Who’s in Charge? Presidents, Assemblies, and the Political Control of Semipresidential Cabinets

Abstract

This article develops an account of who controls Europe’s semipresidential cabinets politically. The authors ask which actors negotiate cabinet composition and what shapes who is in charge of the cabinet—questions that have been the focus of key debates about the political consequences of this regime type since Duverger. This article proposes and tests a principal—agent account of semipresidential governments as controlled by the president and assembly parties whose constitutional and electoral authority and ability to act on behalf of the voters critically shapes their influence on the government. The authors test their argument using data on 218 cabinets in 13 Eastern and Western European semipresidential regimes (1945—2005).

Presidential influence on parliamentary election timing and the electoral fate of prime ministers

“…These findings contribute to two literatures of importance in comparative politics. First, our study of presidential influence on election outcomes complements and extends the literature on presidential activism, which has so far documented how presidents shape government composition, formation and termination (Amorim Neto and Strøm 2006;Tavits 2009;Kang 2009;Schleiter and Morgan-Jones 2009;Schleiter and Morgan-Jones 2010). By charting the impact of presidents on the electoral performance of governments, we take this literature in a new direction.…”

Executive capacity to control legislatures and presidential choice of cabinet ministers in East Asian democracies

“…To estimate the share of nonpartisan ministers in the cabinet, we employ extended beta‐binomial models with country fixed effects. These models are widely used to estimate cabinet partisanship for proportion data that are obtained from a series of binary choices normally dependent of each other (e.g., Amorim Neto, ; Amorim Neto & Strøm, ; King, ; Schleiter & Morgan‐Jones, ). The estimation of fixed effects will account for unobserved country‐level heterogeneity and address potential serial correlation.…”

Cohabitation and Conflicting Politics in French Policymaking

“…The issue of democratic survival, the focus of Linz's original article, was taken up by several authors who assessed the effect of semi-presidential institutions on democratic collapse (Kirschke, 2007;Linz & Arturo, 1994;Pasquino, 1997;Sartori, 1994;Skach, 2005;Protsyk, 2003). Others have looked at how semi-presidential dual executives have affected voting behavior (Gschwend & Leuffen, 2005;Lewis-Beck, 1997;Lewis-Beck & Nadeau, 2000;Magalhaes & Gomez Fortes, 2005), cabinet formation (Grossman, 2009;Amorim Neto & Strom, 2006;Cheibub & Chernykh, 2008;Schleiter & Morgan-Jones, 2010), or more generally intra-executive relations (Ardant & Duhamel, 1999;Cohendet, 1993;Zarka, 1992).…”