Proximity, Candidates, and Presidential Power

Abstract

This article examines the impact of direct presidential elections on legislative party systems. We argue that presidential power shapes the effective number of presidential candidates in a way that will have a reductive effect on the legislative party system, but this reduction will be observed only within an intermediary range of presidential power. We also argue that this proposition should be tested solely on the population of countries with direct presidential elections. We find that the effect of presidential coattails is less important than has typically been suggested, that by contrast presidential power has an influence on the legislative party system, but also that we need to think carefully about how to capture variation in presidential power when trying to estimate its effect. This latter point applies to the debate about the determinants of the legislative party system but also to debates about the effect of presidential power more generally.

The party system effects of unstable electoral rules in Latin America

“…Most works that found a reductive effect of temporally proximate presidential elections on the number of electoral parties when the number of presidential candidates is low have used samples pooling elections from presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary democracies, treating parliamentary elections as equivalent to midterm legislative elections in regimes with direct presidential elections. However, Elgie et al (2014) show that when we restrict the sample to regimes with direct presidential elections, there is no discernible restrictive effect of temporally proximate presidential elections on the number of electoral parties, regardless of the number of candidates competing in that election. Interestingly, most observations in their analysis come from new democracies.…”

Foreign Policy Preferences and Vote Choice Under Semi-Presidentialism

“…In these elections, voter choices are mostly idiosyncratic and related to the personal characteristics of the candidates (O'Malley 2012; van der Brug et al 2000). This explanation is supported by research finding an inverse relationship between the strength of a presidency and the number of candidates: if the powers of the president are weak, major parties will have little incentive to waste resources on presenting candidates (Elgie et al 2014; Hicken and Stoll 2008, 2013), and reduced competition from political parties encourages non-partisans to participate, thus diluting the influence of representational factors or government performance.…”

“…The Lithuanian presidency has an interesting mix of medium powers and constitutional ambiguity. Various measures of presidential power place it in the average category for both Central and Eastern Europe (Sedelius 2006; Elgie et al 2014; Raunio and Sedelius 2019) and also European (Elgie 2009; Siaroff 2003) semi-presidential republics. There are several particular reasons for selecting this case.…”

Presidential Elections and European Party Systems (1848–2020)

“…Once again, a rich literature, inspired by the principal-agent theory, documents negative relationships between presidential power and democratic consolidation (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997;Shugart and Carey 1992), cabinet stability (Fernandes and Magalhães 2016;Protsyk 2005), electoral fragmentation (Clark and Wittrock 2005;Elgie et al 2014;Golder 2006;Hicken and Stoll 2013), and party institutionalization (Samuels 2002;Samuels and Shugart 2010). Studies of the structure of competition have been fewer.…”