Informal powers as effective weapons of formally constrained presidents. Insights from parliamentary and semi-presidential cases

The discussion on presidential informal powers is a topic underinvestigated, especially in Europe. The paper builds on a (previously proposed) definition of informal powers to assess how and to what extent formally constrained presidents succeed in prevailing when confronting with executive or legislative by using informal powers in different spheres such as government formation, policy-making, and polity definition. This first discussion will allow to identify certain specific cases of presidents operating in parliamentary and semipresidential regimes, who tried to strengthen their role and whose going-public tactis may be worth exploring. To this end, a sample of relevant public presidential speeches will be analysed by using qualitative content analysis. This exercise allows to empirically test three problems: 1) what kind of issues are at stake for presidents: policy issues, politics dynamics, polity/community values, ceremonial tasks etc. 2) to what extent the content of presidential public speech is becoming more political in its core; 3) if going-public tactics (here intended as speeches with high political content) are becoming a common strategy for relatively weak presidents.