From promises of "change" to specific changes: Presidential Transitions and The Redefinition of the Executive-Parliament Relationship

This paper aims at building upon two elements. Firstly, drawing on four 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 within the administration and between the administration and the legislature. This contribution will especially clarify the constantly renewed negotiation of executive-parliament relationships. Secondly, enlightening feedbacks from last year's Presidential Politics panel were taken into consideration. The way the relationship between the government and the parliament or Congress starts plays a crucial role in facilitating the presidential transition process altogether. Explaining how presidential leadership evolves alongside executive-legislative relationships must draw our attention to the first months defining period into the presidency. Different strategies are pursued by various presidents, with different implications. This process being a compromise, the issue of representation needs exploration. What representation, and whom's interests to represent? Whether it is in a presidential system or a semi-presidential one, these institutions need to work together, for efficiency can only arise from it. This approach presupposes studying a sequence that goes from establishing a government to its first measures, in order to review the policy and organizational changes across presidencies and institutional settings. The process-tracing method contributes to opening the "black box" of institutional constraints. How are newly-elected Presidents using the election to change institutional practices and arrangements? Understanding the influence of the presidential institution during the policy process requires to understand: 1/The formal and informal constraints: economic and social context, 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 contextualization; 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/How they articulate these constraints with their preferences; 4/And how does the "wall of reality" yields learning and feedbacks, influencing after that the policy-process, presidential political and technical capacities, and the subsequent possibilities. These cases will highlight how different political and institutional systems 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 was proved to be important when it comes to implementing "campaign pledges" (Guinaudeau, Saurugger, 2018). 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), I will also rely on their work titled the "First-Year Project" and the considerable center's resources.