Electoral Legitimacy Vs. Political Support. Presidential Strategies to Influence the Policy Process in Semi-Presidential Republics

The emergence of political systems that combine directly elected presidents with multiparty systems has called for increased scholarly attention on the structural interaction between different loci of power. In such semi-presidential systems, the president formally has a constitutionally limited role, leaving the main institutional drive for policy making and implementation with the government and its supportive legislative majority. So far, scholarly literature has provided insufficient accounts for the informal aspects of presidential authority. The present study claims that, albeit her electoral legitimacy and symbolic capital, the president is limited in her actions by the need to have a working partnership with a supportive parliamentary party. Evidence is provided by an investigation of the policy outcomes of different presidentially led strategies in the new democracies of Romania and Bulgaria. Using the case of post-communist countries that present the incentives for an increase in the presidentialization of politics, I uncover that even under these circumstances, the directly elected president is institutionally constrained, can be politically isolated and rendered ineffective. Following a comparative analysis of cases when they were or were not successful, the study identifies that the effect of the president is conditional on the inclusion of her own parliamentary party in the cabinet.