Presidents, Assemblies and Policy-making in Asia

Y. Kasuya, Y. Kasuya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137315083
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The authors assess the constitutional and partisan powers of Asian presidents, and analyse how they are used in actual policy-making processes. Country case studies on Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan analyze how their constitutional and partisan powers are used in actual policy-making processes.

1

Introduction

Yuko Kasuya

This book is concerned with executive–legislative relations in the presidential and semi-presidential democracies of Asia. Since around the mid-1980s, comparative politics scholars have advanced our understanding of differences in executive–legislative relations and their impact on many aspects of political life. These impacts include regime stability, the quality of governance, policy-making processes, formation of parties and party systems, ethnic conflict, and even the international actions of the states.¹ These consequences have been analysed with a focus on differences in the two basic forms of executive–legislative relations – that is, (semi-) presidential versus parliamentary government – as well as with a focus on executive–legislative relations within one form of government. This book’s focus belongs to the latter type of analysis; specifically, it centers on executive–legislative relations within presidential and semi-presidential governments.

Geographically, comparative study on presidential and semi-presidential governments has been pioneered by scholars whose primary focus has been Europe and Latin America (for example, Linz and Valenzuela 1994; Shugart and Carey 1992; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997; Cheibub 2007). More recently, the study of presidentialism has expanded to include former communist countries (for example, Elgie 1999; Roper 2002; Beliaev 2006; Elgie and Moestrup 2008) and Africa (for example, Bratton and van de Walle 1997; Kirschke 2007; Elgie and Moestrup 2007).

Meanwhile, in Asia, political debate about presidentialism has arisen in many countries. In the Philippines and South Korea, serious attempts have been made to replace presidentialism with parliamentarism.² Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, and Taiwan actually witnessed a several rounds of constitutional amendments that changed the powers of the president.³ In India, which is a long-standing parliamentary system in Asia, has seen a recurring debate among politicians and scholars urging a shift towards presidentialism (Rüland et al. 2005: p. 23, fn10). Despite these developments and their importance, scholarly investigation into Asia’s presidentialism and semi-presidentialism is still largely underdeveloped.⁴ In particular, we know of no Asia-focused comparative study on this topic that covers as many countries as this book does. In these regards, this book is one of the first attempts to study Asian presidentialism/semi-presidentialism using a common comparative framework.

The aim of this book is twofold. The first is to deepen our understanding of politics in Asia, especially in the relatively democratic⁵ presidential and semi-presidential countries of East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia – namely Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Timor-Leste. Of these, this book will present chapter-length studies of six countries: Afghanistan, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan.⁶ The second goal is to contribute to the literature on presidentialism and semi-presidentialism in comparative politics. For these purposes, this book adopts a framework proposed by Mainwaring and Shugart (1997) in their study of Latin American presidentialism, which I sketch below and elaborate in Chapter 2. This framework will clarify the characteristics of Asian presidentialism and semi-presidentialism in a comparative context. At the same time, our theoretically guided, in-depth investigation of Asian cases will provide insights that would benefit scholars who are interested in theory development, and who study presidential and/or semi-presidential governments in other regions of the world.

The common framework adopted in this book addresses the ‘strength’ of the presidents vis-à-vis the legislature in policy-making processes. Here, strength means the extent to which the president can enact her policy agenda. The better able the president is to do this, the stronger the president is considered to be. Further, this strength is composed of, and measured by, two dimensions. The first dimension concerns the president’s constitutionally given authorities, such as veto and decree powers. The second dimension concerns the president’s influence over legislation through the ruling party or the ruling coalition. The details of this framework are discussed in Chapter 2.

Accordingly, our framework’s scope is ‘middle-range’. The existing body of presidentialism research can be grouped into those that have macro, micro and middle-range perspectives. A macro analysis looks at the regime-level characteristics such as stability, quality of democracy and the degree of democratization. In his seminal study, Juan Linz (Linz and Valenzuela 1994) argues that presidentialism is more prone to regime breakdown than parliamentary systems. Many scholars have further studied the impact of presidentialism on regime stability by way of supporting or disproving Linz’s argument (for example, Stepan and Skach 1993; Shugart and Carey 1992; Cheibub 2009; Elgie 2011).

The second type of presidentialism research involves a micro-analysis, which focuses on one relatively narrow aspect of presidential or semi-presidential government. For example, some scholars have focused on the president’s veto authority (Tsebelis and Alemán 2005), and others have looked into the use of presidential decree (such as Carey and Shugart 1998). The third type of research has a middle-range focus, which attempts to explain the nature of policy-making process using a broad set of factors concerning executive–legislative relations. For example, Mainwaring and Shugart (1997) as well as Haggard and McCubbins (2001) adopt this type of analytical coverage, and so does this book.⁷ We believe that this middle-range focus is appropriate for contemporary Asia, since the risk of regime breakdown does not appear to be urgent in most countries. At the same time, we do not yet have enough accumulation of research to allow us to engage in micro-level research for Asian presidential and semi-presidential governments.

There are two caveats concerning the scope of this book. First, our analysis of presidential strength focuses primarily on the institutional aspects. Other factors, of course, might make a president strong, such as her personal popularity among voters, historically shaped normative attitudes toward the president, or the modes of regime transition. But these are not within the scope of this book. Excluding these does not mean that we consider them unimportant. Rather, we regard institutional analysis as a starting point for the study of Asian presidents; these other factors will likely be the concern of future research.

