Comparative Executive-Legislative Relations under Authoritarianism: Focusing on the Choices and Practices of Semi-Presidentialism

Comparative executive-legislative relations have been central to analysis on democratic performance and survival.Then what about dictatorship?Specifically, why have executive-legislative relations been rarely addressed in authoritarian literatures?How diverse are executive-legislative relations under dictatorship?Do these varieties matter in authoritarian regimes?This study attempts to answer these questions by reviewing both of the literatures on authoritarian institutions and democratic executive-legislative relations, presenting a universe of regime subtypes, namely, presidentialism, semi-presidentialism, and parliamentarism under dictatorship, and reorganizing several choices and practices of semi-presidentialism within the context of authoritarianism.This paper points out inter-indifference between the two main sets of literatures as a reason for the limited attention paid to authoritarian executive-legislative relations.Then, the tentative list of the three regime subtypes highlights the relatively recent and growing feature of semi-presidentialism, which still awaits examination even in the newly emerging authoritarian literatures.Subsequently, by reconstructing the choices and practices of semi-presidentialism under dictatorship, the author demonstrates how executive-legislative relations are worthy of consideration, as distinctive institutional arrangements different from their democratic counterparts.