FACING THE PERILS OF PRESIDENTIALISM?

Abstract

Juan Linz's classic article laid out 4 major perils of presidentialism in the context of Latin American experience, which unleashed a flood of scholarship about the topic. Very little of the literature, however, has taken account of recent developments in East Asia, where the majority of new democracies have presidential systems. Here, Fukuyama et al consider the developments in the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, and Taiwan, and explore to what extent Linz's critique and prediction have been borne out in East Asia.

While several East Asian countries have been part of the "third wave" of democratization over the past generation, it is no secret that many of them have also been experiencing significant growing pains. In just the last five years, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and most recently South Korea have all suffered serious-albeit not regime-threateningpolitical crises that featured at least the beginning of impeachment proceedings against an elected chief executive. Presidents Joseph Estrada of the Philippines and Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia (the one indirectly elected member of the group) actually lost their offices-in Estrada's case through means that many deemed illegal. Presidents Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan and Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea survived the campaigns against them, the former because impeachment never went much beyond a preliminary motion in the legislature, and the latter because his country's Constitutional Court decided that he should keep his job despite what the Court found were legal and constitutional derelictions.

In each of these cases a president found himself facing a crisis of legitimacy, bereft of a legislative majority, and often without power to enact his agenda into law. The turmoil created by these crises has led to calls for constitutional reform in all four countries. In the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Estrada's successor, has even agreed to open formal deliberations on whether the country should amend its constitution and adopt a parliamentary form of government.

Is there a crisis in East Asian presidentialism comparable to the problems that presidential polities have experienced in Latin America and other parts of the world? Does what happened in Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan reveal defects inherent in presidentialism, or are the causes more particular, relating to poorly designed institutions in one country or another? If the latter, are such institutions readily fixable, or do they reflect deep-seated dynamics in each society that are likely to resist change?

It is true that presidential systems have created crisis and instability in all four of these East Asian lands, though none of the four crises was regime-threatening or led to democratic breakdown. In each country, presidentialism allowed a relative outsider to rise to power far more rapidly than would have been possible under parliamentarism. In Taiwan and South Korea, these outsiders succeeded in dramatically shifting the policy agenda. Estrada might have as well, had the Philippine establishment not ousted him. In many developing countries, the tendency toward consensus praised by proponents of parliamentarism is often a formula for political stasis. What one thinks of the ultimate merits of presidentialism thus depends on what one thinks about the urgency of political change in a given country.

Juan Linz, in his classic article in the Journal of Democracy, laid out four major "perils of presidentialism."1 First, the inherently winner-takeall nature of presidential elections can too readily produce a president who enjoys the support of only a minority of the electorate and hence suffers from a legitimacy gap. Second, the rigidity of presidential terms and the difficulties in removing a sitting president make change in the executive excessively difficult, and term limits may turn even popular and effective incumbents into lame ducks. Third, the "dual legitimacy" of elected executives and legislatures often leads to policy gridlock when the two branches are captured by different parties or when presidents fail to muster solid legislative majorities to support their agendas. Finally, presidentialism can foster "personality politics" and make it possible for inexperienced outsiders to rise to the top.

Linz's original article unleashed a flood of scholarship on presidentialism, much of it published originally in the pages of this journal.2 Very little of that literature, however, has taken account of recent developments in East Asia, where the majority of new democracies have presidential systems. In reviewing developments in the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, and Taiwan, we will explore to what extent Linz's critique and predictions have been borne out in East Asia.

The Philippines: A President on Trial

Joseph Estrada won the presidency of the Philippines in May 1998 with the largest landslide in the country's history. A former movie star with strong populist appeal, he drew the support of poorer voters and the skepticism or even dismay of political and economic elites. By January 2001 he was being hustled out the back door of Malacanang Palace under a cloud of impeachment charges and with a new version of the nonviolent 1986 "people power" uprising brewing in Manila.

At first glance, it all seemed a stunning reversal of fortune. When Estrada had taken office in mid-1998, he had enjoyed not only wide voter support but also majorities in both houses of the legislature. His cabinet was well-balanced, and he wisely boosted his legitimacy and allayed establishment fears by asking his well-respected predecessor Fidel Ramos to sign on as a senior advisor.

