How do minority presidents manage multiparty coalitions? Identifying and analyzing the payoffs to coalition parties in presidential systems

The preponderance of minority presidents in modern democracies has concentrated the attention of researchers on the multi-party coalitions that presidents form to govern in legislative assemblies. This analysis of “coalitional presidentialism” has focused almost exclusively on presidential systems in Latin America, and Brazil in particular. It has understood multi-party presidential coalitions as cabinet-level constructs, which bind the support of parties in legislatures through portfolio payoffs. In this paper, we explore this analysis in a non-Latin American context: post-Soviet Ukraine. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, we find that portfolio payoffs are an important tool for managing Ukrainian coalitions. But, we also find that minority presidents have relied systematically on the support of legislative parties outside of the cabinet, and have used different payoffs to manage their support. Given that this complexity also exists in other new democracies, we argue that there is a need to distinguish between cabinet-level and floor-level coalitions in minority presidential systems

Flying solo: explaining single-party cabinets under minority presidentialism

In recent years, the comparative literature on presidential democracy has emphasized the role of coalitional politics in attenuating the ‘perils’ facing minority presidents. Yet since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization in 1974, a surprising number of minority presidents have eschewed cabinet coalitions (defined minimally as the awarding of at least one portfolio to a party other than the nominal party of the president). We observe unipartisan governments just under half of the time. What explains the adoption of single-party cabinets by minority presidents? We employ cross-sectional time-series analysis to address this question. We test hypotheses relating to the size and distribution of the formateur (presidential) and largest non-formateur parties that make up the legislature; the nature of party linkages and ideological distance between the president and possible partisan allies; and the extent of reactive veto powers held by the president

The political implications of popular support for presidential term limits in Russia

With Vladimir Putin having commenced his second term, the issue of the constitutional limit of two successive terms for the president has again become politically salient in Russia. In this article, two specialists of Russian politics investigate public support in 2018 for term limits. They address three questions. Why does the issue of term limits matter? To whom in Russia does it matter? Is opposition to abolishing terms limits likely to be politically divisive? Their findings point in general to a shift in the level and character of support for term limits since 2012. Opposition to term limits has grown over time, and while in 2012 support for term limits was drawn from supporters of more authoritarian leadership, today it includes engaged democrats with negative views of the economic situation. They also find that supporters of term limits remain more likely to support political protest

Does power always flow to the executive? Interbranch oscillations in legislative authority, 1976-2014

Is legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater ‘noise’ in the relationship

Critical election or frozen cleavages? How voters chose parties in the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election

Ukraine's 2014 parliamentary election, which took place in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution of February 2014 and at the height of war in the East of the country, appeared to produce significant party political realignment. In particular, support for parties that had represented the Russian element of the ethno-linguistic/geo-political cleavage that had dominated electoral competition in Ukraine since independence collapsed. The paper considers whether 2014 was a ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ election for Ukraine. Our argument is that the 2014 election lacked the conditions that critical elections theory posits as necessary and that, on the contrary, there are strong theoretical reasons to expect cleavage stability in these volatile electoral circumstances. We offer evidence for this continuity drawn from surveys undertaken among Ukrainian voters from 1995 to 2014

How do minority presidents manage multiparty coalitions? Identifying and analyzing the payoffs to coalition parties in presidential systems

The preponderance of minority presidents in modern democracies has concentrated the attention of researchers on the multi-party coalitions that presidents form to govern in legislative assemblies. This analysis of “coalitional presidentialism” has focused almost exclusively on presidential systems in Latin America, and Brazil in particular. It has understood multi-party presidential coalitions as cabinet-level constructs, which bind the support of parties in legislatures through portfolio payoffs. In this paper, we explore this analysis in a non-Latin American context: post-Soviet Ukraine. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, we find that portfolio payoffs are an important tool for managing Ukrainian coalitions. But, we also find that minority presidents have relied systematically on the support of legislative parties outside of the cabinet, and have used different payoffs to manage their support. Given that this complexity also exists in other new democracies, we argue that there is a need to distinguish between cabinet-level and floor-level coalitions in minority presidential systems

Flying solo: explaining single-party cabinets under minority presidentialism

In recent years, the comparative literature on presidential democracy has emphasized the role of coalitional politics in attenuating the ‘perils’ facing minority presidents. Yet since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization in 1974, a surprising number of minority presidents have eschewed cabinet coalitions (defined minimally as the awarding of at least one portfolio to a party other than the nominal party of the president). We observe unipartisan governments just under half of the time. What explains the adoption of single-party cabinets by minority presidents? We employ cross-sectional time-series analysis to address this question. We test hypotheses relating to the size and distribution of the formateur (presidential) and largest non-formateur parties that make up the legislature; the nature of party linkages and ideological distance between the president and possible partisan allies; and the extent of reactive veto powers held by the president

The political implications of popular support for presidential term limits in Russia

With Vladimir Putin having commenced his second term, the issue of the constitutional limit of two successive terms for the president has again become politically salient in Russia. In this article, two specialists of Russian politics investigate public support in 2018 for term limits. They address three questions. Why does the issue of term limits matter? To whom in Russia does it matter? Is opposition to abolishing terms limits likely to be politically divisive? Their findings point in general to a shift in the level and character of support for term limits since 2012. Opposition to term limits has grown over time, and while in 2012 support for term limits was drawn from supporters of more authoritarian leadership, today it includes engaged democrats with negative views of the economic situation. They also find that supporters of term limits remain more likely to support political protest

How challenger parties can win big with frozen cleavages: explaining the landslide victory of the Servant of the People party in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary elections

In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of July 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky’s new party, Servant of the People (SN) won a majority of seats in the context of what had been a ‘frozen cleavage’ dividing party voters along a single geo-cultural dimension: pro-West/anti-Soviet versus anti-West/pro-Russian positions. Analysing a unique set of surveys of public and expert opinion, we find that its unprecedented success stems from the extreme weaknesses of the existing and often discredited parties rather than ideological shifts. Our findings also question whether challenger parties in other contexts, including consolidated democracies, must compete on new issue dimensions in order to succeed electorally