5XÉçÇø

Semi-presidentialism creates a dynamic triangular relation among presidents, prime ministers, and parliaments, shaped by both constitutional designs and partisan configurations. While existing research focuses primarily on normal conditions, how crises reshape this power distribution remains underexplored. Against the backdrop of increasingly frequent crises—from pandemics and wars to economic disruptions and democratic backsliding—this panel asks: how do crises reconfigure these intra-executive and executive–legislative dynamics, and how such shifts impact governments’ capacity to respond to crises and sustain democratic resilience and accountability?
This open panel examines how crises transform the distribution and exercise of political power within this triangular relationship. Crises can drive the expansion of presidential power at the expense of government and parliamentary authority, fostering executive personalization and autocratization. At the same time, such emergencies often trigger political friction between the president and the prime minister, heightening intra-executive conflict. Conversely, crises may also create opportunities for parliamentary actors to transcend partisan divides, coordinate collective action, challenge presidential overreach, and push for constitutional reforms that reinforce institutional checks and balances.
The panel also investigates how triangular executive relations shape governments’ responses to crises. As nationally representative figures, presidents can leverage their powers to articulate policy preferences that resonate with citizens, limiting space for populist rivals and thereby reinforcing democratic accountability. Meanwhile, temporary executive centralization enables swift coordination during emergencies. Consequently, semi-presidentialism offers a remarkably flexible institutional framework for crisis management.
By bringing these perspectives together, the panel moves beyond the assumption that crises necessarily weaken democracy, conceptualizing them instead as critical junctures that can either destabilize democratic institutions or foster institutional adaptation and resilience. We welcome theoretically informed and empirically grounded papers on executive–legislative relations, intra-executive conflict, democratic backsliding, populism, constitutional reform, crisis governance, and democratic accountability across different regions and semi-presidential systems.