Institutional Power and Interbranch Coordination: Managing Executive-Legislative Relations in Presidential and Semi-Presidential Democracies

The purpose of this workshop is to incentivise new theoretical and empirical work on executive-legislative relations in presidential and semi-presidential democracies. There is a long-standing controversy about the relative impact of different constitutional systems on executive-legislative relations. This debate began with the seminal, if somewhat pessimistic, work of Juan Linz, who argued that presidential systems were inherently more prone to executive-legislative conflict than parliamentary systems (Linz 1994, Stepan and Skach 1993). The Linzian approach was grounded in an expectation of interbranch conflict. Fast-forwarding to 2010, a review essay by two leading scholars would claim that the research frontier in the study of executive-legislative relations under presidentialism had now shifted to coordination — i.e. to the study of the mechanisms that allowed presidents and assemblies to cooperate, even under apparently unfavourable scenarios of partisan fragmentation and divided government (Cheibub and Limongi 2010). Newer empirical work has demonstrated that presidentialism is no more prone to legislative deadlock, executive-legislative conflict, or barriers to coalition building than most parliamentary systems (see for example, Cheibub, Przeworski and Saiegh 2004; Cheibub 2007; Amorim Neto 2006). In fact, presidents, just like prime ministers, are often conciliatory and willing to compromise (Cox and Morgenstern 2002; Amorim Neto 2002; 2006; Pereira, Power and Rennó 2005; Raile, Pereira and Power 2011). This literature has now moved beyond superficial comparisons of presidentialism, semipresidentialism and parliamentarism format to address important sub-regime variables, which evince immense variation within these broad categories (Elgie 2005). Examining political systems where the head of state is directly elected, our focus in this workshop will be on the specific institutional powers that induce “coordination” rather than “conflict” in executive-legislative relations. These include presidential prerogatives and the power of the national legislature, not to mention the tools that allow presidents to overcome the problem of severe party fragmentation (see Shugart and Carey 1992; Cox and Morgenstern 2002; Fish 2006; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997; Fish and Kreonig 2009; Siaroff 2003; Chaisty, Cheeseman and Power 2014). How do these mechanisms overcome incentives to conflict? What is their impact on interbranch accountability and democratic quality? We propose to use this workshop to incentivise scholars to respond to this call. We aim to encourage new theoretical and empirical studies that explore the institutional variation in presidential and semi-presidential systems, and the implications of this variation for the relationship with the legislature. In selecting the papers for this workshop, theory-building and/or comparative papers (including cross-regional studies) will be given preference over single-country case studies. For empirical papers, we encourage scholars to be as innovative and as precise as possible in the concepts and measures of executive and legislative power that they employ. We will encourage cross-national empirical comparisons of executive and legislative power, but we also envision the workshop as an opportunity for Africanists, Asianists, Latin Americanists and scholars of the former Communist bloc to share insights with each other about executive-legislative relations more generally. 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Cox, Gary and Scott Morgenstern, 2001. ‘Latin America’s Reactive Assemblies and Proactive Presidents.’ Comparative Politics 33(2): 171-190. Elgie, Robert. 2005. “From Linz to Tsebelis: Three Waves of Presidential/Parliamentary Studies?” Democratization 12, no. 1: 106-122. Fish, Steven. 2006. “Creative Constitutions: How Do Parliamentary Powers Shape the Electoral Arena?” In Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Fish, Steven and Matthew Kroenig. 2009. The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey. New York: Cambridge University Press. Linz, Juan J. 1990. “The Perils of Presidentialism.” Journal of Democracy 1 (1), pp. 51-69. Mainwaring, Scott. 1993. ‘Presidentialism, Multipartism and Democracy: The Difficult Combination.’ Comparative Political Studies, 26: 198-228. Mainwaring, Scott and Matthew Soberg Shugart, eds. 1997. Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America. 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