The Diffusion of Presidential Powers: Post-Communist Presidencies Between Russia and the EU

With more than three decades since Linz's (1994;1996) seminal contribution on the perils of presidential powers, studies of presidential powers have never been out of date. As the third wave of democracy has come to an end (Luo & Przeworski, 2019; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019), the reasons for studying presidential powers are even stronger as presidents are currently exhibiting an increased tendency to stretch their constitutional powers to an extent that contradicts the functioning of democracy (Çınar, 2021; Curato & Fossati, 2020; Sinkkonen, 2021). Featuring key themes such as presidential institutions, executive-legislative relations and intra-executive relations (Fruhstorfer, 2016), a lot of ink has been spilt on the effects of elected presidents. As part of the field of semi-presidential regimes, the regime in which an elected president coexists alongside a prime minister and government responsible to the parliament (Elgie, 1999), many scholars have traced the effects of elected presidents (Elgie, 2016), giving scholars reasons to caution against the risks associated with high levels of presidential powers (Sedelius & Linde, 2018; Åberg & Sedelius, 2020). Despite the general assumption that presidential powers matter, few studies trace the level of presidential power in a country in light of a country's external relations. This lack is surprising considering the early conclusion of the wave-like pattern of democratization (Huntington, 1991), a pattern also found in the establishment of government regimes such as in the many presidential constitutions of Latin America and semi-presidential regimes of former French and Portuguese colonies (Ginsburg, 2012). In all, studies of diffusion have emphasized how social phenomena travel between proximate countries or countries part of common networks (Brinks & Coppedge, 2006; Jung & Deering, 2015; Åberg & Denk, 2020). This study makes use of new measurements on presidential powers and the density of interdependence between countries (Åberg & Denk, forthcoming) to test the extent to which the level of presidential powers diffuses from a country’s networks. Squeezed between Russia and the EU, the post-communist context provides a unique opportunity for studying how the density of competing networks (i.e. economic, political, linguistic, religious, and organizational) affect the level of presidential powers in post-communist countries. In that, this study gathers new empirical knowledge and develops further the theoretical frameworks of the fields of diffusion and presidential studies and their interconnectedness.