The devil in the details: constitutional regime types in post-Soviet Eurasia

Abstract

The constitutions of Eurasia’s more authoritarian countries categorically differ from those of the region’s more democratic countries, in that they codify a doctrine of presidential supremacy as well as several constitutional tools allowing for its implementation. Therefore, the classic typology of forms of government is inadequate for understanding the architecture of power in these countries. Rather, their routine categorization as presidential or semi-presidential formats of executive–legislative relations causes flawed case selection in extant comparative research about the impact of forms of government, particularly president-parliamentarism, on regime performance and stability. This article shows that almost a third of all constitutions in the region reflect a regional variety of genuinely authoritarian presidentialism. It systematizes the properties of this constitutional pattern of “Eurasian-type presidentialism” or, for that matter, “superpresidentialism.” Methodologically, the article encourages contextual analyses to understand non-Western, non-liberal constitutions “from within.”.