owever, the ‘presidential party’ remains relatively understudied at both the theoretical and the empirical levels. The ‘party of the president’ is the key political actor that affects presidential activity during his or her mandate. The article aims to present a theoretical framework and a potential guideline for comparative studies. Starting from a critical review of Shugart and Carey’s seminal book, I propose a conceptualisation of the presidential party and the theoretical possible effects of it on the legislature, which might be useful for further empirical analysis.

2a:T419,

This article revisits theoretical claims that separation of power systems will display an inverse relationship between presidential power and party strength. Shugart and Carey posited this as a general equilibrium within presidential democracies; later, Shugart proposed that the inverse relationship resulted from founding institutional choices shaped in turn by modes of democratic transition. We test both the equilibrium and the genetic versions of the inverse relationship on a large-N dataset of presidential systems from 1900 to 2016. We find strong significant empirical support for an inverse relationship between executive power and party system institutionalization. However, the relationship is more dynamic than would be predicted by theories based on institutional foundings alone. Through analysis of decree reform in Argentina and Brazil, we observe changes in the expected inverse relationship despite the absence of a constitutional assembly and the lack of any change in electoral rules or party authority.

2b:T4c3,

This work reassesses the central thesis of Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies, that weak presidencies make stronger, more lasting democracies. We argue that a thorough review of the literature that has evaluated this thesis thus far reveals a persistent methodological flaw that has hindered an adequate conclusion on its accuracy. While many scholars have revisited the role of presidential systems in democratic failure, comparative analyses of presidential systems have relied on additive, rather than combinatorial, measures of presidential power. We demonstrate why this produces misleading inferences about presidential power, and offer a novel methodology for its assessment. Following an investigation and replication of Shugart and Carey’s original work that incorporates the progress of the cases they studied since 1992, we test our new method on their hypothesis, and find little support for their argument. However, our combinatorial approach invites future researchers to make their own theoretically informed arguments about the relative weight of different presidential powers within a methodological framework that avoids the errors of previous work on the topic.

2c:T48d,

Shugart and Carey were among the first scholars to recognise that there is a relationship between regional and local – or subnational – electoral forces and the presidential race. Yet because of a lack of subnational electoral data, this relationship has largely remained unexplored. We elaborate on Shugart and Carey’s theory to argue that the effects of decentralisation are conditional on a party’s presence in subnational elections for determining when and why parties enter the presidential race. Using an original dataset of subnational electoral results and presidential strategies in 17 countries in Europe and Latin America from 1990 to 2013, we find that parties with a small presence in subnational elections are more likely to compete for the presidency under more extensive decentralisation. Statewide parties, however, contest presidential elections regardless of level of decentralisation. These findings have important implications for understanding Shugart and Carey’s expectation that subnational contestation influences national party systems, presidential elections and democratic representation more generally.

2d:Td3b,