Presidents, Elections, Parties, and Parliamentary-Executive Relations

The President (PR) may represent the engine of the Government both in Presidential and in Semipresidential regimes. Depending on the institutional, political and electoral contexts, the PR can make effective the executive-legislative relationship and the Government's activities.  The presidential tools to intervene in the political arena are in fact referring to different spheres: political, institutional/constitutional, and electoral ones. These can reduce or emphasize trends towards personalization and presidentialisation of presidential political parties. The centralization of the electoral campaign and the increasing presidential accountability have more and more shown the need to detect the PR's influence in the political system. Therefore, the need for studies comparing different regimes and countries.  This Section includes Panels devoted to the comparative analysis of the Presidential electoral campaign, the role of the presidential parties, and the executive-parliament relations, as well as on leaders. Panels focused on one case only (e.g. the US presidential elections) are also considered as long as they are going to cover different aspects of the presidential role.