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Is Negative Parliamentarism sometimes no Parliamentarism after all? Evidence on Tiered systems of power separation
from the Weimar Republic, 1920-1932.
Philip Manow / Valentin Schröder
Universität Bremen
Parliamentarism, Semi-Presidentialism and Presidentialism are often seen as distinct options for setting up the separation of powers. Either option privileges a single body in terms of cabinet investiture.
Some political systems however feature mechanisms that do not monopolize control over cabinet composition to either parliament or president. They rather give precedence in determining cabi-net composition to one, “first-tiered”, body, but empower the other one to step in if the first-tiered body fails to act.
Such was the case with the German “Weimar Constitution”. Parliament with its right to discharge the cabinet served as the first tier. Germany could thus be classified as a system of Negative Par-liamentarism. But as long as parliament did not act the president could determine cabinet compo-sition on his own. Germany could thus also be seen as a Presidential system. Only Semi-presidentialism would never seem to fit due to both parliament and president being capable of determining cabinet composition.
Similarly, parliament could legislate on its own. However, the president could issue decrees that, if not overturned by a parliament, became law. Consequently, control over both cabinet composi-tion and legislation was held by either parliament or president, but conditional on either of them acting.
We address this issue of “Tiered systems” of power separation conceiving of them as enduring processes of equilibrium selection among parliamentary elites and the president. Patterns of be-havior would thus either succumb to expectations as implied under Negative Parliamentarism or under Presidentialism at any point in time. But there would not be one single pattern.
We employ novel data on positions of major parliamentary parties, as well as on legislative activi-ties of factions, cabinets and presidents in Germany for the period 1920-1933.
We hope to complement the recent debates on systems of power separation, notably under Neg-ative Parliamentarism, with this equilibrium-based perspective.
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1 Introduction
Studies on the relationship between the president and the cabinet classify democratic regimes in
terms of the latter being selected only by the former, by the president and parliament or only by
parliament. Three broad categories result: the president deciding on cabinet composition on her
own (presidentialism); the cabinet being elected – if indirectly by not stipulating its non-election
in e.g. a vote of non-confidence – by parliament (parliamentarism); and the combination of both
(semi-presidentialism). As subtypes of the semi-presidential category, regimes that confer powers
in the appointment of the cabinet to the president have been dubbed premier-presidential, while
regime that also confer the power to dismiss cabinet members without parliamentary consent
have been called president-parliamentary (Shugart and Carey 1992). Of these two subtypes, the
premier-presidential one has been described as closer to negative parliamentarism, while the pres-
ident-parliamentary as closer to presidentialism (ibid., Metcalf 2000). This differentiation goes as
far as Clark et al. stating that “premier-presidential systems effectively function like parliamentary
democracies” (Clark et al. 2013: 507), and that “it is common for scholars to equate semi-
presidentialism with its president-parliamentary version” (ibid.).
This classification has predominantly been achieved by constitutional analysis, with a focus on
constitutional letter and the derivation of power indices of the president from it (this is most
pronounced, for the case of Weimar, in Shugart and Carey 1992: 154f., while, for example,
Metcalf 2000: 676f. proceeds as they do but simply states that Weimar fell into this subtype rather
than including it in his analysis). This method of constructing aggregate measures from single
constitutional competences has sparked some criticism recently (Fortin 2013).
One reason for the alleged discrepancies between the “sum” and the “whole” of presidential and
parliamentary powers is constitutional practice. Mainwaring (1993: 203), for example, in his as-
sessment of democratic performance of presidential and parliamentary democracies, dismisses
Duverger’s claim of Austria, Iceland, and Ireland belonging to the semi-presidential category
since he considers the presidential powers in these countries as largely symbolic. What is more,
practice rests in ever-changing circumstances itself. Consequently, dead constitutional letter may
well come alive or be laid to rest at some point in time or switch between these two states. This
notably concerns presidential “emergency powers”, e.g. the power to enact decrees if parliament
is not assembled or parties cannot agree on legislation in an assembled parliament.
2
In the present paper, we address this issue of changing constitutional practice and related changes
in the assignment of regimes according to the way powers of cabinet and legislation are separat-
ed. We do so with a view to the regime of the German Weimar Republic. This regime was erect-
ed shortly after World War I in 1919 and fell with the National-socialists assuming power in
1933. It has been classified as semi-presidential ever since Duverger put this category to the fore,
and is often understood to belong to the president-parliamentary subtype (Duverger 1980: 173f.,
Elgie 2011: 29, Metcalf 2000: 661, Skach 2005: 9, Shugart and Carey 1992: 68f.). With a view to
the literature it thus serves as a prime example not only of the characteristics of semi-
presidentialism in its least parliamentarism-friendly variant but also of the perils of (semi-
)presidential regimes in the enduring debate on the functioning and performances of these regime
types (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997, Aleman and Calvo 2010, Cheibub et al. 2004, Diermeier
and Vlaicu 2011, Elgie 2008, Palanza and Sin 2014, Samuels and Shugart 2003, Wiesehomeier and
Benoit 2009).
We take a policy-oriented perspective on regimes in the sense of subordinating actors’ interest in
cabinet composition and, consequently, cabinet control, to their interest in control over legisla-
tion. A presentation of this argument together with a classification of the Weimar constitution
into a related classification of regimes according to what we call “monopolized” and “tiered”
systems of legislative power separation is the subject of the following section 2. Only then do we
turn to a classification of constitutional practice in Weimar Germany along comparing the prac-
tice of cabinet formation, and data on cabinet type, cabinet polarization and cabinet duration on
Weimar with data on these indicators in Western European parliamentary and semi-presidential
regimes (section 3). Since we find these indicators for the Weimar cabinets to indicate a switch
from a practice of negative parliamentarism to a semi-presidential practice, we then set up a
model that aims at predicting the circumstances that lead to this switch in general terms (section
4). We then test the ensuing hypothesis (section 5) and conclude (section 6).
