breakdowns inflicted by elected leaders, but says little about variation within parliamentary systems. Using an exhaustive approach to analyze the data, I further show that parliamentary systems are virtually free from incumbency turnovers as long as their governing party is not excessively large. All post-war parliamentary systems that experienced such an episode have a governing party more than three times as large as the second party. All by one of these governing parties have a seat share that is larger than 80%. In contrast, presidential and semi-presidential systems are subject to incumbent takeovers whether their parties are large or not.

I argue that such a strong pattern cannot be an accident and explain it with a simple formal model. Since the executive branch in parliamentary systems is subject to no-confidence votes, any radical change of policy would require the consent of a majority of the legislators. Unless a prime minister can persuade more than 50% of the legislators that they will benefit from a reversal to authoritarianism, he/she is virtually confined to the democratic status quo. As visible in Figure 1, even if the probability for any individual legislator to prefer authoritarianism is not particularly low, the probability for them to collectively make such a decision is often negligible unless the governing party is excessively large. The model essentially connects the size of an agency to the probability of moral hazard. This may also explain why a modern corporation always needs a board of directors to constrain its chief executive. It is not that the board members are morally superior or more accountable than CEOs, but that the sheer size of the board makes it less likely for abusive preferences to coincide.

An important implication from the data and the model is that just having a parliamentary system is not a sufficient condition to deter incumbent takeovers. Certain institutions have to be in place to guard against an oversized majority party. Apparently, a proportional electoral system is suitable for the job, considering how uncommon it is for dominant parties to survive high proportionality (Li, 2016). As long as a parliamentary system is made sufficiently proportional,

based on the evidence and theory provided in this paper, we can expect it to be free from incumbent takeover, a specter that is still haunting many modern democracies.

In Federalist 51, one of Madison’s (2003:319-322[1787]) proposals to guard against an abusive government is to introduce the separation of power, which is probably the most well-known justification for presidential systems. However, the direct election of the president necessarily implies a high numerical barrier for impeachment. As Figure 2 in this paper shows, the super-majority requirement for impeachment is highly consequential to the probability of incumbent takeovers. Therefore, the decentralizing effect of power separation is outweighed by the concentration of executive power into the hand of a fixed-term presidency, which is evident in the many cases of president-led incumbent takeovers. To solve Madison’s question of how to oblige a government to control itself, it seems that a proportional-parliamentary combination is the most sensible choice.

Of course, incumbent takeovers are not the only reason for a democracy to fail. There is still no evidence that any institutional feature can make a country immune from exogenously driven breakdowns such as military coups and civil wars, which are best explained by contextual factors. Institutional scholars may want to spend more effort to crack these even harder cases if we want to find the secret for democratic longevity.

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