[Civsoc-mw] book on coalitional presidentialism, inc. mw.

[cammack at mweb.co.za]

Saw this advert and thought I sh/share it. Diana

 

 

Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective. Minority Presidents
in Multiparty Systems

Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman & Timothy J. Power, . Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2018,xiii + 267pp., £60.00 h/b.

Philipp KökerORCID Icon

Pages 1613-1615 | Published online: 07 Nov 2019

 

    Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1674530
CrossMark Logo CrossMark 

 

Click to increase image sizeFree first page

 

The phenomenon of ‘coalitional presidentialism’, the strategic efforts of
directly elected presidents without a parliamentary majority to build and
maintain alliances in fragmented legislatures, has been analysed by students
of Latin American politics for the last three decades. However, as the
number of directly elected presidents grows and levels of legislative
fragmentation increase around the world, more and more executive presidents
find themselves in a situation where they need to build coalitions beyond
their own party to implement policy programmes. Taking this trend as the
starting point, this insightful co-authored volume by Paul Chaisty, Nic
Cheeseman and Timothy J. Power presents the first cross-regional analysis of
coalitional presidentialism to date. Focusing on a ‘toolbox’ of five key
presidential powers, the authors examine how presidents in nine
democratising and hybrid regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and
post-Soviet Eurasia employ different strategies to build and manage
legislative floor coalitions.

 

The book consists of ten chapters, including a substantive introduction and
conclusion, and is supplemented by a brief methodological appendix. The
first chapter situates the book and its subject matter in a wider empirical
and theoretical context, showing among other things the rise in minority
presidents around the world and providing a concise summary of the extant
literature on coalitional presidentialism. The second chapter subsequently
introduces the nine countries chosen for analysis—Benin, Kenya and Malawi
(sub-Saharan Africa), Brazil, Chile and Ecuador (Latin America), Armenia,
Russia and Ukraine (post-Soviet Eurasia)—and discusses the advantages and
challenges of such cross-regional comparison. The third chapter rounds off
this introductory part by focusing on the formation of coalitions in
presidential systems. In particular, the authors show that the formation and
purpose of coalitions in these systems differs fundamentally from
parliamentary regimes, and argue that the size, power balance and
heterogeneity of Day One coalitions (those formed at the beginning of a
presidential or legislative term) determine the subsequent costs of
coalition management for the president.

 

The fourth chapter presents the theoretical core of the book and focuses
specifically on presidents’ continuous management of multi-party coalitions
in the legislature. Conceptualising minority presidents as policy-motivated
actors, the authors convincingly argue that presidents use a ‘toolbox’ of
five key powers that any analysis of coalitional presidentialism must
consider—legislative powers, power over the cabinet, partisan powers,
budgetary authority and the ability to engage in exchange of favours.
Depending on the specific incentive structures provided by the political
system, coalition characteristics and exogenous factors, presidents are
expected to choose the most cost-effective option to manage their
coalitions. Thereby, the argument is made particularly compelling by the
assumption of bounded rationality of presidents, which arguably provides a
much better approximation of political realities in the countries studied
than any approach assuming fully rational behaviour under complete
information.

 

The subsequent five chapters analyse each of the five tools in turn, first
discussing the factors affecting the costs of their use and then presenting
them ‘at work’ through case studies of between two and four selected
episodes of minority presidentialism. The analysis draws not only on ample
legislative data but also on insights from semi-structured interviews and
surveys of over 370 MPs. The latter present a particular strength of the
study as they are used to illustrate individual instances (or particular
features) of coalition management by minority presidents as well as to test
the validity of findings at the end of each chapter. Finally, the last
chapter summarises the main findings and provides a highly useful overview
of the different ways presidents can use the tools at their disposal,
highlighting in particular how different tools can be employed to achieve
the same objective.

 

The authors clearly succeed in their declared goal ‘to shed light on the
strategies and mechanisms used by minority presidents to cultivate
cross-party support in fragmented legislatures’ (p. 3). Written by experts
on both presidentialism and the regions in question, their
descriptive-analytical approach innovatively blends a well-crafted
theoretical framework with rich qualitative insights. Nevertheless, this is
also where two smaller points of criticism emerge. First, it is not always
clear whether the snippets from interviews with MPs and other empirical
examples that accompany the theoretical considerations in Chapters 5–9,
respectively, merely illustrate or actually inform the formulation of
theory. In contrast, several case studies of presidential tools ‘at work’
could have benefited from more explicit references to the theoretical
concepts discussed earlier, as it is sometimes difficult to discern the
relative importance of the many details provided. Second, the selection of
episodes for case studies in the same chapters is only very briefly
justified and not explicitly placed into a wider (national or regional)
context beyond the more general information contained in Chapters 2 and 3.
Thus, the representativeness of the variations in presidential strategies
examined cannot always be easily ascertained. Furthermore, the majority of
case studies showcase only the successful use of tools by minority
presidents. While the analysis includes some negative examples (and case
studies in Chapter 7 only focus on cases where presidents’ strategies
misfired), introducing more contrasting cases arguably would have enhanced
the analysis and provided an even stronger foundation for the authors’
findings.

 

In summary, the book presents a major leap forward in research on
coalitional presidentialism and comparative studies of presidential politics
alike. It presents an excellent and insightful analysis based on an
unrivalled breadth and depth of quantitative and qualitative data (available
to other scholars through the UK Data Service). Given recent election
results in several of the countries covered by this volume, it is clear that
coalitional presidentialism is here to stay. As the first cross-regional
analysis of coalitional presidentialism to date, this book will hence
undoubtedly serve as an inspiration and benchmark for future studies of this
intriguing phenomenon.

 

Copyright © 2019 Informa UK Limited Privacy policy & cookies Terms &
conditions Accessibility

Author information

Philipp Köker

Philipp Köker, Department of Political Science, Leibniz University Hannover,
Schneiderberg 50, 30167 Hannover, Germany

 

Registered in England & Wales No. 3099067

5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG

Taylor and Francis Group


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://chambo3.sdnp.org.mw/pipermail/civsoc-mw/attachments/20191109/a6b184a0/attachment.html>