2 Weimar Germany as a regime of Tiered legislative power separation
Parliamentary regimes not only confer cabinet control to parliament but also place a monopoly
over legislation in the hands of parliaments. Even if this may lead to de-facto control of the cabi-
net over legislation, there is still a monopoly (for the development of this practice see, e.g. Cox
1987). In presidential and semi-presidential systems, this is not necessarily the case (Metcalf
2000). In some of these regimes, legislative control is split between the president and parliament,
for example with a domaine réservé of the president over certain policy fields, and leading to con-
siderable debate among actors over who is entitled to legislate on what policy field and under
3
what circumstances in instances where the president’s policy preferences diverge from those of
the majority in parliament (see, e.g. Huber 1996, Magni-Berton 2013, Thiébault 2000). In others,
legislative control is shared, for example with the president having the right to unilaterally veto
legislation. Shugart and Carey (1992: 134) consider this “the president’s most consistent and di-
rect connection with the legislative process.”
And in still other regimes, the president has decree powers, but subject to parliamentary approval
or disapproval by simple parliamentary majority. Shugart and Carey (1992: 140f.) note that this
allows the president to bring legislative outcomes closer to her ideal point than parliamentary
legislative monopoly, even if decrees can be revoked by a simple parliamentary majority. As an
illustration, consider the situation, where there is a (minimum winning) majority cabinet of parties
C and R confronted with opposition party L and president P with ideal points on some policy
dimension as depicted in Figure 1. It is not at all certain that policy SQ (or the CR cabinet), as
agreed between C and R will survive a decree of the president aimed at setting policy at P. Of
course, situations like this can only arise in multiparty settings or where members of parliament
(MPs) do not at least typically act in consonance with their party lines. But there are political sys-
tems of this kind, for example the (semi-presidential) French and Finnish ones.
Figure 1: Policy position of parties L, C, R and president P
We thus conceive of these arrangements as systems of “Tiered” power separation, when legisla-
tive acts can be taken by both parliament and the president, but the latter subject to parliamentary
scrutiny. So the institutional setting of these system diverges from parliamentarism not only in
terms of the executive being not or only partly responsible to parliament, but also in terms of
legislation being only “temporally” under the sole guise of parliament – only as long as policy
preferences of a parliamentary majority and the president are in consonance with each other (for
a similar argument on cabinet formation, see Schleiter and Morgan-Jones 2010).
One such system was codified in the German Weimar constitution of 1919. It foresaw legislation
to lie with parliament, the Reichstag. Still, Art. 48, para. 2 conceded the president the right “in
situations where public security and order are severely disturbed or endangered to take the neces-
sary steps as to restore public security and order.” However, the next paragraph secured “that all
[these] steps shall be revoked if the Reichstag so demands”, and the final paragraph made the
L P C SQ R
4
article as a whole subject to application “as detailed by law”. In German constitutional doctrine,
this reference to “law” served as a means to actually invoke parliament to issue a law detailing
application. The Reichstag never did. But this inaction did not prevent “public security and or-
der” to be disturbed by, inter alia, a series of attempted military, communist, and fascist coups
d’état in 1920-23, foreign occupation of Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr area in 1923,
hyperinflation in 1922/23, the Great depression capping more than one third of German GDP
from 1928 to 1932, and frequent foreign policy crises between Germany and the victors of World
War I over war reparations that in turn threatened to strangle federal budgetary capacities over
the period 1920-32 as a whole. It is not surprising with this in mind that decrees under Art. 48
were issued 85 times in the “crisis” period 1920-24 and 115 times in 1930-32. It is perhaps also
not surprising that these decrees often contained legislation beyond pure emergency measures.
Legislation on curbing hyperinflation in 1923, for example, essentially entailed setting up a new
currency (the “Rentenmark”) and was passed as decree in order to avoid a lengthy parliamentary
process. This broadening of policy fields subject to decrees together with the absence of detailed
regulation rendered constitutional lawyers to conceive of Art. 48 as applying to any measure
deemed “necessary” for any cause determined by the president by the mid-1920’s (Huber 1981:
444, 705ff.).
But there was one impediment to the president issuing decrees. According to Art. 48, para 3, they
could only be issued if they were co-signed by the chancellor as head of government.1 Lacking
further legislative powers of practical importance2, the main source of presidential power thus lay
with the president’s right to appoint and dismiss the chancellor (and the other cabinet members,
with the chancellor having the sole right to propose them, Art. 53). The chancellor and cabinet
members had however to resign following a simple-majority Reichstag vote of no confidence
over either individual or the cabinet as a whole (Art 54).
This Art. 53/Art. 54-combination renders Weimar Germany a president-parliamentary regime, at
least according to constitutional letters. Art. 48 puts it in the group of “Tiered” systems of power
separation, but with presidential actions tied to a chancellor who was in turn tied to parliament.
In terms of legislative procedure this meant that the cabinet could use two paths: a parliamentary
one as prescribed in Art. 68ff, and a presidential one. It thus could introduce a so-called draft law
(Gesetzentwurf) to parliament where the draft would (hopefully) receive three readings until it was
1 This seems to have gone unnoticed in some studies. 2 The president could also call a referendum over laws that were agreed in the Reichstag, then contradicted by the Reichsrat (the second chamber), and where the Reichsrat’s contradiction was again overturned by a Reichstag vote (Art. 74, para 3). This never happened. The president could also postpone signature of a law if the Reichsrat called for an extended period of time to ponder contradiction (Art. 70 in conjunction with Art. 74). This happened once, without the Reichsrat contradicting in the end.