Within a year, however, Estrada's approval ratings were dropping and his political capital was running low. A sluggish economy and mounting fiscal constraints had made clear the limits to his bold agenda of balancing the demands of economic liberalization with his goal of enacting policies to help the poor. New agencies and projects such as the National Anti-Poverty Commission and the mass-housing program seemed sluggish or even corruption-riddled.

The president's day-to-day operating style, meanwhile, was causing concern. Estrada met with his cabinet ministers irregularly and spent much time drinking and gambling with a "midnight cabinet" of cronies who even drafted orders for the president to sign during after-hours carousing sessions. Scandals and evidence of special presidential treatment involving friends of Estrada in the air travel, telecommunications, and banking industries as well as the stock market gravely worried the FiIipino business community. The president tried to address these worries in early 2000 with a cabinet reshuffle and some outreach efforts, but to no avail. On 9 October 2000, a state governor named Luis Chavit Singson alleged that he had funneled about US$3.5 million in illegal gambling money to Estrada and his family as protection payments. This accusation led to the first concrete evidence that the president had been taking bribes and condoning illicit activities.

Civil society groups rallied to protest Estrada's misdeeds, business groups distanced themselves from him, and legislators defected.3 In December 2000, the Senate began impeachment proceedings on charges of bribery, corruption, betrayal of public trust, and culpable violation of the constitution. The impeachment trial produced additional evidence against the president, but came to a sudden end in January 2001 when the prosecutors walked out, claiming that pro-Estrada senators were manipulating the trial.

At that point, the focus of anti-Estrada activity moved to the streets. Church, business, and political leaders demanded Estrada's resignation, and thousands of mostly middle-class protesters in the Manila area backed these calls. When the armed forces publicly withdrew their support, Estrada was finished. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo stepped up from the vice-presidency to the presidency in a process not covered by the constitution. A Supreme Court ruling later deemed it a case of presidential resignation, but doubts as to the legality of the process remain.4 Estrada himself, detained in April 2001 and still under house arrest, awaits trial on charges of corruption, bribery, and economic plunder.

Estrada's dubious habits and erratic leadership convinced many that he was unfit, yet he was no political neophyte. He had become mayor of San Juan Municipality in metropolitan Manila in the late 1960s, a position that he held until he won a Senate seat (a nationwide office, since all Philippine senators are "at-large") in 1987 and the vice-presidency five years after that. He had even served on Ramos's Presidential AntiCrime Commission. While Estrada had experience, however, he was unlike his predecessors in being unable to reach out to critical business, religious, and civic groups to build consensus. Under the influence of friends and family, his policy style became increasingly exclusionary, skewed toward populist policies aimed at the poor and relatively unmindful of the urban middle class.

Institutional dynamics mattered a great deal as well. The Philippine president is directly elected and limited to a single six-year term. A serious presidential campaign costs more than US$50 million-a huge sum in a country where GDP per capita is about US$1,080 a year.5 Business interests typically provide most of this money, and expect rewards for doing so. Meanwhile, the term limit might reinforce tendencies to push through with a political agenda without pausing to build broadbased support.

Besides cash, it is popular appeal-and not the backing of the Philippines' traditionally weak and fragmented political parties-that is the key to winning the presidency. Estrada ran and won as the head of a party that was formed barely a year before the election. Given the feebleness of parties and the strength of the president in matters such as the budget process, floor-crossing is common, especially in the 250-member House of Representatives. This eases the problem of "dual legitimacy" but also means that defections can swiftly cascade should the president's popularity slip or a crisis loom. The 24 members of the Senate, with their limit of two six-year terms and their nationwide voter bases, often regard themselves as potential presidents-in-waiting, which only tends to increase the system's brittleness once a president runs into trouble.

The foregoing explains why the real push for Estrada's removal came from outside the formal political institutions. At least one scholar has praised the "People Power II" movement, which united political and economic elites with activists from the urban middle classes, as a victory for popular will and a "middle-class consensus."6 Yet is not the resolution of a constitutional crisis by an extra-institutional popular movement a worrisome sign of brittleness and vulnerability in the Philippine polity?

