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Party government in Europe? Parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies compared
Author(s) -
SCHLEITER PETRA,
MORGANJONES EDWARD
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2009.00847.x
Subject(s) - presidential system , principal (computer security) , government (linguistics) , democracy , politics , political science , political economy , control (management) , divided government , power (physics) , scale (ratio) , public administration , economics , law , geography , management , physics , linguistics , philosophy , quantum mechanics , computer science , operating system , cartography
Control over government portfolios is the key to power over policy and patronage, and it is commonly understood to lie with parties in European democracies. However, since the democratic transitions of the 1990s, Europe has had nearly equal numbers of parliamentary and semi‐presidential regimes, and there is evidence that the ability of parties to control government posts in these two regime types differs. As yet, political scientists have a limited understanding of the scale and causes of these differences. In this article a principal‐agent theoretical explanation is proposed. Data are examined on 28 parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies in Europe that shows that differences in party control over government portfolios cannot be understood without reference to the underlying principal‐agent relationships between voters, elected politicians and governments that characterise Europe's semi‐presidential and parliamentary regimes.