Abstract
This paper aims to analyze the institutional evolution of impeachment, from its emergence in England to the occurrence of the American and French matrices, which would later be repeated, with variations, in current presidential and semi-presidential democracies. The recent mutation in this instrument function, as we argue here, turned it into a political weapon at disposal of parliamentary oppositions against governments, by one hand, and by the other hand, converted it in a quite peculiar motion of distrust to oust presidents. Nonetheless, this mutation must be understood as another historical change that characterizes a long trajectory of evolutionary adaptations to fit the constant political environment modifications. We conclude by emphasizing the necessity of analyzing the impeachment institutional evolution history in order to understand accurately the reasons for the development of these new functions in currently context of presidential democracies crisis.
Impeachment; institutional evolution; presidentialism; parliamentarism; presidential democracies