Afghanistan’s strong president and weak parties

Since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, Afghanistan has belonged to the league of democracies in Asia. Prior to this regime change, the country had experienced 30 years of civil war, and only a decadelong, relatively democratic period during the 1960s. Such political history makes it difficult to write this chapter; because of the paucity of existing research on democratic institutions, the period that can be studied is very limited, and data are hard to obtain. With these caveats in mind, this chapter analyses Afghanistan’s executive-legislative relations with a focus on the period of the first parliamentary term, from 2005 to 2010. Although the number of studies on Afghan politics has grown rapidly during recent years,¹ there remains a paucity of research on executive-legislative relationships that takes theoretical and comparative perspectives. This chapter is one of the first attempts to study Afghan politics from such perspectives.