Recent debates and advances in the scholarly examination of presidential institutions

Abstract

Research on presidents and presidential institutions has never been out of date. However, presidents in semi-presidential and parliamentary systems have attracted even more attention from scholars in the last decade. Furthermore, presidential institutions, executive-legislative relations and inner-executive relationships between president and government are important topics in most countries' constitutional discourses. Their importance and thus their popularity make presidential institutions and relating questions no less disputed among scholars. Nevertheless, its importance stems largely from the role presidential institutions play in countries' democratic development, the efficiency of governance, but also the simple fascination for presidential leadership. In this article, I will show that, despite the variety of approaches and topics, a common pattern emergesnamely, the shared emphasis by scholars of presidential institutions on the importance of the variety of constitutional design. The aim of this contribution is to review recent scholarship on presidential institutions in semi-presidential and parliamentary democracies, map existing trends, in particular present the common topic of constitutional design, and propose further research directions for a field where the standards are already immensely high.

President and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book: Introduction to Special Issue

“…Since the publication of Presidents and Assemblies , research endeavors have highlighted the poor internal cohesion of the traditional categorization of presidentialism, parliamentarism, and semi-presidentialism. And, although the internal coherence of these categorizations is empirically not as strong as was long assumed, they remain important in the debate (Fruhstorfer, 2016). As this conversation on categories has evolved from the “Linzian perspective” (Schleiter and Morgan-Jones, 2009: 879), which emphasizes the worrisome effects and consequences of presidential and semi-presidential systems as such, research now takes a nuanced look at different subtypes of semi-presidentialism (i.e.…”

Presidentialisation: One Term, Two Uses – Between Deductive Exercise and Grand Historical Narrative

“…The standard way of interpreting their work is as an explanation of party organisation (e.g. Fruhstorfer, 2016). This is both because they explicitly frame their study in the context of the previous research on this topic going back to Duverger (Samuels and Shugart, 2010: 7–14) and because they make variation in constitutional presidentialisation the direct – although not deterministic – cause of differing party organisational structures.…”

The institutionalization of relative advantage: formal institutions, subconstitutional presidential powers, and the rise of authoritarian politics in Russia, 1994–2012

“…There is no generally accepted definition and consensus on how to measure the authority of presidents. However, one of the most popular approaches in comparative politics are the socalled Presidential Power Indices (PPI) that offer a more fine-grained instrument with which to capture variation than the literature on the system of government typologies of presidential and semi-presidential types (Elgie 2016;Elgie and Moestrup 2016;Fruhstorfer 2016). The number of indices to be found in the literature is quite large (among the most prominent are Shugart and Carey 1992;McGregor 1994;Frye 1997;Metcalf 2000;Roper 2002;Siaroff 2003).…”