The institutional dimension of the crisis becomes fully comprehensible only in light of the strong regional, political, and above all social cleavages that made a populist such as Estrada a likely choice for the Philippine poor. The massive and sometimes violent protests of his supporters after his resignation as well as his continuing high popularity among lower-income voters betoken the aspirations of millions who are disillusioned with elites and institutions that have delivered neither equity nor sustained growth. As long as the Philippine Republic is run by elites that are unable or unwilling seriously to accommodate the policy preferences of the poor within a formal institutional framework centered on a strong presidency, political crisis is almost inevitable.7

After the 2004 presidential election, in which populist outsider (and famous Philippine actor) Fernando Poe unsuccessfully challenged President Macapagal-Arroyo, the latter proposed to resume a constitutionalreform process that had stalled during Estrada's truncated term. The goals of this reform, it would appear, are to redefine elite-mass relations, recalibrate low-quality institutions, and change a political culture widely perceived as dysfunctional. It remains to be seen whether these deliberations will provide the Philippine Republic with the answers it badly needs.

Indonesia: A President Befuddled

Abdurrahman Wahid came to power in October 1999 as, in effect, the first democratically chosen president after the fall of the long-ruling dictator Suharto. A charismatic Muslim cleric known for his open-minded and inclusive leadership style as head of the moderate, Islamic-oriented National Awakening Party (PKB), Wahid was the widely respected compromise choice of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), Indonesia's highest deliberative body. On 23 July 2001, barely two years after electing him, the MPR dismissed him from office in a process tantamount to impeachment.

The first signs of tension surrounding Wahid's presidency appeared early. Wahid headed a government of national unity comprising all major parties represented in Indonesia's parliament, the People's Representative Assembly (DPR). After only a few months in office, he shocked and outraged his coalition partners by firing several major cabinet ministers-one from each of three major parties that were far larger than Wahid's own PKB-on unspecified corruption charges that were never followed up through the legal process. To make matters worse, Wahid installed his own close allies as replacements, thereby threatening to upset the delicate party balance in his 36-member cabinet. Tensions spiraled upward, and Wahid's subsequent behavior would only make them worse.

News soon leaked that Wahid had possibly misused state funds and taken a large cash gift from the sultan of Brunei. The MPR debated the charges in August 2000, but party leaders, recognizing the politically charged climate in the country, decided to shelve the matter in return for Wahid's agreement to enlarge the policy-making role of Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who also headed the largest of the parties represented in parliament. Wahid made the promised power transfer, but kept it on a mostly procedural rather than substantive level. Then, mistakenly thinking that he held the upper hand, he reshuffled his cabinet again. Wahid completely shut out Megawati's party and another major party, while limiting the still-formidable old ruling party (Golkar) plus another major party to one ministerial post apiece.

The legislature's response was swift. By January 2001, a special committee had dismissed Wahid's explanations and had officially found it "reasonable to believe" that Wahid had been involved in an improper state-funds transfer and had made contradictory statements about the Brunei money. In April 2001, parliament passed a motion of censure.

Having now alienated all major parties, including the Muslim-oriented ones, and facing a series of cabinet resignations, Wahid grew ever more erratic. He offered more power-sharing proposals to Megawati even while lobbing corruption charges at senior figures in Golkar and Megawati's own party (including her husband)-all while backing her sister in an attempt to split the nationalist base. With Wahid's precarious health failing further (he was nearly blind after a series of strokes), his last desperate flailings featured numerous additional cabinet changes and a shake-up of top military and police ranks as part of a plan to engineer a state of emergency that would allow him to dissolve parliament. With the armed forces signaling no enthusiasm for this scheme, Wahid's bid to declare a national emergency on 23 July 2001 was cut short by an adverse Supreme Court decision, the refusal of the army and police to take part, and the MPR's vote to oust Wahid and replace him with Megawati, who took the presidential oath of office the same day. Wahid, holed up in the presidential palace with supporters gathering outside, calmed his partisans and, to his credit, quietly left to seek medical help in the United States. The way to a peaceful leadership transition was clear.