5
approved by the appropriate parliamentary majority, with extant opportunities for parliamentary
parties to change its content in a committee system in between each reading. Or the cabinet
could seek the president’s approval to enact a decree that would enter into force immediately but
that could be revoked by a simple Reichstag majority. But since parliamentary parties could issue
draft laws on their own (Art. 68) and with cabinet survival tied to the Reichstag not explicitly
ousting it, legislation outcomes would always rest with the Reichstag, at least in theory (Huber
1981: 44f.). We will return to the consequences of these ties in section 4. Now we however look
at how this system worked in terms of cabinet formation.
3 Weimar cabinets: from negative parliamentarism to semi-presidentialism
In the following sections we draw on a dataset on the formation, composition, majority/minority
status, and political position of the 31 cabinets that held office between 9 November 1918, and
31 January 1933 (see Table 1 for the 21 cabinets in the period under study). Information on cabi-
net formation processes, on composition, and on “external support” have been retrieved from
the archival documentation on Weimar cabinet protocols (Bundesarchiv 2009), and from Huber
(1984). By external support we mean the existence of explicit agreements on support between all
coalition parties and one or more non-coalition parties. Notably, this could entail non-coalition
parties voting with coalition parties on a so-called “empowerment law” (Ermächtigungsgesetz) that
allowed the cabinet to legislate without parliamentary consent for a specified period of time and
on a specified range of policies. This concerns the Cuno, Stresemann I, Stresemann II, Marx I,
and Brüning IV cabinets in table 1. Data on political positions along a left-right dimension result
from means of cabinet party positions, weighted by their respective shares of mandates within
each coalition. Data of party positions in turn are bootstrapped means of expert codings of Wei-
mar party positions in an expert survey conducted by Morgan (1976: 10ff., the individual expert
data used here rather than the aggreggate measures used by Morgan for his study appear in the
appendix to this work). Data on majority/minority status (“type” in Table 1) differentiates be-
tween minority, minimum winning majority, and oversized majority cabinets and reflects changes
of Reichstag composition within terms.
We analyze the period in which the Weimar constitution was in place and where parliament dealt
with at least one draft law or decree. We thus do not analyze the ultimate eight months (1 June
1932 – 30 January 1933) of the Weimar republic. In these months legislation lay with the presi-
dent who dissolved parliament on 2 June 1932, and 12 September 1932. This led to extended
periods of time where the president governed by decree. Historically, these months are crucial for
the explaining how and why the NSDAP came to power. With a view to the model that we are
6
going to present, we will however argue below as to why this process did not result from the in-
stitutional setting in which it took place in terms of an equilibrium result.
Table 1: Cabinets in the Weimar republic, 26 June 1920 - 1 June 1932
Date Cabinet Coalition Ext. Support Trials L-R-Pos. Type
26.06.1920 Fehrenbach DDP Z DVP BVP DNVP 5 5,44 M/m
10.05.1921 Wirth I SPD DDP Z
4 3,92 m
26.10.1921 Wirth II SPD Z
(-) 3,77 m
31.01.1922 Wirth III SPD DDP Z
(-) 3,92 m
31.03.1922 Wirth IV SPD DDP Z BBB
(-) 3,91 m/MW
22.11.1922 Cuno DDP Z BVP DVP SPD DNVP 3 5,56 M
13.08.1923 Stresemann I SPD DDP Z DVP
1 4,2 O
03.11.1923 Stresemann II DDP Z DVP SPD (-) 5,5 M
01.12.1923 Marx I DDP Z BVP DVP SPD 6 5,57 M/m
15.04.1924 Marx II DDP Z DVP
(-) 5,5 m
04.06.1924 Marx III DDP Z DVP
2 5,44 m
16.01.1925 Luther I Z BVP DVP DNVP WP 7 6,92 MW
29.10.1925 Luther II Z BVP DVP SPD (-) 5,75 M
20.01.1926 Luther III DDP Z BVP DVP SPD WP 4 5,53 M
18.05.1926 Marx IV DDP Z BVP DVP SPD 3 5,53 M
29.01.1927 Marx V Z BVP DVP DNVP
3 6,92 MW
29.06.1928 Mueller II SPD DDP Z BVP DVP
2 4,19 O
30.03.1930 Bruening I DDP Z BVP DVP WP CNBL/CNAG
0 5,73 m
16.10.1930 Bruening II DDP Z BVP DVP WP CNBL/CSVD
(-) 6,07 m
05.12.1930 Bruening III DDP Z BVP DVP CNBL/CSVD
(-) 6,06 m
10.10.1931 Bruening IV DDP Z BVP CNBL/CSVD SPD (-) 5,94 m
Cabinets are coded following Müller and Strøm (2000: 12) (-): new cabinet due to party entering or leaving coalition or due to election. Type: m = minority cabinet, without agreement with non-cabinet party/parties as to forge a majority in parliament; M = minority cabinet, with agreement with non-cabinet party/parties as to forge a majority in parliament; MW: minimum winning majority cabinet; O: oversized majority cabinet; m/MW: switch to minimum winning due to op-position MPs joining coalition party. M/m: parties withdrawing external support over course of cabinet duration.
Until March 1925 Friedrich Ebert, an SPD politician, served as president. He had been voted into
office by the social-democrat (SPD), left-liberal (DDP), and catholic (Zentrum, Z) factions of the
National Assembly in February 1919. His successor, Paul von Hindenburg, however, was elected
in a two-round presidential election in March 1925, and reelected in April 1932. Hindenburg’s
first presidential campaign was supported by the regionalist Bavarian People’s Party (Bayerische
Volkspartei, BVP), national-liberal DVP, nationalist DNVP, and the anti-tax and anti-devaluation
Business Party (Wirtschaftspartei, WP) against a communist (KPD) candidate, and a joint SPD,
DDP, and Z candidate. Himself being no member of any party, Hindenburg held a conservative,
agrarian political position as represented by the (then not yet founded) Peasant People (Christlich-
nationale Bauern- und Landvolkpartei, CNBL). His second presidential campaign was supported by
the SPD, DDP, Z, and DVP against a KPD, and a joint DNVP-NSDAP candidate.
