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

Coalition governance and foreign policy decision making

This article explores processes of coalition governance in foreign policy. Specifically, it argues that such processes are shaped by two interrelated dimensions of coalition set-up: first, the allocation of the foreign ministry to the senior or a junior coalition partner and, second, the degree of policy discretion which is delegated to that ministry. Bringing these two dimensions together, the article distinguishes four types of coalition arrangement for the making of foreign policy, which are expected to have predictable implications for the process of foreign policy-making and, ultimately, for the foreign policy outputs of multi-party coalitions and their quality

Conclusions. The populism-sovereignism linkage: findings, theoretical implications and a new research agenda

In this article, an assessment of the sovereignism- populism linkage is offered, moving from the main findings emerged in the contributions to this special issue. The sovereignism- populism linkage is seen as a challenge for comparative politics: on the one hand, the copious literature already developed, particularly in the specific field of populist parties, offers a broad set of findings and stimuli. On the other hand, the huge application (and the abuse) of the concept of populism, which has been associated to a number of very different phenomena, make the discussion on its relationships with cognate concepts more and more difficult. The article offers a first attempt to review the knowledge on the sovereignism-populism linkage, defining a new space for the empirical analysis, and refreshing the research agenda, in particular regarding some classical themes in comparative politics like the ‘sustainability’ of political elites and the crisis of representative institutions