Policy-making and Executive Rivalries in Semi-presidential European Regimes

This paper explores the complex relation between political executives in selected semi-presidential regimes, when it comes to craft important policies. It is often assumed that in such regimes, presidential authority is dominant over prime ministers’ (excluding cohabitation episodes), but as this paper will demonstrate, authority over policy-making prerogatives is often fluid and variable in semi-presidential regimes. Many scholars have addressed this issue, but the specific patterns and informal mechanisms have received less attention. With a specific focus on European semi-presidential political regimes, this paper will argue that executive effectiveness in implementing their policy preferences is as much the result of institutional prerogatives (in both ‘’standard” and cohabitation periods), than the result of leadership abilities and contextual situations of each executive’s respective positions, political objectives, and personal ambitions.