7
So, technically, it is doubtful as to whether the first five years of the Weimar Republic abide by
the criterion of popular election of the president for classifying it as semi-presidential, even more
so as parliament prolonged Ebert’s mandate several times rather than calling a presidential elec-
tion.
Ebert in turn refrained from pushing his candidates for chancellorship. He rather consigned him-
self to assigning the role of formateur to the party leader he expected to be most likely to cobble
together a cabinet. And so did Hindenburg. Coalition formation however was a rather complex
task with a view to party positions (see table 2), and where polarization (Dalton 2008) of the par-
ty system hovered between 0.4 and 0.6 for all six parliaments under study. In practice, there were
only two sets of parties that were able to agree on enduring policies: the SPD, DDP, and Z (a so-
called Weimar coalition), and the DDP, Z, and DVP (a “bourgeois” coalition). The SPD, repre-
senting the interests of unionized workers, and the DVP, standing for the anti-union heavy in-
dustry, had hardly any common ground other than not opposing democracy in general. Both
parties joining one cabinet was thus consigned to some 90 days in the crisis year of 1923 and the
lengthy but deadlocked Grand coalition of 1928-30. This coalition fell over the question whether
unemployment insurance fees should be raised by 0.3 percent of wages at the expense of employ-
ers. This was not a matter of substance, but of principle and this principled approach to coalition
policy was frequent in the negotiations of the time: there was not a single cabinet that was
formed or fell due to presidential actions. They all came and went due to parties leaving or enter-
ing a coalition or just not agreeing on forming the next cabinet.
Table 2: Political positions of main parties
KPD USPD SPD DDP Z BVP DVP WP CNBL DNVP NSDAP
0,5 1,7 2,9 4,6 5,1 6,2 6,4 6,9 7,5 8,4 9,4
At the same time, the choice of parties ready to even enter into a coalition was constrained by a
substantial share of mandates in the hands of parties that held extremist positions. Conceiving as
“extremist” of left-right positions below 2 and above 8 on a 0-10 scale, this concerned between
29 and 42 percent of mandates at the beginning of each legislative term under study.3 It thus usu-
ally took several attempts (and formateurs) to form at least a minority government that could
count on sufficient external parliamentary support as to survive the next budget debate. Chancel-
lor Wilhelm Marx, for example, presided over three consecutive cabinets only due to no for-
mateur (including himself several times) being able to form a coalition, but with coalition negotia-
3 The 0-2 and 8-10 intervals would include, in the post-1945 world, all communist parties and parties like Austrian FPÖ, Italian MSI and AN, or Dutch PVV, but not, for instance Swiss SVP.
8
tions spanning the duration of these cabinets in their entirety. They only ended once the DNVP
had been lured into joining a Center-right cabinet.
Consequently, Weimar cabinets were predominantly minority cabinets. Even so, they were much
less stable as compared to minority cabinets in post-1945 Western Europe. We derived data on
this from the ParlGov database (Döring 2013). This is depicted in Table 3. Average duration of
the typical Weimar cabinet was even shorter than the rather transient minority cabinets in semi-
presidential democracies. Cabinet polarization was much higher. This is related to considerably
higher scores of parliamentary polarization that were “reduced” to similar degrees over the cabi-
net formation process. But there were bounds to this reduction as compared to recent Western
Europe with a view to the share of extremist parties.
Table 3: Indicators on stability of minority cabinets
Indicator Regime type N Mean Minimum Maximum
Duration (days) Positive Parliamentarism 54 555 23 1806
Negative Parliamentarism 117 614 18 1523
Semi-presidentialism 29 247 18 913
Weimar, 1920-30 12 144 28 264
Weimar, 1930-32 3 186 50 309
Polarization (cabinet) Positive Parliamentarism 54 0,05 0,00 0,34
Negative Parliamentarism 117 0,06 0,00 0,46
Semi-presidentialism 29 0,05 0,00 0,46
Weimar, 1920-30 12 0,17 0,12 0,20
Weimar, 1930-32 3 0,19 0,16 0,21
Polarization (parliament) Positive Parliamentarism 54 0,37 0,17 0,48
Negative Parliamentarism 117 0,42 0,30 0,65
Semi-presidentialism 29 0,39 0,32 0,58
Weimar, 1920-30 12 0,47 0,42 0,56
Weimar, 1930-32 3 0,57 0,51 0,60
Share of extremist parties Positive Parliamentarism 54 0,18 0,00 0,43
Negative Parliamentarism 117 0,15 0,00 0,70
Semi-presidentialism 29 0,08 0,00 0,49
Weimar, 1920-30 12 0,29 0,25 0,42
Weimar, 1930-32 3 0,35 0,26 0,39
Change in Polarization Positive Parliamentarism 54 -0,32 0,07 -0,48
Negative Parliamentarism 117 -0,35 -0,05 -0,65
Semi-presidentialism 29 -0,34 -0,12 -0,47
Weimar, 1920-30 12 -0,30 -0,25 -0,42
Weimar, 1930-32 3 -0,38 -0,35 -0,40
Legislation however proceeded on sound parliamentary grounds (see Figure 2). It is at times ar-
gued, that the use of Art. 48 during these years foreshadowed a kind of “presidential dictator-
ship” (see, e.g. Bracher 1962). But to the extent that they were not aimed at ordering dissolution
9
of organizations involved in attempts at coups d’état, they served as “true” emergency measures
in the sense of swift reactions to unfolding crises when the Reichstag was either not assembled or
were mere withdrawals of previous emergency measures. The bulk of these decrees was however
issued in 1923, during the Cuno, Stresemann, and Marx cabinets and aimed at flanking legislation
agreed by a parliamentary majority as part of the three empowerment act of that year.
