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The conceptualization of the relationship between executives and legislatures (henceforth 'forms' or 'systems' of government) is central to scholarship on comparative politics, and no categorization is more influential than the tripartite distinction between presidentialism, parliamentarism and semi-presidentialism. This classification has so thoroughly dominated scholars' understanding of executive-legislative relations that it has almost no conceptual competition. In this article, we examine the constitutions that populate these categories and evaluate the degree to which this time-honored conceptualization captures variance in executive-legislative relations. That is, we examine whether the classification allows one to predict the various powers and responsibilities of executives and legislatures, many of which are presumed to follow from presidentialism and parliamentarism. We have reason to be skeptical, as we explain below.
Most traditional (so-called classic) approaches to categorization require that the objects under study share a set of finite definitional (necessary or sufficient) properties. More recent approaches to classification - such as the well-known prototype (Rosch) and family resemblance (Witgenstein) models - operate under a more probabilistic assumption, in which similarly classified cases are those that share a large number of non-necessary attributes.1However, even those operating using a classical approach expect some family resemblance: that is, that similarly classified objects will resemble one another with respect to a collection of other, elective, attributes. It can be distressing to a taxonomer to find significant variation within a given category with respect to elective features, many of which may also be shared across categories. When biologists categorized the platypus as a mammal rather than a reptile, for example, they relied on definitional characteristics (lactation) over non-definitional ones (laying eggs, a duck bill) to make their determination, and thereby emphasized similarities with beavers over lizards or ducks.
In the context of a widely shared taxonomy among scientists and students, classification decisions serve to reinforce perceptions of the similarity and dissimilarity of organisms. Organisms are assumed to share more characteristics with co-classified than cross-classified organisms. In the field of comparative politics, scholars rely on an assumption that the presidential-parliamentary distinction (defined in various ways) classifies constitutions that are reasonably homogenous across a range of attributes of executive-legislative relations. For many scholars, knowing that, for example, Australia is 'parliamentary' would seem...