英文摘要 |
The semi-presidential system has become the most popular regime type in the world, indicated by the number of states that adopted the system having surpassed that of purely presidential system and the parliamentary system since 2000. A number of major studies have recently focused on the evolution of semi-presidentialism; some of the researches have sketched the working mode of parlimentalization of semi-presidential system, and considerable studies have been paying attentions to the development of a semi-presidential system moving towards a presidentialized working mode. This research focuses on the development of presidentialization of politics in the semi-presidential system and explores how the presidentialization has led to an interrelated processes on the existing political party system as well as on the stability of cabinet. The goal of political parties under semi-presidential states is to win the presidential and parliamentary elections, thus the parties have to keep high reputation of each's own presidential candidate in order to generate coat-tail effects on parliamentary elections. The key to win elections depends on the presidential candidate's personal popularity and leadership. Given the presidential election being the most critical to party survival, the electoral strategy of the party has often become a king-making strategy: increasing leadership power and autonomy within the political executive and within political parties as well as increasingly leadership-centered electoral processes. As a result, the king-making process - the symptom of presidentialization - results in the cabinet becoming a 'lightning rod' to the president: a privileged tool of changing members of the cabinet to answer public opinion discontent that leads to declining stability of the cabinet. Some relative studies have shown that the president has used this institutional privilege to reshuffle and replace cabinet in his own best interests and that the bipartisan politics further reinforce this kind of development. The most significant political situation of presidentialization in semipresidentialism is the unified government. Generally believed that the unified government should be the most stable, however on the contrary, the presidentialization of semi-presidentialism enforces presidential power to interfere with cabinet formation, by the effects of 'lightning rod' and 'scapegoat' inducing the president to change the cabinet frequently. This observation is quite different to the existing argument. This article uses some major indicators to measure the cabinet stability and conducts a crossnational comparison via France, Taiwan and Russia. The findings of this article suggest that the presidentialization of semi-presidmetialism does enforce frequent of cabinet changes, but this mainly appears as increased frequency of partial cabinet turnover, not the general cabinet reshuffling. |