Clearly, President Wahid's own rash behavior had fueled the crisis. Originally praised for his inclusive and tolerant leadership style, he became increasingly volatile as his term wore on. His consultations with his coalition partners and even his own advisors were often impulsive and incoherent, while his relations with parliamentary leaders grew tense. He alienated the vast bulk of Indonesia's political elite even as his frail health was driving him out of touch with day-to-day political affairs.

Blaming the crisis solely on Wahid, however, ignores the context in which his presidency operated. The 1945 constitution establishes a presidential system with twin legislatures, the DPR and the MPR. The latter, nominally the supreme sovereign body, was at the time in charge of electing the president. This practice has since been scrapped in favor of direct popular election with a provision for a runoff between the top two finishers if no candidate exceeds 50 percent in the first round. The constitution, a short document hastily drafted at independence and lacking any clear separation of powers, was reenacted by President Sukarno (Megawati's father) in 1959 after a brief, volatile period of parliamentary democracy. Unamended for nearly four decades, it was the cloudy basis of an unclear constitutional framework that allowed rulers like Sukarno and Suharto to establish centralized authoritarian structures which they could then claim were somehow "constitutional."

Coming to power amid the opening that followed Suharto's 1998 resignation, Wahid was operating within an institutional framework that underlying political events had overtaken. Indonesia held its first truly democratic DPR elections in 1999. With more than 48 parties competing in multimember districts on a closed-list system, the predictable result was a "hung parliament" with no clear majority. With most parties both centralized and separated from each other by robust ideological differences, stable coalitions were not in the cards. Moreover, the Muslim-minded parties, once virtually shut out of the system, were now competing under fairer conditions than ever before, and doing well.8 Under such circumstances, any president would have found it fairly hard to keep up broad support in the DPR and to a lesser extent the MPR, with its regional delegates and representatives named directly by the army (another practice since abandoned).

With no clear constitutional separation of powers, the legislative and the executive each tried to gain power at the other's expense. Moreover, Indonesia-unlike the other three countries-lacked an exclusive arbiter in constitutional matters such as a constitutional court to help settle conflicts between institutions. On top of this, the decision to switch to direct popular election of the president dated from before Wahid's 1999 accession, meaning that party leaders had an incentive to jockey for position early, perhaps by facing down the incumbent. Indeed, Wahid's cabinet firings and hirings may have been aimed at weeding out potential rivals while gaining access to contributions for his 2004 campaign chest.9

Perhaps a calmer if not more skillful politician than Wahid would have managed to stay in power despite these systemic flaws-the more placid Megawati did so for three years until the voters unseated her in a regular election. Indonesia is riven by ethnic, religious, and regional cleavages that press constantly on its political institutions and it is surprising how stable these institutions remained under Wahid's troubled rule. While Wahid's own blunders bear no small share of the blame for his fall, it is also true that the complicated and shifting institutional landscape which he inherited left him with little room for error. Once his poor decisions cut him off from the kind of major-party support that that he needed in Indonesia's quasi-parliamentary system, the drop was very steep and he was effectively finished.

Triggered by Wahid's impeachment, several substantial constitutional amendments have brought Indonesia a directly elected president, changes to the electoral process, more regional autonomy, and a constitutional court. The number of parties competing for parliamentary seats has decreased, and the electorate has-surprisingly for many observers-tended to vote for centrist candidates. Though all this may enhance political stability and prevent major crisis in the future, given the now more pronounced dual-legitimacy problem in the modified presidential system, it remains to be seen whether presidential crises are completely an issue of the past.

South Korea: A Court Ascendant

Roh Moo Hyun's December 2002 victory marked the second time since 1997 that a left-wing opposition leader had been elected president of South Korea (the first had been Kim Dae Jung). Roh at first lacked a legislative majority to carry out his program, and as conflict escalated with his main rivals in the Grand National Party (GNP), his approval ratings plummeted. Fifteen months after Roh's election, his own Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) joined forces with the GNP and made him the first president that South Korea's National Assembly had ever voted to impeach.

