Presidents and Mass-Elite Preference Congruence: A Global Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Congruence in policy preferences between voters and parliamentary representatives has long been considered a vital quality of representative democracy. Reflecting the significance of the topic, our meta-analysis results based on 154 related empirical studies show that the literature has witnessed a dramatic increase in the past decades appearing under several labels, e.g., "issue representation", "opinion congruence,” "policy representation", "issue congruence,” “opinion-policy link”, or "policy congruence.” Despite the growing academic interest, the publications left one critical blind spot—presidents have been overlooked in the elite-level preference measurement. Out of 115 works containing at least one presidential or semi-presidential democracy in the mass-elite congruence research, less than 5% of the total works explicitly examined the policy preference of the president. This is a serious limitation for the literature to be globally relevant in present times. For instance, beyond Western Europe, roughly three-fourths are either semi-presidential or presidential democracies. Moreover, for many presidential and semi-presidential democracies, presidents are powerful political actors who can directly affect policy-making processes and results. With a direct mandate from the people, presidents are often entrusted with a wide range of legislative and executive powers, such as introducing and vetoing legislation, issuing decrees, initiating referendums, forming and dismissing cabinet, dissolving parliament, or supervising military operations as commanders-in-chief. Beyond the prevalence of directly elected presidents and their policy influences, we should remember that presidents cannot be equated to faithful agents of their affiliated parties. Since presidents enjoy a separate political survival for a fixed term, they are often isolated from partisan mandates. Against this backdrop, the panel brings together three studies from Eastern Europe, North Africa, and East Asia to fulfill the following goals: ▪️ Demonstrate the importance of including presidents’ preferences in understanding key policy outcomes in (semi-) presidential democracies. ▪️ Theorize why and under what circumstances presidents’ preferences deviate (or not) from their parties. ▪️ How to systematically combine parliamentary elites’ preferences with that of presidents Focusing on two significant cases in the regional wave of the Arab Spring—Egypt and Tunisia—the first paper compares policy preferences between parliamentary parties and presidential candidates during founding elections in the early 2010s. Specifically, with election manifesto data from parliamentary and presidential elections, the paper measures mass-elite congruence levels by analyzing both issue positions and issue salience. Leveraging on variation in political institutions and party continuity, the second paper examines the divergence and convergence of policy preferences between political parties and presidents. Based on process tracing of legislative speeches in three Eastern European countries—Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania—the paper demonstrates under what conditions presidents are more likely to have deviant preferences and how that helps to understand key legislative changes. Finally, with multiple available data types in four East Asian democracies—South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines—the third paper explores the pros and cons of each data type in measuring presidents’ preferences. Moreover, given legislative interdependence between presidents and parliamentary elites, the paper explores varieties of factors we ought to consider in merging elite-level preference as one.

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