Breaking the Cabinet’s Glass Ceiling: The Gendered Effect of Political Experience in Presidential Democracies

Do ministers face gender discrimination in their career paths after entering presidential cabinets? Departing from past studies, which find little evidence of gender discrimination in more established democracies in Europe and the Americas, we argue that political experience can have a gendered effect on cabinet careers in newer democracies outside the West. Using fixed effects and matching designs, we analyze original data on the careers of 1,374 ministers from all major presidential democracies in Asia. Investigating the patterns of “cabinet promotions,” where ministers transfer from their initial cabinet appointment to a higher-prestige post, we confirm the null direct effect of gender in this new context. However, we also find important gender differences based on political experience, which helps women’s upward mobility in cabinets more than men. The finding that pathways to higher office differ by gender adds to our understanding of women’s representation in society.

The Politics of Legislative Debates

Legislative debates make democracy and representation work. Political actors engage in legislative debates to make their voice heard to voters. Parties use debates to shore up their brand. This book makes the most comprehensive study of legislative debates thus far, looking at the politics of legislative debates in thirty-three liberal democracies in Europe, North America and Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The book begins with theoretical chapters focused on the key concepts in the study of legislative debates. Michael Laver, Slapin and Proksch, and Taylor examine the politics of legislative debates in parliamentary and presidential democracies. Subsequently, Goplerud makes a critical review of the methodological challenges in the study of legislative debates. Schwalbach and Rauh further discuss the difficulties in the comparative empirical study of debates. Country-chapters offer a wealth of original material organized around structured sections. Each chapter begins with a detailed discussion of the institutional design, focusing on the electoral system, legislative organization, and party parties, to which a section on the formal and informal rules of legislative debates ensues. Next, each country-chapter focuses on analyzing the determinants of floor access, with a particular emphasis on the role of gender, seniority, and legislative party positions, among others. In the concluding chapter, the editors explore comparative patterns and point out to multiple research avenues opened by this edited volume.

Emergencies: on the misuse of government powers

Nine out of 10 constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, intended to help governments cope with extraordinary events that endanger many people or the existence of the state. We ask two questions: (1) does the constitutionalization of emergency provisions help governments to cope with disasters and other extraordinary events? (2) What particular parts of emergency constitutions fare best? We find that the more advantages emergency constitutions confer to the executive, the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity. As this is an unexpected result, we discuss a number of potential explanations, the most plausible being that governments use natural disasters as a pretext to enhance their power. Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights. Interestingly, presidential democracies are better able to cope with natural disasters than parliamentary ones in terms of lives saved, whereas autocracies do significantly worse in the sense that empowerment rights seriously suffer in the aftermath of a disaster.

Image that Matters: News Media Consumption and Party Leader Effects on Voting Behavior

Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the “personalization of politics.” The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there is evidence of this trend for presidential democracies, notably the United States, this linkage is yet to be fully explored for parliamentary democracies undergoing a process of personalization. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of pooled national election study data from thirteen Western European parliamentary democracies collected between 1982 and 2016. Our results show that leader effects are significantly stronger among individuals with a television-dominant media diet. The findings provide support to the yet underdeveloped theoretical relationship between media change and the personalization of politics, while also speaking to the broader question involving the importance of media for contemporary democratic elections.

Prime ministerial autonomy and intra-executive conflict under semi-presidentialism

This article answers why intra-executive conflict varies across semi-presidential democracies. The literature verifies that intra-executive competition tends to be higher when the president holds less power to dismiss the cabinet, coexists with a minority government, or the president’s party is not represented in the cabinet. This paper, therefore, integrates these factors to construct an index of prime ministerial autonomy, proposing that its relationship with the probability of intra-executive conflict is represented by an inverted U-shaped curve. That is, when the prime minister is subordinated to an elected president, or conversely, enjoys greater room to manoeuvre in the executive affairs of the government, the likelihood of conflict is low. In contrast, significant confrontation emerges when the president claims constitutional legitimacy to rein in the cabinet, and controls the executive to a certain degree. This study verifies hypotheses using data on seventeen semi-presidential democracies in Europe between 1990 and 2015.

