No abstract

Presidents’ informal powers remain under-investigated especially in Western European democracies. This gap might hamper the full understanding of how presidents ultimately behave and act. The objective of this article is twofold. First, it aims at adopting a definition of presidents’ informal powers by distinguishing them from formal ones and from informal institutions. Second, it distinguishes among different kind of informal powers by focusing on why presidents use them. To this end, a typology based on the following two criteria is proposed: (1) the existence of formal powers at disposal of the president in a specific sphere and (2) the evaluation of public support each individual president thinks to enjoy should they act or refrain. Four types of informal powers can be derived from these dimensions: substitutive informal powers, parallel informal powers, risk-taking informal powers and subverting informal powers.

No abstract

Although party system change has been widely explored, it is less so for the regional level. The article provides the first systematic attempt to discuss party system change at the regional level in Italy. Through a comprehensive overview of the five 1995–2015 regional elections, indicators of party system change, based on an original database, are explored. It will be showed that in the 2013–15 election cycle while party system fragmentation, volatility and recomposition reached their maximum high – parallel to what happened in 1995 – the level of bipolarism, one of the main features of Italian party system since the mid-1990s, dramatically dropped replaced by a three-pole configuration. These results, and their consistency with the relevant junctures at the national level in 1994 and 2013, may allow to state that a party system change at the regional level occurred and thus to consider 2013–15 elections as critical

No abstract