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Patterns of Transformation in Dual Executives

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Presidents, Monarchs, and Prime Ministers

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics ((PASTPRPO))

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Abstract

Building on a principle-agent framework, the present chapter sets out to assess transformation patterns within and between three variants of dual executives. Results showed that strong presidents that have not been elected by popular vote were exceptionally likely to be stripped of their powers. A similar finding was observed for dual executives with a monarch as head of state but only when the smallest monarchies were excluded; in very small countries, monarchs can remain powerful for extensive periods of time. Powerful popularly elected presidents are also likely to lose powers, although the trend is less obvious than for the other two regime categories. Results also show that the likelihood that the head of state receives increasing powers is not affected by a lagged measure of powers of the head of state in any of the three dual executive variants. A number of control variables are included in multivariate analyses but on the whole their impact is negligible.

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Correspondence to Carsten Anckar .

Sources

Sources

Cohabitation::

Elgie and McMenamin (2011); Elgie, R. The Semi-presidential one (http://www.semipresidentialism.com/category/cohabitation); WorldStatesmen.org (www.worldstatesmen.org); Wikipedia: “list of heads of state of ….”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_state_of_[country] . Wikipedia: “List of heads of government …” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_government_of_[country].

Share of Government parties in parliament::

Armingeon et al. 2020 and Cruz et al. 2018 (converted by one year as their data reflect the situation on January 1 each year).

Effective number of parties::

Bormann and Golder (2013) and Struthers et al. (2020).

Number of parties in government::

Nyrup and Bramwell (2020).

Population size:::

Dataset v6 via Gapminder (http://gapm.io/dpop).

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Anckar, C. (2022). Patterns of Transformation in Dual Executives. In: Presidents, Monarchs, and Prime Ministers. Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03960-7_5

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