Measuring Presidential Powers: Constitutional Provisions and Political Practice

Presidential powers can be measured with reference to constitutional provisions or to political practice. Both ways of measuring powers have their advantages and drawbacks. Essentially, the main advantage of focusing solely on constitutional provisions is that these are easily interpretable and comparable across time and space. The main disadvantage is that constitutional provisions do not necessarily reflect actual political practice. The present paper sets out to assess to what extent constitutional provisions correspond to real powers of the presidents. The research population is extensive in time and space, consisting of all democratic semi-presidential countries in the world during the time period 1850-2025. When assessing the constitutional powers of the president I rely primarily on a new dataset created by Åberg and Denk (2024). In order to measure the actual powers of the president I make use of seven questions in the V-dem dataset. Three of the items refer explicitly to powers in the executive sphere, two to legislative powers and two to other powers. A first purpose of the study is explorative. By combining the two indicators of presidential powers it will be possible to identify, on the one hand, countries where presidents have strong constitutional prerogatives but weak real powers and, on the other hand, countries where presidents possess stronger actual powers than what the constitutions prescribe. In the next step, I try to identify plausible explanations for why constitutional powers do not correspond to actual powers. As the V-dem dataset contains yearly observations for the countries included, it will be possible to account for a large number of variables pertaining to what Tavits (2009) has referred to as the political opportunity framework. For instance, it is plausible that presidents find it difficult to exercise powers in situations where the oppositional party is in control of the legislature or where the prime minister is not from the same party as the president.