A little less than three months later, in mid-May 2004, South Korea's Constitutional Court ruled that Roh could keep his office. In the meantime, his foes had learned the hard way that they had overplayed their hand: The voters, having formed an unfavorable view of the impeachment push, had gone to the polls for prescheduled elections in mid-April and had given Roh's new Uri Party (UP) a narrow legislative majority. The Korean system survived this turmoil and in the end produced a result that was both constitutionally and democratically legitimate. But there was substantial instability in the meantime, and it amplified Korea's existing social cleavages in way that may encourage future political conflict.

Roh's election had been unforeseen by pollsters and came as a great shock. Perhaps among those most surprised was the winner himself, who seemed unready for the burdens of national leadership. Roh was a self-made lawyer who had never gone to college because his parents were too poor. His opponent, Lee Hoi Chang of the GNP, was a former high-court justice and prime minister who had graduated from the best university in South Korea. Signs of tension surfaced immediately after the election, with GNP leader Choi Byong Ryol publicly rejecting Roh's legitimacy and talking of ousting him. The GNP held a solid legislative majority and in September 2003 successfully pressed Roh to fire a cabinet minister. Roh's popularity fell and the smell of a failed presidency was in the air.

Under the Republic of Korea's constitution, impeachment requires the vote of a two-thirds majority of the National Assembly. The GNP lacked that many votes, so the move became a live possibility only in early September 2003, when the MDP split into factions for and against Roh. The group loyal to Roh became the UP, but it had only 44 seatsnot enough to block an impeachment. In response, Roh suggested holding a referendum on his presidency, in effect trying to engineer a presidential version of the parliamentary practice of a confidence vote. The constitution carefully spells out the conditions under which a referendum may go forward, however, and as no such conditions applied in this case, Roh's proposal went nowhere.

Two months later, more than two-thirds of the National Assembly voted to establish an independent-counsel's office to probe corruption charges involving President Roh's entourage. Roh vetoed this move, but in December an even larger majority overrode him (after a nearly ninety-day investigation, little would come of these charges). On 24 February 2004, Roh made a televised remark that opposition leaders said was in violation of the election law and the constitution. Roh refused to retract or apologize, and said that he would let the people decide the matter via the legislative balloting already set for mid-April. Impeachment came on March 12 by a vote of 193 to 2, with nearly all Roh supporters abstaining.

In presidential systems, impeachment is meant to be used infrequently to correct grave abuses by the executive, and not as a routine means of unseating presidents. There is evidence that Roh's opponents were using it in the latter fashion. He had deeply upset conservatives by saying that he might adopt a policy of anti-Americanism, as if seeking to ride the wave of anti-Americanism and Korean nationalism among younger voters.1" In the eyes of business interests and the old guard within the existing political parties, Roh's remark about the United States in conjunction with his past as a labor-rights lawyer and dissident represented a grave danger to Korea's international security and domestic political order.

Enveloping these ideological splits was a climate of personal antagonism between President Roh and opposition leaders. The anti-Roh faction in the MDP consisted of the former party mainstream, now resentful of the president's recent rise. The GNP epitomized the establishment that had ruled for decades before Kim Dae Jung. Roh, in other words, was the consummate outsider. He had run and lost repeatedly in races for the National Assembly seat representing his far-southeastern hometown of Pusan, knowing that as long as he refused to pay court to regional patrons, his chances of winning were near zero. He thus symbolized the "underdog" mentality within the strongly regional politics of South Korea.

In many respects, the impeachment of Roh resembled the impeachment of U.S. president Andrew Johnson in 1868: The grounds for impeachment cited in the resolution seemed strained at best, if not simply false." According to the resolution, Roh had neglected his obligation to be neutral on political matters when he publicly supported the Uri Party,12 and had disregarded his obligation to protect law and order when he publicly rejected as unfair the National Election Commission's reprimand.13 The Constitutional Court would later rule these charges "not sufficient"-even if true-to warrant the removal of a duly elected president.

In impeaching Roh, the opposition had miscalculated badly. Citizens weighed the charges and found them wanting. As voters in April, these same citizens stripped the GNP of its majority, reduced the MDP to fewer than a dozen seats, and tripled the size of the UP's National Assembly delegation.

