Does the Type of Regime Really Matter? Institutional Design, Presidential Elections and Party System Closure in Asia
Abstract: Historically speaking, the debate over the relative virtues/vices of different regime types was launched four decades ago by the conviction that institutions matter as they are considered to have an autonomous impact on the development of party politics. In this context, Linz’s seminal essay on Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does it Make a Difference? (1984), constituted an intellectual milestone laying the groundwork for much of the subsequent discussion. Since then many scholars across the world have put their efforts into investigating the relationship between type of regime and democratic consolidation (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997; Elgie 2011), political party institutionalization (Moser 1998; Samuels and Shugart 2010), government formation and stability (Freudenreich 2016; Fernandes and Magalhães 2016), ministerial appointment, allocation and turnover (Protsyk 2005; Martínez-Gallardo and Schleiter 2015; Camerlo and Pérez-Liñán, 2015), institutional confidence (Ecevit and Karakoç 2017) or political disenchantment (Tavits 2009). Still little is clear about the effects different regime types have on party system development in general, and party system closure in particular. Especially, little is known about the effects different regime types (i.e. presidential, semi-presidential and parliamentary) and subtypes (i.e. collective vs. non-collective responsibility) have on the way party systems institutionalize (Åberg and Sedelius 2020). Using a mixed-methods approach (e.g. regression analysis, congruence, process-tracing) and a new dataset that includes all Asian democracies between the conclusion of the Second World War and the end of 2020, the article focuses on the effects of institutional design on party system closure, trying to disentangle which regime type has been more prone to help to the institutionalization of Asian party systems, and what is the mechanism behind.