Petra Schleiter

Constitutional Power and Competing Risks: Monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and the Termination of East and West European Cabinets

Some European constitutions give cabinets great discretion to manage their own demise, whereas others limit their choices and insert the head of state into decisions about government termination. In this article, we map the tremendous variation in the constitutional rules that govern cabinet termination and test existing expectations about its effects on a governments survival and mode of termination. In doing so, we use the most extensive government survival data set available to date, the first to include East and West European governments. Our results demonstrate that constitutional constraints on governments and presidential influence on cabinet termination are much more common than has previously been understood and have powerful effects on the hazard profiles of governments. These results alter and improve the disciplines understanding of government termination and durability, and have implications for comparative work in a range of areas, including the survival and performance of democracies, electoral accountability, opportunistic election calling, and political business cycles.

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

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).

Review Article: Citizens, Presidents and Assemblies: The Study of Semi-Presidentialism beyond Duverger and Linz

Semi-presidential regimes have attracted increasing attention from scholars and constitutional reformers over the last quarter century. Yet, despite this popularity, there is no consensus on how to understand this constitutional format. Since Duverger defined semi-presidentialism as a ‘new political system model’, and Linz argued that the constitutional format shares many of the ‘perils of presidentialism’, subsequent research has questioned the conceptual status of semi-presidentialism as a distinct regime type, and whether it has any distinct effects on politics. In this article we review the progress of recent work on semi-presidentialism and suggest that the conceptual tools to clarify some of the major debates in the field are now available in the form of principal–agent theoretical work on democratic constitutions.

Choosing Whom to Trust Agency Risks and Cabinet Partisanship in Presidential Democracies

Presidential cabinets include on average more nonparty ministers than governments in any other form of democracy, and critics of presidentialism have argued that this compromises representativeness, accountability, and governability. Yet cabinet partisanship in presidential democracies remains poorly understood. Existing studies argue that the partisan composition of cabinets reflects the degree to which presidents prioritize building legislative support. We demonstrate that a better understanding of government formation requires attention to a second dimension of choice: agency risks. Focusing on the relationship between presidents and their own parties, which is at the core of every presidential government, we show that party-affiliated ministers are not always reliable agents for presidents and that presidents appoint nonpartisan ministers to limit agency loss. We test this argument using original data on the partisanship of single-party cabinets in 12 Latin American countries and find support for the key claims.

Governmental Change in a President-Parliamentary Regime: The Case of Russia 1994-2003

Two specialists on Russian politics examine governmental stability and change in Russia from 1994 to 2003, using opinion poll results, economic and election data, Duma stenograms, memoir and biographical literature, press reports, and current-events almanacs. Rival explanations are assessed for variations in governmental stability over time and compromise over governmental composition. Bargaining, constitutional, and political-contextual explanations are examined.

The Electoral Benefits of Opportunistic Election Timing

This study explores the effect of opportunistic election timing on the incumbent’s electoral performance. While the existing literature leads to contradictory predictions about the ability of incumbent governments to benefit from strategically timed elections. We advance the theoretical debate by presenting the first cross-national comparative analysis of this question, drawing on an original data set of 318 parliamentary elections in 27 Eastern and Western European countries. In order to identify the effect of opportunistic election calling, we rely on instrumental variable regression. The results demonstrate that opportunistic election calling generates a vote share bonus for the incumbent of about 5 percentage points and is thereby likely to affect electoral accountability.

An Index of Assembly Dissolution Powers

Assembly dissolution is a key dimension of constitutional variation in parliamentary democracies. It conditions the timing of elections, influences electoral accountability, and shapes how politicians bargain about government formation, termination, and policy. Yet, despite the importance of dissolution rules, no measure exists that applies to the different actors involved in dissolutions and records the complexity of the rules sufficiently accurately to capture their substantive implications. This article develops, operationalizes, and tests a detailed index of parliamentary dissolution powers that generalizes to all relevant actors. We demonstrate the substantive utility of the index by examining how election timing powers modify electoral accountability.

Party system competitiveness and corruption

This article examines why democratic competition sometimes fails to curb governmental corruption. We argue that in democracies party system competitiveness, which shapes the ability of voters to effectively select and control their politicians through elections, plays a critical role in conditioning the scope for corruption. For voters, governmental corruption is a classical principal–agent problem and its magnitude is mediated by the extent to which the competitiveness of a party system helps to make information and effective choices available to the electorate. Informed voters who can coordinate on credible alternatives to under-performing and corrupt incumbents, we argue, can select politicians who are likely to curb corruption and hold accountable those who do not. We test this argument through a controlled comparative analysis of corruption in 70 democracies around the world and find broad support for our hypotheses.

Mixed Constitutions and Political Instability

Mixed constitutions combine executive presidents with assembly-dependent prime ministers. While some analysts argue that these regimes foster stability, their presidents are also often viewed as pivotal actors when such regimes collapse. Russias First Republic seemed to fit the latter pattern, and this article inquires into whether the addition of an executive presidency to its constitution truly had a destabilizing effect on Russias first attempt at democracy. Specialists provide different perspectives on this question. One view is that the constitution had no effect on political outcomes; a second perspective suggests that it may have had effects particular to Russia. Alternatively, its impact may have followed patterns similar to other countries. To examine these views the article provides a classification of this constitution using a comparative typology and then looks at the outcomes of political disagreements over government, policy and the constitution. It finds that these followed the sort of patterns of compromise and conflict that one might expect from a comparative perspective. The implications for our understanding of Russian politics and other political transitions are explored. It is argued that the Russian case helps to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the mixed constitutions that have attracted such divergent views.

Variation in the Durability of Semi-Presidential Democracies

This chapter examines why some semi-presidential democracies survive while others fail. The scale of suffering and loss of opportunity that followed the failure of some of these democracies remains staggering even at a historical distance: the death and destruction caused by the Nazi dictatorship in the aftermath of the Weimar Republic’s collapse, the squandering of resources that followed the collapse of democracy in Armenia in 1996, which allowed a small elite to benefit from economic growth while leaving an estimated 54 percent of Armenians struggling below the poverty level, and the havoc of civil war in Guinea-Bissau after the overthrow of democracy in 1998. While the consequences of the failure of semi-presidential democracies have often been devastating, the factors that enhance or reduce the durability of these democracies remain, as yet, poorly understood.