South Korea's political system, instead of bridging political conflicts arising from the country's pronounced regional and class divisions, tends to widen them. For example, the first-past-the-post electoral system for the National Assembly overrepresents certain populous provinces in the central government, while underrepresenting social interests such as the labor and environmentalist movements. Strong party discipline exacerbates conflicts by making it hard for presidents to reach across party lines to individual lawmakers for the sake of gathering "issue coalitions" behind specific policies.14

As in some other countries, the single, five-year term of a Korean president removes the prospect of reelection as an accountability mechanism and puts a huge premium on constantly maintaining a stratospheric level of popular support. To hold the president accountable, voters can only punish his party in the next election, which of course increases the likelihood of divided government. More importantly, the one-term limit tempts presidents to excessive haste in their efforts to deliver on election pledges.

In the end, the real winner may have been neither Roh nor his Uri Party, but rather the Constitutional Court. By resolving the standoff between the president and the legislature, the Court effectively raised its own stature above that of either the presidency or the National Assembly. The Court's nine justices took center stage and bestrode the political world as millions of their fellow citizens looked to them to decide a grave national issue. If nothing else, South Korea's voters learned that institutions matter. This lesson from the school of crisis suggests that future debates on constitutional reform in South Korea will draw close and careful attention from her people.

Taiwan: A President Wounded

President Chen Shui-bian came to power in March 2000, ending the 55-year rule of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) in Taiwan. Like Roh, Chen was a lawyer and former regime opponent. He began his political career in 1980 when he defended eight anti-KMT demonstrators in court. The son of poor tenant farmers, he worked his way up through Taiwanese society by entering prestigious National Taiwan University and succeeding at the law. He became a national figure with his 1994 election as mayor of Taipei.

Chen and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have long advocated Taiwanese independence. This puts them at odds with both Beijing (which insists that Taiwan is a province of China) and the KMT (which maintains that the island is the seat of the legitimate national government of all China). Chen's election therefore marked a great change on the island-the rise of a new Taiwanese national identity and assertiveness. Yet Chen's presidency has been afflicted by many of the weaknesses that Linz describes. These include legislative deadlock, weak legitimacy due to a minority mandate, and the attempted use of impeachment to oust a weak and unpopular president. Chen's legitimacy remains contested, as some opposition leaders have been refusing to concede defeat in the March 2004 presidential election.

Like Chile's Salvador Allende (1970-73), Chen Shui-bian was originally a minority president. He won in 2000 only because the KMT vote split between lien Chan and James Soong as the result of a feud between lien and former president Lee Teng-hui. Chen lacked a parliamentary majority, and found both the KMT and Soong's People First Party (PFP) blocking his program in the Legislative Yuan (LY). An early dispute over the building of a fourth nuclear power plant on the island led the opposition to attempt Chen's impeachment, but that resolution never passed. Chen's standing as a leader suffered, however, and an ailing economy dragged down his popularity. Chen's refusal to reaffirm a "one China" policy and his increasingly confrontational attitude toward Beijing energized his base but polarized the island's politics.

The legitimacy of Chen's presidency faced a more serious challenge, however, at the beginning of his second term. On 19 March 2004, the day before the presidential election, Chen and his vice-president, Annette Lu, were shot and slightly wounded while leading a motorcade in Tainan. Chen won the election by a small margin of 29,518 votes, or 0.22 percent of the total votes cast. Polls had predicted a slight advantage for the KMT's lien Chan. lien immediately charged that the shooting had been an election-eve stunt, staged to gain sympathy votes from undecided voters who otherwise would have stayed home. The presence of 337,297 invalidated ballots-representing 2.5 percent of all ballots cast, or more than enough to change the outcome-further exacerbated opposition suspicions.

On March 21, thousands gathered in Taipei and elsewhere on the island to protest the election result. The Central Electoral Commission nonetheless declared Chen the winner. The KMT-PFP "Pan-Blue" alliance then filed two lawsuits, one asking for the invalidation of the election, and the other asking for a recount of the votes. The Taiwan High Court dismissed the first suit in November as "lacking evidence." In response to the second lawsuit, the judiciary began recounting ballots on May 10. Chen's margin fell to 22,000 votes, but he remained the winner.