Figure 2: Types of legislation in the Weimar republic 1920-1932, by cabinet
Black: Decree (Art. 48); Dark gray: Law (by empowerment law); Light gray: Law (Art. 68ff.).
Thus, until dissolution of the Grand coalition in March 1930, the president did not play a role
other than that of a crisis manager. By early 1925 Ebert came to end even with this, and Hinden-
burg consigned himself to representation during the first five years of his presidency.
However, a slight change in both duration and cabinet polarization sets in with the Brüning cabi-
nets (i.e,. “Weimar, 1930-32” in the table). Cabinets are now less polarized, have longer durations
(even the minimum of 50 days being due to the elections of September 1930 that propelled us to
count in a cabinet identical to its successor) and this is despite parliament polarization at record
levels of 0.6 for the better part of the period. We turn to this in moment.
050
100
150
Fehrenbach
Wirth-I
Wirth-II
Wirth-IV
Cuno
Stresemann-I
Stresemann-II
Marx-I
Marx-II
Marx-III
Luther-I
Luther-II
Luther-III
Marx-IV
Marx-V
Mueller-II
Bruening-I
Bruening-II
Bruening-III
Bruening-IV
10
These cabinets differed from their predecessors in that they were not formed by party leaders.
After the end of the Grand coalition in March 1930, rather than waiting for party leaders to agree
on a new cabinet, the president unilaterally appointed Heinrich Brüning, the head of the catholic
Zentrum faction. Hindenburg made it clear to the other parties that he expected them to cooper-
ate with the cabinet at least in those issues that he deemed important. The related bills were thus
declared “necessary”, enacted as Art. 48 decrees and put to the Reichstag together with the threat
of dissolution upon disapproval. This worked for some months, but in mid-July the SPD lost its
temper. It called a vote of no confidence, and Brüning lost. Rather than letting Brüning resign,
Hindenburg now renewed his Brüning’s appointment, and dissolved the Reichstag. The elections
of September 1930 cost the SPD one fifth of its parliamentary strength. But the party remained
in a crucial role regarding legislation. With the communists, nationalists, and national-socialists
attaining a seat share of 39 percent and not willing to cooperate with any cabinet, the 25 percent
of seats held by the SPD were indispensable for any cabinet policy short of another Reichstag
dissolution. But since the parties in support of Brüning had suffered substantial losses as well and
since results of regional elections over the course of 1931 pointed to ever more grave electoral
prospects for all but the three extremist parties neither other party was interested in this. But the
SPD also was increasingly unwilling to support legislation that fostered Brünings image as bold
reformer of the German social security system by budget contraction at the expense of harming
the SPD’s own electorate. Ever more often Hindenburg thus enacted an Art. 48 decree, tying the
fate of ever less important pieces of legislation to dissolution of the Reichstag. The SPD never
tried whether Hindenburg (or Brüning, for that matter) was bluffing.
Brüning’s chancellorship only ended when he replaced by Franz von Papen, a personal confi-
dante of Hindenburg, on 1 June 1932. Again, parties were confronted with this decision rather
than consulted. So, while constitutional practice resembled one of negative parliamentarism for
the first ten years, it turned into the president deciding over the fate of the cabinet and indeed
legislation from 1930. We now present a more formal argument on how this came about.
4 A model on the choice of the presidential path of legislation
We argue on when the actors – parliamentary parties and the president – will switch from a par-
liamentary to a semi-presidential pattern of behavior with the help of two models. Both models
aim at capturing the institutions of a democratic regime, where the cabinet is responsible to both
parliament and the president, where the president is tied in his legislative actions to cabinet con-
sent, and where the president and the cabinet act as to maximize utility only of those parties that
support it or that, with a view to the president, have supported her when she ran for office. So
11
actors are “partisans” rather than “technocrats.” One model is directed at situations where parties
can count on the regime itself not being endangered, while the other model portrays a situation
where this is the case. We thus call the first model the “Stability” and the second model the “Cri-
sis”.
In each game, we account for four possible combinations a cabinet can face with a view to legis-
lation by four different scenarios that are implemented as subgames into the models: the presi-
dent’s preferences reflecting the preferences of at least one party that supports the cabinet; her
preferences being “dissimilar” from the cabinet in terms of reflecting the preferences of a party
that does not support the cabinet; the parties in support of the cabinet holding a majority of seats
in parliament; and those parties not holding a majority. These four scenarios are intended to cov-
er legislative points of contention in parliamentary democracies (minority versus majority cabi-
nets), and semi-presidentialism (all four).
There are five actors in the games: the cabinet (player C), the opposition (O), the president (P),
an extremist party (X), and Nature (N). Nature serves as a substitute for the electorate in that it,
in the first and second moves of the games, randomly sets the cabinet to either hold a majority or
only a minority of seats in parliament, and the president to either have preferences similar to or
dissimilar from the cabinet. In the other moves of the games, players decide on whether some
existing policy be replaced by another policy in the way described below.
We assume preferences of players C, O, and P to correspond to ideal points on a euklidian, one-
dimensional policy space R. We assign idealpoints o to O, c to C and o’ or c’ to P, the latter de-
pending on N’s move, with o<c<x, and x>(c-o). So X is “to the right” of both O and C. We set
policy at the beginning of the games at sq, with o<sq<c. So it is never attractive for O to com-
promise with C on a change of sq and vice versa. P has either ideal point o’, with o<o’<sq; or c’,
with sq<c’<(x-c)/2. So P’s ideal point is to the left of sq if it is o’, to the right of sq if it is c’ and
closer to c than to x. Whether P’s ideal point is at o’ or c’ depends on N’s second random move.