Second, this book does not address normative arguments about whether or not a strong president is better. For example, a strong president may create ‘bad’ laws, yet on some other occasions a strong president may be able to implement necessary reforms that benefit the entire nation. Thus it is difficult to categorically judge the benefit or liability of having a strong president. Nevertheless, comparative politics scholars often evaluate a strong president as the less favorable option. This is mainly because compared to a weak president, a strong one is more likely to have conflicts with the legislature, and is thereby more closely associated with political instability (Shugart and Carey 1992; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997).

The book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 provides an overview of Asian presidents, placing them along a spectrum related to strength. To do so, the chapter first defines three types of executive–legislative structures (presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary systems) and then catalogues the distribution of these government types across Asia. The chapter further measures the strength of Asian presidents along two dimensions: The first encompasses constitutionally given legislative authority, which includes the package and partial veto, presidential decree, budget-related authority, national referendum, and dissolution of the parliament. The second dimension encompasses partisan power, which refers to the president’s ability to influence the legislature through her party. This second dimension is measured by the ruling party’s share of seats weighted by the degree of party discipline and coalition status. These measures are applied to the following nine countries: Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Timor-Leste.

Chapters 3 to 8 closely examine five countries – namely, Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan. These chapters use Chapter 2’s evaluation of presidential strength as a springboard. In other words, they analyse the extent to which the degree of strength suggested in Chapter 2 appears accurate, and if not, why not. These chapters are aligned in the order of strength of the presidents’ constitutional power.

In Chapter 3, Asaba analyses the case of Korea. He starts by addressing an important question: even though Chapter 2 evaluates the Korean president as strong in both constitutional and partisan power dimensions, in reality, she often has difficulty passing her legislative agenda. Why? In answering, Asaba argues that the president’s partisan power is actually weaker than what the common framework suggests due to two factors: internal party conflict among factions and the constitutional court’s role in limiting the president’s initiatives. He further points out the role of the electoral cycle in weakening the president’s influence within her own party. Asaba demonstrates these points using the case studies of Kim Dae-jun’s policy on North Korea, Roh Moo-hyun’s capital relocation plan, and Lee Myung-bak’s grand canal project.

Chapter 4 studies one of the youngest democracies in Asia, Afghanistan. Focusing on the first parliamentary term in the post-Taliban era (2005 to 2010), Kasuya and Kendall demonstrate that President Karzai has had a combination of strong constitutional power and weak partisan power. As the corollaries of this power configuration, they find that legislators’ support for the president depends more on presidential popularity than their patronage consideration, and that the president has had a tendency to bypass the legislature through his use of decree power. In their analyses, President Karzai is ‘stronger’ than the given power combination because of his manipulation of institutions under his control. For example, he has used the Supreme Court to declare the decisions of the legislature unconstitutional, and has had executive departments not to implement laws passed by the parliament.

Kawanaka analyses the Philippines in Chapter 5. He argues that the president’s strength vis-à-vis the legislature cannot be unitarily evaluated as the common framework does; their relations differ by policy areas. In particular, he points out that, due to inter-branch bargaining, the Philippine president is stronger in budget policy-making, while Congress is more influential in other policy areas. He further notes that this relationship is due to weak discipline among major Philippine parties.

In Chapter 6, Matsumoto analyses Taiwan’s semi-presidentialism. The chapter first clarifies that between the two sub-types of semi-presidentialism, Taiwan belongs to the premier-presidential type. This should be contrasted to the conventional view that sees Taiwan as a president-parliamentary system (such as Shugart 2005). According to Matsumoto, Taiwan may be considered president-parliamentary in operation, but with regard to institutional design, the country adopts the premier-presidential system. Building on this understanding, Matsumoto compares three presidents after democratization, concluding that only Li Teng-hui was a strong president, while Chen Shui-bian was weak vis-à-vis the parliament, and Ma Ying-jeou was moderately strong. The difference in strength between Li Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian arose because Li enjoyed a unified government, while Chen had a divided government in which his party was a minority. During the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, a unified government has been in place, but the president did not have a solid leadership within his own party. This seriously limited his influence over policy-making.

In Chapter 7, Miwa analyses Sri Lanka’s semi-presidentialism. After classifying the country as the president-parliamentary variant of semi-presidentialism, he argues that the Sri Lankan president is stronger than the evaluation in Chapter 2 makes it appear. The sources of her strength stem from her authority as the leader of the ruling party, her power of appointing almost half the legislators to top administr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgement
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Framework for Analysing Presidential–Legislative
• 3 Presidentialism in Korea: A Strong President and a Weak Government
• 4 Afghanistan’s Strong President and Weak Parties
• 5 Trading Compromises: Interaction of Powers in the Philippine Presidential System
• 6 Presidential Strength and Party Leadership in Taiwan
• 7 Strong President and Vulnerable Political System in Sri Lanka
• 8 President Restrained: Effects of Parliamentary Rule and Coalition Government on Indonesia’s Presidentialism
• 9 Conclusion: Lessons from the Study of Asian Presidentialism
• Index