The Presidentialization of Politics shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies' contingent factors which fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term factors relate to the personalities of office holders, the overall political agenda, and the majority situation in parliament, there are several structural factors which are relatively uniform across modern nations. First, the internationalization of modern politics (which is particularly pronounced within the European Union) has led to an 'executive bias' of the political process which has strengthened the role of political top elites vis-à-vis their parliamentary groups and/or their parties. Their predominance has been amplified further by the vastly expanded steering capacities of state machineries which have severely reduced the scope of effective parliamentary control. At the same time, the declining stability of political alignments has increased the proportion of citizens whose voting decisions are not constrained by long-standing party loyalties. In conjunction with the mediatization of politics, this has increased the capacity of political leaders to by-pass their party machines and to appeal directly to voters.
As a result, three interrelated processes have led to a political process increasingly moulded by the inherent logic of presidentialism: increasing leadership power and autonomy within the political executive; increasing leadership power and autonomy within political parties; and increasingly leadership-centred electoral processes.
The book presents evidence for this process of presidentialization for 14 modern democracies (including the US and Canada). While there are substantial cross-national differences, the overall thesis holds: modern democracies are increasingly following a presidential logic of governance through which leadership is becoming more central and more powerful, but also increasingly dependent on successful immediate appeal to the mass public. Implications for democratic theory are considered.
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Thomas Poguntke is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf and Director of the Düsseldorf Party Research Institute (PRuF). He has previously held chairs at the universities of Keele, Birmingham, and Bochum. In 1998 he was Senior Research fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim. His research interests include the comparative analysis of political parties, parties in the European union, and the presidentialisation of modern democracies.
Paul D Webb is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on party and electoral politics, including the OUP books Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (with David Farrell and Ian Holliday) and The Presidentialization of Politics (with Thomas Poguntke), and is co-editor of the journal Party Politics. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK.
Nicholas Aylott is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Södertörn University.
Herman Bakvis is Professor of Political Scince, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia.
Mauro Calise is Professor of Political Science, University of Naples.
Ben Clift is Lecturer in International Political Economy, University of Warwick.
Marina Costa Lobo is Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon in Portugal.
Sergio Fabbrini is Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto.
Stefaan Fiers is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics and Director of the teaching training programme in social sciences at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.
Richard Heffernan teaches at the Open University.
Jonathan Hopkin is Lecturer in Government at the LSE.
Tim Knudsen is Professor in Public Administration at the University of Copenhagen.
Karina Kosiara-Pedersen is Associate Professor in Political Science at University of Copenhagen.
André Krouwel teaches political science and communication at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on political parties and elections. He is also Academic Director of Kieskompas, through which he developed online party profiling applications in over 40 countries. He is a founding member of the consortium that developed EUvox, a VAA for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament across all EU member-states.
Heikki Paloheimo is Professor of Political Science, University of Turku, Finland.
Ingrid van Biezen is Professor of Comparative Politics at Leiden University. She has previously taught at the University of Birmingham (UK) and Johns Hopkins University, and has held Visiting Fellowships at Yale University, the University of California, Irvine, and European University Institute. She is a co-editor of Acta Politica, a former co-editor of the Political Data Yearbook and the author of Political Parties in New Democracies. Her current research focuses on political parties, party regulation, and democratic theory. She has published in, among others, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, the European Political Science Review, Government and Opposition, Party Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and West European Politics.
Steven B. Wolinetz is Professor Emeritus at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. Wolinetz writes about parties and party systems, smaller democracies (especially the Netherlands and Belgium, and the European Union). His publications include Parties and Party Systems in Liberal Democracies (1988), ‘Beyond the Catch-all Party: Approaches to the Study of Parties and Party Organization in Contemporary Democracies,’ in Linz, Montero, and Gunther, The Future of Political Parties, ‘The Transformation of Western European Party Systems Revisited’ and other articles on parties and party systems. He is currently working on a book, Parties and Party Systems in the New Millennium.