The difference of c’ and c captures the idea that the ideal point of a partisan president (who is
assumed above to reflect the preferences of one party rather than of many parties) cannot be
identical with the ideal point of the cabinet as long as the cabinet reflects the ideal points of a
coalition of parties, and we conceive of this as the typical situation in a multiparty setting. How-
ever, the main implications of the model are not changed if it was c’=c, i.e. in a single party cabi-
net. That c’<(x-c)/2 makes sure that the president’s ideal point is never closer to x than to c. This
implements the “similarity” of the president, if her ideal point is c’, to a cabinet that favors policy
12
c in that the president will never be drawn to foster policy x or o if she can have policy c.4 The
difference o’ versus o is introduced for symmetry of situations where the president is dissimilar
from the cabinet. This does never make a difference as compared to o’=o, as will be seen below.
An example of this setting is depicted in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Example of policy positions of O, C, X, and P
X, though it has ideal point x on R, prefers no change of policy sq over all changes of policy as
long as x is not set as policy. Consequently, while C, O, and P are interpreted as abiding by quad-
ratic loss functions over R with maximum at their respective ideal points in terms of utility max-
imization, X maximizes utility by rejecting every policy change other than a switch to its ideal
point. So, while it holds for every player i = {C, O, P} with ideal point ipi and outcome r that
U(i)=(ipi-r)2, X has U(X)=(0, if r=x; -1 if r=sq; -∞, else). We thus assume all actors to be interest-
ed in policy only, but one actor not to be ready to agree on any compromise on policy.
Policy is at sq at the beginning of the games, and actors can switch it to any point on R according
to the protocol as depicted in Figure 4. Each game starts with the two mentioned random moves
by N. In each of the ensuing subgames, C first decides whether to introduce a draft into parlia-
ment that switches policy from sq to c (draft); or to propose a decree (decree) to the president
that switches sq to c’ if the president has ideal point c’ (subgames 1 and 2 of each game), or from
sq to o’ if the president has ideal point o’ (subgames 3 and 4); or to do nothing and leave policy at
sq (wait).
If C introduces the draft, O can either approve (Yl) or disapprove (Nl). If it approves, policy will
always be switched from sq to c and the game ends. If it disapproves, policy will also be switched
from sq to c if C disposes of a parliamentary majority (subgames 1 and 3), and the game ends.
Policy will only not be switched from sq if C does not hold a majority of seats, since X, by the
assumption on utility above, always disapproves as well (subgames 2 and 4).5 In this case, the
game ends with r=sq.
4 Note that the president is not assumed to also prefer o over x or x over o. 5 This is why we do not include X’s actions in the game tree in Figure 2.
o o‘ sq c c‘ x
13
Figure 4: Game tree for policy position as described in Figure 3
If C proposes the decree, then it is up to the president to decide whether she enacts or rejects the
decree. If she rejects the decree (reject), policy remains at sq. If she enacts the decree (enact) it is
again O’s turn to approve (Yd) or disapprove (Nd) the decree. If O approves, the game ends with
3 3 1 2 2 1 4 2 2 3 1 2 3 3 1 2 2 1 4 2 2 3 1 2 2 2 1 3 3 1 3 2 2 4 1 2 1 1 2 3 3 2 1 2 2 4 3 2 2 2 3 1 1 3 2 3 3 1 4 3 1 1 3 2 2 3 1 2 2 3 4 2
Yl Nl
seats(C)>seats(O+X) seats(C)≤seats(O+X)
enact reject
N
N
ip(P) = c’ ip(P) = o’
Yd Nd
enact reject
O
P
C
Yl Nl
O
C
Yl Nl
O
C
Yl Nl
O
C
N
Yd Nd
enact reject
O
P
Yd Nd
enact reject
O
P
Yd Nd
O
P
seats(C)>seats(O+X) seats(C)≤seats(O+X)
draft decree wait
draft decree wait
draft decree wait
draft decree wait
Subgame S1 Subgame S2 Subgame S3 Subgame S4
G1: Stability
O
O
3 3 1 2 2 1 4 2 2 3 1 2 3 3 1 2 2 1 4 3 3 2 1 3 1 1 2 3 3 2 3 2 2 4 1 2 1 1 2 3 3 2 2 3 3 4 1 2 2 2 3 1 1 3 3 4 4 2 1 4 1 1 2 3 3 2 2 3 3 4 1 3
Yl Nl
seats(C)>seats(O+X) seats(C)≤seats(O+X)
enact reject
N
N
ip(P) = c’ ip(P) = o’
Yd Nd
enact reject
O
P
C
Yl Nl
O
C
Yl Nl
O
C
Yl Nl
O
C
N
Yd Nd
enact reject
O
P
Yd Nd
enact reject
O
P
Yd Nd
O
P
seats(C)>seats(O+X) seats(C)≤seats(O+X)
draft decree wait
draft decree wait
draft decree wait
draft decree wait
Subgame C1 Subgame C2 Subgame C3 Subgame C4
G2: Crisis
14
either r=c’ or r=o’. This will also be the case if O disapproves while C has a majority of seats
(subgames 1 and 3). If however, C does not have a majority (subgames 2 and 4) and O disap-
proves, there will be an election. Only with a view to the consequences of this election do the
games differ. In Stability, the election will lead to a majority cabinet of O, and the game ends with
r=o. In Crisis, the election will result in a majority cabinet of X, and the game ends with r=x. We
abstain from modelling the events after Nd, since subgames 2 and 4 (C minority cabinet), and 1
and 3 (with X instead of C as majority cabinet) of each model imply this result.
