Semi-Presidentialism as Power-Sharing: Constitutional Reform after the Arab Spring
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The political history of many of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region over the last 60 years has been one of strong presidents and weak legislatures. The democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring created the opportunity to reconstitute the political system in a way that marks a fundamental break from the dictatorships of the recent past. This report assesses the contribution that the semi-presidential form of government can make to preventing the re-emergence of presidential dictatorship and consolidating democracy in the MENA region. The failure of the constitutional systems in place before the Arab Spring can be attributed to a combination of three factors. First, presidential power was largely unlimited. Second, the system of government did not allow the legislature to act as an effective check on presidential power. Third, many pre-Arab Spring countries were single-party states, in which much of the bureaucracy and many state institutions were dominated by the president’s political allies and supporters. Semi-presidential government, if carefully designed, can act as a mechanism to ensure that presidential dictatorship does not re-emerge. The design of such a system must be guided by three principles that respond directly to the constitutional failures in the MENA region: (1) limited presidential power, (2) an effective legislature that is capable of exercising oversight of the president and the government and (3) effective and meaningful power sharing between the prime minister and the president. The report applies these principles to the design of a semi-presidential system for the post-Arab Spring MENA region.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it