Cohabitation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Cohabitation is an arrangement of split-executive government in semi-presidential systems where the directly elected president is forced to nominate the prime minister from the opposition party that holds the majority in the national assembly. Cohabitation strongly impacts the power of the president, as the parliamentary component is reinforced and the prime minister takes on far-reaching decision powers. This arrangement contrasts markedly with that of unified government, in which a de facto presidential logic prevails: The president is the undisputed head of government and the prime minister is the president’s chief of staff. Rather, in cohabitation, both officials—the president and the prime minister—hold a formal and informal veto power, which leads to coalition-like politics based on compromise. Consequently, the system oscillates between the two poles of presidential and parliamentary regime features.

French political scientist Maurice Duverger introduced the term cohabitation in 1980 by to explain divided government in the Fifth French Republic (1958–present). In its history, cohabitation has occurred three times: from 1986 to 1988 and from 1993 to 1995, when socialist president Francois Mitterand was confronted with a center-right majority and had to respectively nominate Jacques Chirac and Eduard Balladur, and from 1997 to 2002, when Gaullist president Chirac had to nominate Lionel Jospin, the leader of the victorious Socialist Party, as prime minister.

Bibliography:

Duverger, Maurice. La Cohabitation des Francais. Paris: Press Universitaire de France, 1987.
Elgie, Robert. Political Institutions in Contemporary France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.