Semi-presidentialism has become a widespread choice among constitution makers around the world. Elgie (1999) defines semi-presidentialism as a system where the constitution includes both a popularly elected president and a prime minister and cabinet accountable to the parliament. With his inclusive definition there are 53 countries with a semi-presidential constitution. The aim of this paper is two-folded. First, we want to demonstrate the empirically value of using the distinction between the two sub-types of semi-presidentialism, i.e. between premier-presidential and president-parliamentary regimes. Second, by using indicators on regime performance and democracy from the QoG dataset on 173 countries, we examine the performance records of premier-presidential and president-parliamentary regimes. This is done in relation to parliamentarism and presidentialism. We find a manifest difference between the two sub-types of semi-presidentialism. While premier-presidential regimes have performance records close to parliamentary regimes, president-parliamentary regimes display performance records more similar to pure presidentialism, and it performs even worse on most indicators.