Presidential Influence on Parliamentary Election Timing and the Electoral Fate of Prime Ministers

Most presidential heads of state in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies have constitutional powers to influence early election calling. They can therefore affect under which conditions prime ministers are held accountable by the electorate. Do these presidents use their powers to shape the timing of early elections for partisan advantage and to influence the electoral performance of incumbent prime ministers? We examine this question using data from 193 elections in eighteen European democracies (1945-2013). Our results indicate that presidents use their dissolution powers to shape the frequency of early elections and to influence under which conditions elections occur, affecting the electoral success of prime ministers. Presidents with significant influence on the dissolution of parliament enable prime ministers of governments that include the president's party to realize a significant electoral bonus compared to governments that exclude the party of the president

Explaining the onset of cohabitation under semi-presidentialism

Semi-presidentialism – where the constitution provides for both a directly elected fixed-term president and a prime minister and cabinet collectively responsible to the legislature – is an increasingly common form of government. For many observers cohabitation is the Achilles heel of semi-presidentialism. This article aims to identify the conditions that are associated with the onset of cohabitation.We specify a number of hypotheses that predict the conditions under which cohabitation should occur.We then test our hypotheses on the basis of a new data set that records every case of cohabitation in all semi-presidential electoral democracies from 1989 to 2008 inclusive.We confirm that cohabi- tation is more likely to occur in countries with a premier-presidential form of semi-presidentialism and show that it is more likely to follow an election that occurs midway through a parliamentary or presidential term, and that when cohabitation follows a presidential election, it is likely to do so in a country where there is only a very weak president. Overall, we find that the conditions under which cohabitation is most likely to occur are also the ones where it is most easily managed. Thus, our findings imply that cohabitation is not likely to be as problematic as the existing literature would suggest

Global economic crisis and corruption

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York. We study the effects of the 2008–2009 global economic crisis on the household experience of bribing public officials. The data come from the Life in Transition-2 survey, conducted in 2010 in 30 post-socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find that households hit by crisis are more likely to bribe and, among people who bribe, crisis victims bribe a wider range of public officials than non-victims. The crisis victims are also more likely to pay bribes because public officials ask them to do so and less likely because of gratitude. The link between crisis and bribery is stronger in the poorest countries of the region. Our findings support the conjecture that public officials misuse sensitive information about crisis victims to inform bribe extortion decisions

Presidents, Assembly Dissolution and the Electoral Performance of Prime Ministers

Many European presidents have extensive constitutional powers to affect the timing of early parliamentary elections, which enables them to influence when incumbent governments must face the electorate. This paper examines whether presidents use their assembly dissolution powers for partisan benefit. To date, presidential activism in the electoral arena of parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies remains poorly understood. We hypothesize that presidents use their powers to influence election calling for the advantage of their political allies in government. To test this argument, we use data on 190 elections in eighteen European democracies. Our results suggest that presidents with significant dissolution powers are able to shape the electoral success of incumbents. Prime ministers whose governments are allied to such presidents realize a vote and seat share bonus of around five per cent. These findings have implications for our understanding of presidential activism, strategic parliamentary dissolution and electoral accountability

Dynamics of new party formation in the Czech Republic 1996–2010: looking for the origins of a ‘political earthquake’

The stable and closed nature of the Czech party system and the failure of most new political parties have been among the most salient features of Czech democracy over the past two decades. The results of the 2010 parliamentary elections seemed to mark a break with this pattern: support for two main parties slumped to historically low levels and two new parties, TOP09 and Public Affairs (VV), entered parliament. This article seeks to put the ‘political earthquake’ of 2010 into perspective by mapping the development of new parties in the Czech Republic from the mid-1990s and relating them to comparative literature and typologies of new party emergence. It concludes that of the two successful new parties in 2010, Public Affairs was, by far, the more novel and important phenomenon