Атиповість напівпрезидентських систем державного правління в пострадянських країнах: контекст вотумів недовіри урядам

Abstract

As we known theoretically and as the practice shows, within the framework of a republican form of government, there are systems of government, which formally and/or actually differ from traditional/typical presidential, parliamentary and semi-presidential systems of government. At the same time, extremely different factors of political process and interinstitutional relations, which are the conditions for defining and distinguishing between different types of systems of government, can be indicators for distinguishing typical and atypical systems of government. In this cut, the purpose of the article is to determine whether the peculiarities of the institution of vote of no confidence in governments in some semi-presidential systems of government in post-Soviet countries can predetermine the atypicality of these systems of gov- ernment. New institutionalism and its various types and paradigms were chosen as theoretical and methodological basis of the proposed research. Their combination made it possible to work out a coherent picture of the atypical character of the post-Soviet semi-presidentialism on the basis of such an indicator as the institution of vote of no confidence in governments. As the result, it is argued that the atypicality and inter-state of the post-Soviet semi-presidentialism is often due to the fact that parliaments have the right to cast a vote of no confidence in governments, but the latter come into force only when they are supported by presidents, who may additionally be empowered to choose between dismissal of government and dissolution of legislatures. On the one hand, such systems of government (on the basis of the institution of government responsibility to legislatures) formally/definitively tend to be semi-presidential and would most likely be in line with semi-presidentialism (with dual executive inherent for it) in the case of democratic (and not autocratic) governance tradition. On the other hand, such systems of government demonstrate that even formally (not to mention political practice) governments are a continuation of the monistic executive verticals of presidents, and their formalized, but atypical, inexhaustible and incomplete responsibility of governments to parliaments denies the semi-presidential nature of systems of governments largely in favor of presidentialism. As a result, this determines that against the backdrop of traditional defini- tions and generalizations of different systems of government, they are formally and actually constructed as “constitutional hybrids” in some post-Soviet countries and therefore can be positioned both as the cases of atypical semi-presidentialism and the instances of incomplete presidentialism. At the same time, it is quite obvious that such cases are unique and must be taxonomied as exceptional.