Party soldiers: The selection of electoral leaders in parliamentary democracies

The selection of candidates for public office is one of the pivotal functions political parties perform in liberal democracies. Many works have studied the nomination of candidates for the legislative branch. Few studies have looked into the nomination of candidates for the executive branch in presidential democracies. However, very few works have looked at candidates' nomination for the executive branch in parliamentary democracies, who have been called electoral leaders or top candidates. This dissertation contributes to filling this gap by exploring three main research questions. First, what criteria do political parties use when nominating a top candidate? Second, to what extent do political parties nominate their top candidates on electoral considerations? Third, under which conditions is electoral competition more likely to shape party decision-making? I consider that political parties hold two criteria when nominating a top candidate. First, based on top candidates' electoral and campaigning function, parties seek to nominate electable top candidates likely to achieve more votes. Second, considering that top candidates may become prime ministers after the election and perform a series of post-electoral functions, parties will seek to nominate more reliable candidates who stay close to their party’s preferences. Building on the literature on party organization change, this dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding how different incentives can drive parties to nominate top candidates closer to one or the other criterion. In particular, this dissertation studies four factors: the party’s screening and recruitment capacity, internal demand, external demand, and the type of selectorate. To test the influence of these four factors, this dissertation presents a novel dataset of more than 2500 sub-national top candidates in Canada, Germany and Spain. There have been collecting information about the personal, partisan and political background of top candidates, which been complemented with information about the type of selectorate, the party’s internal structure, and the electorate's state. The main results are summarized as follows. First, parties are heavily dependent on their access to public institutions to recruit and train new members and produce top candidates with high degrees of reliability. Second, the results show that political parties are more reactive to changes in their internal coalitions' composition than to changes in the overall electorate. Finally, the results show that party primaries tend to differ from party conferences and party elites when the party has experienced some environmental change regarding the type of selectorate. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of the role of top candidates in parliamentary democracies and academic knowledge about party organizational change and adaptation.

Votes and violence: Electoral vote share and international conflict in democratic states

This article argues that the effect of a democratic leader’s electoral margin of victory on their conflict behaviour once in office is highly dependent upon the state’s institutional structure. I show that, uniquely in parliamentary democracies, governments that win a larger share of the vote are significantly less likely to initiate disputes abroad. Such governments entail broad coalitions that, combined with the ever-present possibility of governmental collapse and new elections, require leaders to pursue a more cautious, lowest-common-denominator foreign policy. This effect is significantly stronger for right-wing governments. Conversely, in presidential democracies, I find that electoral vote share has no effect on a leader’s subsequent conflict propensity. Vote shares thus function very differently in parliamentary and presidential systems, with important implications for conflict behaviour abroad.

The effect of two-round presidential elections on human rights

Recent research suggests that democratic presidential elections held using a runoff rule produce presidents that are more likely to protect human rights, in comparison to those elected under plurality rule; with this follow-up article, I seek to highlight the importance of advancing to a runoff round for those elections held using a runoff rule. I find that for presidential democracies that already have a runoff rule in place, country-years where the president has been elected after a runoff round are more likely to be associated with high government respect for human rights, in comparison to country-years where the president has been elected after only one round (that could have advanced to a runoff round, but did not). This article provides decision-makers with more information regarding the human rights consequences of runoff rounds, so that the costs and benefits of adopting (or retaining) variations of a runoff rule can be better weighed.

7. The Executive Branch

This chapter offers a clear introduction to the history, constitutional structure, and powers of the modern executive in European countries. It provides an overview of the constitutional position of the political executive in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies, then charts variations in the powers of key actors (including prime ministers, cabinets, and presidents) and their political implications for conflict within government, cabinet stability, and policy processes. The text complements its coverage of the political executive with an analysis of the civil service and the political challenges of controlling it, and concludes with a comprehensive assessment of the rise in executive autonomy and its political implications in the twenty-first century.