Presidential Power and Democratic Development in Post-Communist Politics¹

Recently, scholars have debated the effects of presidentialism on the development of new democracies. We seek to add to this debate by: (1) extending the investigation to the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; (2) employing an interval measure of presidential power as opposed to previously used categorical measures of presidentialism; (3) testing the relationships between institutions and democratic consolidation using multivariate rather than bivariate analytical techniques. In sum, the evidence suggested that the electoral system had a greater effect than either the power of the constitutional president or socio–cultural or economic factors on various measures of democracy and consolidation.