Semi-Presidential System

A system of government that combines a president elected directly by voters and holding real executive power with a prime minister and cabinet who are separately accountable to, and can be removed by, the legislature, so executive authority is genuinely shared between two offices rather than concentrated in one. The French political scientist Maurice Duverger named and defined the category, drawing chiefly on France's Fifth Republic, established in 1958 and strengthened by the 1962 reform that made the presidency directly elected. France is generally treated as the model case, though Duverger himself, and later scholars, found that semi-presidential systems function quite differently from one country to the next depending on whether the president's own party also controls the legislature.