Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Reilly, Jack

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

Semi-presidential systems are democracies where a popularly elected president and a prime minister who is supported by an elected parliament share the executive portfolio of the government. These systems have been one of the most popular choices for new democracies since the 1950s. While many countries have a semi-presidential framework, they vary substantially in the constitutional powers afforded to the president. The president, being a strong political actor, can either exert more or less influence through these powers. My thesis investigates how the strength of the presidency affects citizens' external political efficacy, the feeling of being represented by the government. I hypothesize that stronger constitutional powers for the president will bring stronger feelings of external political efficacy to citizens. I selected four countries to study to illuminate how differences in these constitutional powers might influence political efficacy: Austria, Romania, Portugal, and Peru. I then use an external political efficacy variable from the joint World Values Survey-European Values Survey wave of 2017 to 2021 and average it to get the average level of political efficacy within each of my cases. The average political efficacy levels for each country did not follow my first hypothesis but rather followed my alternative hypothesis that the interaction with external efficacy would be based on the strength of democracy as measured by the Varieties of Democracy designations of liberal democracy and electoral democracy. More consolidated democracies had higher average external political efficacy rates. The qualitative section illuminated why each country did not follow my initial hypothesis, while the quantitative analyses tried to find what explains political efficacy with standard variables which also ended up not having very much explanatory power. It seems that political efficacy is related more to the country’s history and depth of democratic development than to institutional balances of powers and social factors.

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