Presidential Republics alongside Monarchies and between Parliamentary Republics and Regimes of ‘Usurpers’

Abstract

Presidential republics may be a majority of political systems in the twenty-first century, they are none the less faced with a substantial number of other republics as well as with a substantial number of monarchies. Monarchies constituted nearly half the 56 countries of the world before 1914 (45 per cent): in 2013 there were still 37 monarchies (20.5 per cent of the total), despite the fact that presidential republics had made some gains among older monarchies in Asia (Turkey, Nepal) and in Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia). Meanwhile, in 2013 there were 49 republics which were not presidential: the large majority of these (36) were ‘parliamentary’ in character, but the other 13 divided into four groups. Three countries were highly decentralised, that is to say were even more ‘parliamentary’ than were the ‘classical’ parliamentary republics: these three were, above all, Switzerland, and, in a less convincing manner, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Micronesia. Four countries were ‘communist’, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. A further four were ‘unclas-sifiable’, Libya, Nepal, Somalia and South Sudan, as the nature of their regime was, in 2013, impossible to determine. Two countries remained, and only two countries, in a fourth category, that of the polities ruled by ‘usurpers’: these were Fiji and Myanmar, which were controlled by the members of the military who had come to power by means of a coup.