The opposition continued to contest the legitimacy of Chen's election, however, and to use their LY majority in an effort to reverse the verdict. In August 2004, the LY adopted a bill to set up an independent body, the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee, to look into the election-eve shooting. The Truth Committee was supposed to be equipped with its own investigative and prosecutorial services loaned from the Executive Yuan and controlled by KMT and PFP lawmakers. President Chen signed the bill authorizing the Truth Committee in September, but refused to execute the legislation. DPP lawmakers asked the Court to judge the constitutionality of the Truth Committee. In December 2004, the Court ruled certain core provisions of the Truth Committee statute unconstitutional.

Each of Chen's terms has borne the mark of a legitimacy crisis. The first stemmed from his minority-winner status, a problem highlighted by Linz. The second and odder crisis, stemming from the shooting controversy, could of course also have occurred in a parliamentary system. What could not have happened in a parliamentary system, however, was the attempt by the opposition parties to keep the legitimacy challenge alive through their control of a majority in the legislature. In the LY election of 11 December 2004, the Pan-Blue alliance retained its majority and therewith its ability to prolong the deadlock. The lack of synchronization between the presidential and legislative electoral cycles makes matters worse.

Does Linz's Critique Apply to the Asian Cases?

How do the four defects of presidentialism that Linz outlines apply to these East Asian cases?

Minority presidents. Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia all elected presidents who received a minority of the popular vote and whose legitimacy the opposition thus questioned. The alleged legitimacy deficit was the direct motivation for impeachment efforts. This was not the case in the Philippines, where Joseph Estrada received a large popular mandate.

Rigid terms and difficulty of removal. In each of the four cases, political opponents tried to remove a president who had become unpopular before his term was over. The weapon in each case was impeachment (or, in the case of Indonesia, its equivalent). Impeachment barely got off the ground in Taiwan; was stopped in Korea by a court ruling; failed in the Philippines, yet not in a way that ultimately saved the president (whose removal may have been illegal); and succeeded only in Indonesia, where it arguably also fulfilled the function of removing a genuinely incompetent (that is, severely ailing) president.

Policy gridlock. Dual legitimacy produced situations in which presidents failed to achieve supportive legislative coalitions in Indonesia, South Korea, and Taiwan. As many of Linz's critics have noted, this outcome is often the result not of presidentialism per se but of poorly designed electoral systems. This was a problem in all three cases, and particularly in Indonesia, where a constitution left over from authoritarian days left executive-legislative relations severely clouded.

Election of inexperienced outsiders. This was true in all four cases: It is highly unlikely that figures such as Estrada, Wahid, Roh, and Chen could have risen to power in parliamentary systems. The personalization of politics is most evident in the Philippines, which has seen popular actors run in the last two elections.

The question remains as to whether the problems experienced in these Asian cases constitute a "crisis" of presidentialism, and if so, whether they bolster the general indictment of presidentialism made by Linz. It is our view that they do not.

To begin with, all four systems endured and remained democratic even in the face of crisis. In these four stories, the military coup or other authoritarian backsliding is conspicuous by its absence. Not only was there no Pinochet-style military takeover, but democratic institutions worked as they were supposed to in Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia. In the first two cases, constitutional courts played a particularly important role in diffusing conflict between the executive and legislative branches. Even in the Philippines, the Supreme Court defused conflict by supplying a degree of after-the-fact legitimation to Estrada's removal.

Indeed, one can argue that the problems experienced by each country reflect the immaturity of its democratic system rather than some defect of presidentialism as such. This was particularly true in Indonesia, where constitutional rules were in flux as the crisis unfolded. In South Korea, Roh's ultimate vindication makes it unlikely that the political opposition will try to use impeachment as a political weapon any time in the foreseeable future. A learning process has taken place.

