Presidential Transitions and The Redefinition of the Executive-Parliament Relationship. Does Embodying Change Necessarily Strengthen Presidential Leverage?

In light of existing literature and drawing on three years of comparative research on the presidential transitions of five presidents, Obama, Trump, Sarkozy, Hollande, and Macron, this paper aims to explore how the “window of political opportunity” aspect of this changeover would make it possible to define new roles, structures, and power relationships in the political-administrative area and between the administration and the legislature. This contribution will especially clarify both the constantly renewed negotiation of executive-parliament relationships and the presidential “role”. This approach presupposes studying the presidential campaigns, the establishment of a government, the organization of a new majority and its first measures. The process-tracing method contributes to opening the “black box” of institutional constraints. This research attempts to better explain the breathing space a new government can hope to gain while this window is open. How are newly-elected Presidents using the election to evolve institutional practices and arrangements? Understanding the President’s influence and his leadership requires to understand: 1/The formal and informal constraints: economic and social contexts, expectations related to the President (accountability, authenticity, etc): the use of their resources, internal and external (Light, 1982), as well as formal and informal (Ponder, 2017), needs to be contextualized; 2/Constraints related to the election: campaign promises, the power relationships redefinition and the distribution of resources between the different coalitions resulting from this election; 3/And how they articulate these constraints with their preferences. All of this needs to be taken into account to understand the “presidential leverage” (Ponder, 2017) in the political system. This “presidential role” informs about the institutional constraints a President has to deal with to define his leadership. According to Donald Searing: « Political roles are the place where individual choices meet institutional constraints […] we need to understand the institutional context in order to understand how the actor understands the situation ». Going beyond the concept of a role as a mission, we need to understand how does the “wall of reality” yields learning and feedbacks, influencing thereafter the executive-parliament relationships, the presidential political and technical capacities, and the subsequent possibilities of government’s activities. These cases will highlight how political and institutional systems imposing different election campaigns paces and transition to power lead to various expressions of a president’s leadership and how the relationships arose differently. Moreover, it will explain how the constraints are balanced with three dimensions: policy, office, and votes (Müller, Strom, 1999). The alliance of the MSF and a favorable coalition has been proved to be important when it comes to implementing “campaign pledges” (Guinaudeau, Saurugger, 2018). This will lead us to identify the “votes” and “policies” dimensions’ role in this process. Based on three types of data and the process-tracing method, this paper includes interviews with staff of presidents, media and testimonial material and institutional data. As a “Visiting Scholar” at the Miller Center (UVA) during a presidential election year, I will also rely on their work titled the “First-Year Project” and the considerable center’s resources.