Special Issue on Presidents and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book

Asked to name the or one of the most-cited books in one’s PhD thesis, not few would initially point to ‘Presidents and Assemblies’ by Matthew Shugart and John Carey – at least if you are interested in comparative politics, and a frequent reader of the presidential power blog. In fact, given recent institutional re-shuffling and convulsions in both democratic and autocratic polities around the globe, the scholarship laid out by Shugart and Carey has not lost its relevance.

Justifiably, then, this book has been one of the most important points of reference for every study on presidents, presidential power and the role of parties and party systems in between the president and the assembly since it was published in 1992 (according to google scholar 4591 individual citations as of today). To engage with this book means to reflect on an abundance of material, both theoretical and empirical.

We had the pleasure to edit a Special Issue on President and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book (Political Studies Review 1/2020) bringing together a group of enthusiastic people during an authors’ workshop at the University of Göttingen. These scholars took up the variety of arguments and topics that run through ‘Presidents and Assemblies’. Their contributions expand on the initial ideas of this seminal book with exciting arguments and new data. We are particularly happy that Political Studies Review showed interest in this project and that our editor Martin Ejnar Hansen guided the review process.

Current debates in political science have both endorsed and challenged Shugart and Carey’s initial ideas. Our approach in putting together this special issue was guided by the idea to interrogate the book’s theoretical and empirical arguments against the background of recent scholarship. We are focused particularly on the question of how individual attributes of legislative-executive relations effect democracy and influence political governance. And so, we ‘forced’ all contributors to approach the heterogeneity of the classic categories of parliamentarism, presidentialism and semi-presidentialism. We aim for a discussion of the characteristics and consequences of individual core attributes and to detach these attributes of legislative-executive relations from the classic categorization of political system types. While this idea does not add up to a full-scale theoretical argument, it provided the orientation and framework to investigate core assumptions in Shugart and Carey’s (1992) book.

In Presidents and Assemblies, Shugart and Carey argued that not a specific type of political system is more conducive or more damaging to democratic development. Quite to the contrary, specific institutional configurations, i.e. the concentration of legislative power with the president and the way the party system is shaped, lead to a possible vulnerability of a political regime. These core attributes are, in our understanding, first, accountability and survival, second, executive lawmaking, and third, party system and party organization. The contributors engaged with the question of how far we can really lift these features from the classic trichotomy to get a better understanding of Shugart and Carey’s (1992, p. 12) idea of “trade-off“ or “balancing efficiency and representativeness“. One example is the way how Shugart and Carey (1992) distinguish between delegated and constitutional legislative power affecting the bargaining relationship between president and parliament.

In this sense, Cristina Bucur approaches the question of how the possibility to gain coalition bargaining power between parties and presidents. She argues that it largely depends on the de jure power of the president and the concrete bargaining environment, theoretically in all types of governance. Karleen West and Jae-Jae Spoon test the theoretical argument in Presidents and Assemblies about the relation between the parties’ role in a subnational contest and in national/presidential elections. They show that the participation of a party in subnational elections and the level of centralization influences the strategy parties use in presidential races by gaining momentum. Approaching the so-called inefficiency secret David Doyle and Timothy Power test the underlying idea of an inverse relationship between the extent of executive power and the strength of political parties. Their argument emphasis a focus on to the type of transition as explanation for this inverse relation. Michael Koss provides first evidence for the functionally equivalent legislative powers in different political regimes in strenuous moments for these representative democracies. Tapio Raunio and Thomas Sedelius’ analysis focusses on the specific logic of premier-presidential regimes and the inherent – constitutionally designed – ambiguity of the role of the president in these systems and the effects of this ambiguity for his/her power. Another main topic in Presidents and Assemblies is approached by Scott Morgenstern, Amaury Perez and Maxfield Peterson as they present a new combinatorial measure of presidential power while engaging with the book’s composite index. Gianluca Passarelli argues for a new conceptualization of the presidential party and the theoretically possible effects of it on the legislature and puts it into a critical dialogue with the arguments proposed in the book. Lastly, we were lucky enough to have the late Robert Elgie[1] contribute to this issue. He revisited in his contribution the at times intense scholarly debate about the classic taxonomy of presidentialism and parliamentarism. Only a scholar like him could approach such a question in the form of a meta-analysis of different heavily debated concepts.

We hope that the different articles in the special issue stimulate further debate and discussion, which will also be reflected in future blogposts.

Anna Fruhstorfer & Gianluca Passarelli (Editors)

*** This is the first of seven blog post that will be published here over the course of the next few days, so please stay tuned. ***

Publication bibliography

Fruhstorfer, Anna; Passarelli, Gianluca (2020): President and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book: Introduction to Special Issue. In Political Studies Review 18 (1), pp. 2–11.

Shugart, Matthew Soburg; Carey, John (1992): Presidents and Assemblies. Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press.


[1] Prof. Robert Elgie, our dear friend and colleague passed away on July 14, 2019. He was a professor at Dublin City University, a leading scholar, a great colleague and a good friend to many of us. His unique dedication to the systemic study of institutions on political outcomes, with a particular focus on semi-presidential political systems, political leadership and French politics will continue to inspire us. We are honored that he contributed to this special issue and devote it to him. He will be sorely missed.

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