Executive Politics

This chapter explains the historical origins of strong bureaucratic power in South Korea and recent changes in which the concentration of bureaucratic power has weakened. In the 1960s and 1970s, economic growth was South Korea’s top priority, and economic policy agencies such as the Economic Planning Board (EPB) led the nation’s overall policy decisions under the protection of the powerful president, Park Chung-hee. As the economy grew, however, various social demands, such as welfare, labour rights, and environmental protection, were expressed by the public, and many institutions that could reflect these demands grew within the bureaucracy in the 1980s and 1990s. As a consequence, the influence of the EPB was relatively reduced. Since the 2000s, democratization has matured and the ability of the National Assembly to make policy decisions and keep the administration in check has been strengthened. As a result, the bureaucrats’ influence on policy further diminished.

Core Executive Politics in the Cameron Era, 2010–16: The Dynamics of Whitehall Reform

By the early 1990s, the core executive was established as the ‘new orthodoxy’ in the study of British government at the centre. Thirty years on, this article avers that its main assumptions are increasingly questionable in the light of more recent empirical evidence. The core executive approach may well have outlived its usefulness. This claim is derived from analysis of the Cameron premiership from 2010 to 2016. The focus is on how Whitehall reform radically altered the relationship between politicians and civil servants, reshaping prevailing public service bargains and rules of the game. Ministers identified mechanisms to rebuild political capacity, augmenting partisan control of the bureaucracy. They drew on resources from outside the core executive while politicians increased their sway over civil service appointments. As a result, officials felt they should be ‘responsive’ to ministers. The cumulative effect was to replace interpersonal and institutional resource dependency with a ‘them and us’ model. Consequently, the risk of policy disasters and fiascos grew.

Representation and Ministerial Influence on Cabinet Committees in Canada

Cabinet committees are important sites of executive politics in Canada. This article examines the extent to which two representational attributes—gender and region—determine influence, as a function of cabinet committee structure. Employing a dataset of ministers under the three most recent prime ministers, I find that female ministers are less likely than male ministers to be influential in terms of connections to other ministers, to belong to the core of most influential ministers and to be represented on the most powerful committees or chairing committees. However, there is evidence of improvement over time. While regional representation is an imperative in cabinet making for Canadian prime ministers, its role in determining ministerial influence within committees is not evident: ministers from less-represented regions are no more likely to be influential than other ministers. This analysis highlights a neglected but central arena for social representation in Canadian government.

A Rational Choice Perspective on Political Executives

Rational choice theory has shaped the study of executive politics in important ways. We contend most of the rational choice literature on executive politics can be seen as exploring the consequences of two related problems that all executives confront: credible commitment and delegation. The credible commitment problem arises because executives require political support. This support is forthcoming only to the extent that the executive can assure potential supporters that the executive will faithfully advance their interests. How, then, does an executive make a credible commitment to advance his or her supporters’ interests? The delegation problem arises because executives must rely on subordinates to carry out their agenda. Such delegation is efficient from executive’s perspective only to the extent that subordinates competently and faithfully execute their orders. How, then, does an executive choose and monitor his or her subordinates? We briefly review the key components of rational choice theory that distinguish it from other theoretical approaches. We then examine how the two different problems have different expressions in parliamentary and presidential systems.

Inside the Coordination Paradigm

In this chapter, we examine the shift in presidentialism studies away from Linzian questions of conflict towards questions of coordination in executive-legislative relations. This change of focus has brought presidential studies into line with the research on parliamentary systems, generating a more unified literature on comparative executive politics. Focusing specifically on minority presidents and issues of coalition management, we explore how a conceptual vocabulary familiar to students of parliamentarism has shaped the emerging research agenda. We consider the phenomenon of ‘coalitional presidentialism’, which has become the modal form of minority presidential rule in modern democracies facing higher levels of party fragmentation. We discuss why coalitional presidentialism ‘matters’ for both empirical and theoretical reasons, and review the state of the literature on coalition management. Finally, we identify areas of future research in this field.

Performance and Evaluation of Political Executives

While not being a classic subject of executive politics research, there has been a wealth of scholarly activities more recently that have moved issues of performance, and evaluation, centre-stage. Understood as an independent variable, the performance of political executives has come to be acknowledged as a key factor shaping the political fate of both the government of the day (including more particular issues, such as the electoral costs of governing) and the regime more generally. Research on performance as a dependent variable has focused on such different aspects as the nature and timing of public policies that governments make, political communication, and the personality of different office-holders in the executive branch. As the agenda is expanding quickly, the growing realization of the various meanings of ‘performance’ and a new comparative ambition committed to reaching beyond a particular type of political regimes look set to become important catalysts for future innovations in the field.

The Presidentialization of Political Executives

This chapter aims to disentagle the ‘presidentialization’ and ‘prime ministerialization’ concepts and to clarify them. The first section begins by noting when the terms first came into common academic usage. It will also discuss the relationship between the concept of prime ministerialization and the more familiar concept of prime ministerial government as it has been used in the work on the core executive. The chapter will then focus on the most important research questions at stake in this area, noting the methods that are traditionally used to study this topic. The second section reviews the existing literature on presidentialization and prime ministerialization. The focus will be on the presidentialization of electoral or party politics only in so far as it affects the nature of executive politics. Finally, the chapter will try to set the research agenda for the future study of the presidentialization by focusing of what aspects have not been sufficiently or adequately investigated, or where there is still a lack of knowledge.

Feminist Approaches to the Study of Political Executives

This chapter focuses on feminist approaches to the study of executive politics, gender, and power. The chapter examines how feminist executive political analysis has employed gender as a concept and a process, identifying conceptual and methodological challenges for this body of research and discussing four midrange theories of women’s access to presidencies, prime ministerships, and cabinet posts: cultural models, gender norm explanations, supply and demand models, and feminist institutionalist analysis. The chapter concludes with reflections on a future research agenda for feminist scholarship on political executives: detaching gendered analyses of the political executive from the scholarship on women and parliamentary politics; developing institution-specific gendered analyses across and within political executive offices; and focusing on the gendered consequences of the removal function for political executives from office.