Subgame perfect Nash equilibria (SPNE) for each of the eight subgames S1-S4 and C1-C4 are
also depicted in Figure 4, for the example in Figure 3, i.e. where c’>c. SPNE are derived from
transforming utility losses for players into numbers into numbers by the magnitude of losses
within each subgame, with the lowest loss receiving the highest number.6 These “payoffs” are
listed below the game trees for C (top row), P (middle row), and O (bottom row). Since we do
not include X’s actions in the game tree, we abstain from depicting X’s “payoffs” as well. In Sta-
bility, in subgame S1, for example, where Nature has set P to have ideal point c’ and C to control
a majority of seats, C “receives” a payoff of 3 if O approves C’s draft that sets policy at c, since
this represents C’s ideal point, and a utility loss of Zero ensues for C. P then receives, since c is
closer to her ideal point than o and there are not other policy alternatives in this subgame than c,
c’, and o. Finally, O receives 2 as well, since c is, though not being O’s ideal point o, still closer to
o than c’. Though there are two SPNE in this subgame (draft-Yd, and draft-Yn), it is clear that C
will not in equilibrium propose a decree rather than a draft.
As S1 represents a situation of a majority cabinet and a president with similar preferences to C
this result of the cabinet using the parliamentary rather than the presidential path is perhaps not
surprising. This not depending on whether the president has similar or dissimilar preferences as
compared to C (subgames S1, S3, C1, C3) however points towards majority cabinets not being
affected in terms of realization of their preferences also in instances where the president’s prefer-
ences differ from the cabinet’s.
This result provokes the question as to why we do not include a move of P that replaces cabinet
C with O. We do not for two reasons. 1) Since we assume players to be policy-seeking rather
than office-seeking, replacing parties in cabinet alone does not help any player. This is in line
with, for example, Laver and Shepsle’s classic model of portfolio allocation (Laver and Shepsle
6 So there are four „highest numbers“ for each player in each subgame rather than only on such number for each player in each game as a whole. Consequently, payoffs are not comparable over subgames. But comparability is un-necessary for the substantial purposes of the model – the exploration of conditions und which actors switch from one institutional path to the other, since each subgame only serves as to implement the four scenarios mentioned above.
15
1996) and a policy-oriented approach in general (see, e.g. Tsebelis 2002). 2) We are interested in
democracies where legislation lies with parliament. In subgames 1 and 3 this could be implement-
ed as a counter-measure if C was replaced as cabinet by O, thus neutralizing the legislative effects
of any change in cabinet as long as C has a majority. In the two situations where C does not has a
majority (subgames 2 and 4), O has its way in equilibrium also under the circumstances of the
model – and this is to the detriment of P, since O is never ready to switch to c’ or o’ if it can get
o. Even if we imagine policy to be at c rather than o at the outset, O somehow getting into office,
and C reacting to drafts and decrees, policy could only be switched towards o’ if O held a majori-
ty. This would be due to both C and X opposing any switch from c. So, a mere change of cabinet
would not affect the results of our model in terms of policy outcome. This could only be
achieved by a change in composition of parliament
One could then wonder why we tie a change in composition of parliament to the elections effect-
ed by the failure of a decree on part of C and why we foresee these elections to happen automati-
cally. We first address the issue whether there should not also be options for the president to just
call elections somewhere in the games. If a president with ideal point o’ was allowed to just call
elections when faced with a cabinet supported by C in order to establish a cabinet supported by
O at any point in time (i.e., as a first move of each subgame), he had, of course, an incentive to
do just this, since o’-o<o’-c. This move would be equivalent to a further random draw by Nature
on parliament composition. Depending on the scenario abounding then, there would either be a
situation with outcomes as in subgame 1 (the cabinet having a majority, and the president getting
her second-best result) or another random draw by Nature effected by the president’s move on
parliament dissolution, and, if needed, another, and another. It is not that we do not deem such
moves “unrealistic” – the sequence of the three consecutive German elections of 31 July 1932, 6
November 1932, and 5 March 1933 being a case in point. But including such a move of the pres-
ident in the model would mean that the president could decide composition of parliament on her
own. Though this is probably not what is meant with representative democracy – the three men-
tioned elections again being a case in point – more importantly in terms of our interest in behav-
ior of parties and president this would confuse parties with the electorate (“Nature”) as the actors
with whom the president is understood to interact in the legislature. For this reason we also make
elections obligatory at some points and dictate their results, but with a different target: C using
the presidential path to provoke an election rather than to accept the outcome as propelled under
the current composition of parliament. Again, this would not seem “unrealistic” empirically – the
German elections of 4 May 1924, 7 December 1924, and 14 September 1930 being our examples
this time. But we would confuse things again, this time the president with the electorate. Election
16
results as dictated in the models never make C better off than the worst result it can achieve in
any other way. So provoking elections also does not pay for C, and this is also true for O in Cri-
sis. We are thus able to focus on actor behavior with a view to the recent rather than some future
composition of parliament.
In Stability, this leads to the presidential path never being in. Again, it does not matter whether
the president has her ideal point at o’ or c’. In Crisis however, C will always propose a decree if it
supports a minority cabinet, P will always enact it, and O will always approve. We achieve this
result by confronting players C, O, and P with electoral prospects that are not conducive to foster
their policy goals, just as in Stability. Only this time, X as the only player never willing to com-
promise gets what he wants if an election is called, and due to X’s extreme position, everyone else
is worse of if this happens. Only this prospect however makes the presidential path attractive to
C, since O and P are now forced to choose between x and c’ (C2) or x and o’ (C4) if C decide to
propose the decree rather than introduce the draft. This allows us to hypothesize that:
H1: If there is a minority cabinet, where the president represents a party that is part of the coali-
tion, and where the non-extremist opposition is faced with electoral defeat if it does not accept
the policy set by the cabinet, then legislation will proceed along the presidential path.
We do not discuss here the implications of the model for instances where o’<o und c’<c, i.e.
where the president is “to the left” of o or “between o and c, but to the right from sq, since these
modifications would not affect the hypotheses above that in turn reflect our interest in this paper.
