Power in office: presidents, governments, and parliaments in the institutional design of contemporary democracies

The institutional design of democratic regimes has attracted much attention from a legal and political perspective, because it afects the actual distribution of power among political actors and the efectiveness of their decisions. The article advances a classifcation of the democratic institutional design, with particular reference to the triangular interactions among Presidents, Governments, and Parliaments. Moving from the assumption that the arrangements among these three top political institutions identify the main patterns of the democratic government, the distinction among Parliamentary, Presidential, and Semi-Presidential systems set by the constitutional law is rejected and a new classifcation schema is advanced. In this new perspective, the institutional design of democracy consists of the institutional roles of authority, procedural resources attached to them and arenas of confrontation among the roles.