Blondel’s African Presidential Republics: proof presidentialism can perform even in the most challenging contexts?

The debate on the ‘perils of presidentialism’ has been raging for over 30 years and gone through at least three waves. It began with the influential work of Juan Linz and most recently has seen the emergence of a rich literature on coalitional presidentialism, which has demonstrated the capacity of presidents to manage fragmented multi-party legislatures, and hence overcome the dangers of political deadlock. Jean Blondel’s last book (African Presidential Republics, Oxford, Routledge, 2019) belongs to this latest wave in the sense that he argues that presidential systems can overcome their limitations, and that certain aspects of the presidential models actually give them an advantage over parliamentary equivalents. This article reviews Blondel’s argument against the latest developments in African politics. I suggest that there are fewer instances of positive presidentialism today than Blondel hoped for, in part because democratic progress has often proved to be particularly vulnerable to later autocratization due to a tendency not to entrench gains via constitutional reforms. Despite this cautionary note, however, I conclude that Blondel is right to reject the idea that African cases provide support for the ‘perils of presidentialism’. This is not only because Blondel highlights a number of presidents who played a benign or positive role in their country’s political development, but also because the coalitional presidentialism literature suggests that there is little evidence that parliamentary systems would perform significantly better.