5 Test
We now test our hypothes using data on parliamentary events in the German Reichstag in the
period 6 June 1920 – 1 June 1932, i.e. the first through fifth legislative periods. We do this with a
dataset that has been assembled by coding the annexes to the parliamentary minutes (Anhänge zu
den Stenographischen Berichten) with a view to, inter alia, the date of each annex, its “type” (e.g., draft
law, decree, motion, motion on vote of no confidence, or report of committee), and its “author”
(e.g. cabinet, president, or name/s of sponsor/s of motions). We are interested here in draft laws
and presidential decrees. This concerns 1301 observations (1132 draft laws, 169 decrees issued by
the president) of the 15.591 observations related to this period in the dataset.
With a view to H1, we expect an inverse relationship of the frequency of decrees and draft law,
since the former should replace the latter. This should hold controlling for the characteristic of
Weimar cabinets, i.e. frequent minority cabinets, polarization of the parliament as a whole and
17
the share of extremist parties, and recurring periods of crisis. We operationalize a “crisis” as a
time, where parts of the country are under foreign control, annual inflation rate is higher than
1.000 percent, unemployment affects more than 7.5 percent of the workforce (equaling roughly
20 percent of Germans eligible for unemployment benefits in 1930), or a combination of these
inconveniences. In order to point to the situation as expected in the model (minority cabinet,
president at same side of left-right divide as cabinet, crisis, and extremist parties being conceiva-
ble of attaining a parliamentary majority) we constructed a further dummy for the combination of
this, where more than 30 percent of seats are in the hands of an extremist party.
Two OLS on the number of presidential decrees per day in each month between June 1920 and
May 1932 where at least one draft law or one decree conform to this expectation (see Table 4).
While the president’s position and the share of extremist parties as such do not play a role, taking
this into account points at an increase of one presidential decree every week. However, the rela-
tionship between frequency of draft laws and decrees, though still inverse, is not significant at the
level it was without considering the kind of crisis as described in the games. We still interpret this
result as supportive of H1.
Table 4: Test of Hypothesis 1
Observations 127
127 F 7,67
8,75
Prob>F 0
0 R2 0,28
0,34
Adj. R2 0,24
0,31
Coefficient Std. Error t P>t Coefficient Std. Error t P>t
draft laws/day -0,07 0,020 -2,90*** 0,004 -0,04 0,024 -1,59 0,115
president -0,01 0,140 -0,56 0,574 -0,02 0,014 -1,15 0,253
minority cabinet 0,10 0,034 2,97*** 0,004 0,07 0,030 2,11** 0,037
parliament polarization 0,50 0,27 1,84* 0,067 0,30 0,270 1,10 0,275
Share of extremists 0,02 0,137 0,13 0,894 -0,34 0,170 -1,99** 0,048
Crisis 0,04 0,015 2,62** 0,010 -0,01 0,020 -0,62 0,539
Crisis+president+extreme
0,13 0,039 3,36*** 0,001
Constant -0,12 0,064 -1,90* 0,060 0,04 0,080 0,55 0,582
6 Conclusion
The democratic performance of the Weimar Republic is, of course, miserable regarding the re-
gime that came to power in 1933. In the immediate aftermath of the period under study in this
paper, three consecutive elections ensued, bringing ever higher gains to the extremist parties on
the left and the right. Cabinets were not related to any parliamentary basis anymore and changed
at a similar pace to the pre-1930 period. Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag on 2 June and legis-
18
lation proceeded solely with presidential decrees. In the brief periods of the Reichstag being as-
sembled – two days after the elections of July 1932 until he was again dissolved on 12 September,
and three days after the elections of November 1932 before a further dissolution on 1 February
1933 – the NSDAP, DNVP and KPD factions blocked parliamentary business with their parlia-
mentary majority. Not a single of the 91 presidential decrees issued between June and December
1932 was thus subject to Reichstag scrutiny. Rather than negotiating on with parliament, the pres-
ident just barred it from access to legislation. Legislation ceased to be connected to any parlia-
mentary scrutiny and Reichstag parties, on 24 March 1933, finally granted the Hitler cabinet an
unconditional empowerment act, thereby relinquished lawmaking to the Nazis. But this only
happened after the president had, with the appointment of Franz von Papen, and immediate
Reichstag dissolution, ceased to abide by the spirit if not the letter of the Weimar constitution.
These final months of the first German republic were thus characterized by presidential dictator-
ship rather than “constitutional dictatorship” (Skach 2005). Indeed, the powers exercised by the
president in conjunction with the chancellor before June 1932 were within the domain of his
constitutional authority as envisaged by the liberal founders of the Weimar constitution (Stirk
2002).
With a view to the more recent past, our paper thus points at a crucial role of constitutional prac-
tice rather than constitutional letter, simply because practice will be linked to factors outside the
constitution itself. Our models, for example, indicate electoral prospects of the opposition to be
crucial for delineating the circumstances that foster presidential influence over policy outcomes
from those that privilege cabinet, or the opposition. These prospects will never be certain in ad-
vance in a democracy; and much less so at its constitutional outset, as the experience of Weimar
republic demonstrates.
Our paper also points towards the use of more detailed analysis of legislative processes within
individual political systems. Even when Duverger introduced the notion of Semi-presidentialism,
he only did so in the aftermath of presidential dominance over French political life; i.e. in a situa-
tion when a particular path of the processes ceased to be the only one generally taken. Similarly,
the class of “Tiered” systems of legislative power separation proposed here will not be of particu-
lar analytical use as long as situations conducive to the second tier becoming “active” do not
arise. With a view to our models these situations can even be rather special (a particular political
position of the president, of the cabinet, and of the opposition, and a crisis that threatens to bring
about very undesired consequences to them all if they do not act in equilibrium). But, as the
Weimar experience shows, they can arise.
19
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