Finally, the conflicts between Roh, Chen, and Estrada and their respective opponents reflected real social conflicts in each country. Each president represented constituencies that were more left-leaning or at least populist than those of the existing establishment. The winner-take-all nature of presidential systems often amplifies rather than mutes structural dissonances, thereby making faster political change possible. The politics of South Korea and Taiwan are utterly different today than they were a decade ago, and it is doubtful that this would have happened had they possessed Japanese-style parliamentary systems, where delay and accommodation, rather than dispatch and tension, are the order of the day. The Philippines was ripe for a similar shift, but established elites blocked change by going outside the institutional framework. Whether one regards presidentialism as good or bad thus depends in part on what one thinks about the need of democratic political systems to accommodate rapid political change.

Juan Linz wrote his critique of presidentialism at the end of a period in which militaries in many developing countries had come to regard themselves as guardians of stability, and had intervened to prevent the sort of rapid political change that presidentialism facilitates. Today, there are much stronger norms against overt military intervention-though it is interesting to note that the refusal of the military to help the sitting president get his way was a major factor in both the Philippines and Indonesia. In these four Asian cases, one can make the argument that constitutional courts are doing in a gentler way something like what militaries used to do in a much rougher fashion when presidents and legislatures simply could not get along. Presidential systems have not two but three branches; whether judiciaries come to play critical mediating roles on a consistent basis will bear careful watching.

Sidebar

Whether one regards presidentialism as good or bad depends in part on what one thinks about the need of democratic political systems to accommodate rapid political change.

Footnote

NOTES

1. Juan J. Linz, "The Perils of Presidentialism," Journal of Democracy 1 (Winter 1990): 51-69.

2. Donald L. Horowitz, "Comparing Democratic Systems," Guy Lardeyret, "The Problem with PR," and Arend Lijphart, "Constitutional Choices for New Democracies," in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., The Global Resurgence of Democracy 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Matthew S. Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Scott Mainwaring and Matthew S. Shugart, Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

3. Carl H. Lande, "The Return of 'People Power' in the Philippines," Journal of Democracy 12 (April 2001): 88-102.

4. The decision, while unanimous, reveals some of the legal problems surrounding Estrada's fall from power. Three justices held it to be a case of resignation, three accepted Macapagal-Arroyo's presidency as an irreversible fact, two ruled Estrada permanently disabled, and the largest group-five-simply signed the ruling without expressing any opinion.

5. Yvonne T. Chua and Sheila S. Coronel, eds., The PCIJ Guide to Government (Manila: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 2003).

6. Alexander R. Magno, "Philippines: Trauma of a Failed Presidency," Southeast Asian Affairs (May 2001): 251-63.

7. Steven Rogers, "Philippine Politics and the Rule of Law," Journal of Democracy 15 (October 2004): 111-25.

8. See Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Dcrnocratizalion in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Greg Fealy, "Islamic Politics: A Rising or Declining Force?" revised version of a paper presented at a conference on "Rethinking Indonesia," Melbourne, Australia, 4-5 March 2000; R. William Liddle, "The Islamic Turn in Indonesia: A Political Explanation," Journal of Asian Studies 55 (August 1996): 613-34; and Martin van Bruinessen, "Genealogies of Islamic Radicalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia," Southeast Asia Research 10 (July 2002): 117-54.

9. R. William Liddle, "Indonesia in 2000: A Shaky Start for Democracy," Asian Survey 41 (January-February 2001): 208-20.

10. Various survey results show that anti-Americanism is one of the most important sources of the recent political polarization in South Korea. see Sook Jong Lee, The Transformation of South Korean Politics: Implications for U.S.-Korea Relations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2004).

11. For a brief review of Andrew Johnson's impeachment, see John Bowman, History of the American Presidency (North Dighton, Mass.: World Publications, 2002), 78.

12. Roll's controversial 24 February 2004 remark, made during a televised discussion program, was as follows: "I expect that people will overwhelmingly support (the Uri Party] in the general election in April."

13. On 3 March 2004, the NEC found that Roh's 24 February 2004 remark violated a provision of Korean electoral law which requires that all public employees except national and local assemblymen remain neutral in election campaigns. The Commission sent Roh a letter urging him to abide by his legal duty of neutrality. Officials in the president's office (not Roh himself) objected, citing the open and active electioneering typical of U.S. presidents.

14. Strong party discipline is of course not always a liability; in many developing countries its absence makes it difficult for presidents to pass unpopular agendas.