Coalitions in presidential and semi-presidential systems

In this chapter, we review the literature on coalition formation in presidential and semi-presidential democracies produced in the past 20 years. We start by restating the reasons why incentives for coalition formation are not entirely dissimilar in democracies based on the separation of executive and legislative powers and those based on assembly confidence. Based on data on government formation in all democracies between 1946 and 2020, we show that, as previously found with data for a shorter period, coalition governments in presidential democracies are less frequent when compared to semi-presidential and parliamentary democracies but still quite common. We proceed to discuss the factors that have been found to be associated with the emergence of coalition governments in presidential democracies, focussing our attention on the legislative powers of the presidency and the formation of pre-electoral coalitions. We conclude with a brief discussion of paths for future research on coalition governments in presidential democracies.