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Presidents and Prime Ministers: Then and Now

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The Problem of Governing

Part of the book series: Executive Politics and Governance ((EXPOLGOV))

Abstract

Presidents and prime ministers are, more than ever, key players in domestic and international politics. The rise to increased prominence and power has however not marked the only element shaping recent developments at the level of political chief executives. This chapter identifies several major features that separate the ‘new breed’ of contemporary presidents and prime ministers in Western Europe and the United States from their predecessors of the early post-war decades, and assesses how this has come to shape the politics of executive leadership on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I note that Rose has always been sceptical about referring to the US president as a political ‘chief executive’ (Rose 1980a, 339; see also Rose 1977). However, I still take the liberty here to use the widespread and increasingly common term ‘political chief executive’ here when referring to both prime ministers and presidents.

  2. 2.

    Nowadays, in comparative politics, the topos ‘presidents and prime ministers’ tends to be mainly associated with the politics of intra-executive relations in semi-presidential regimes (see e.g. Shugart and Carey 1992; Elgie 1999; Protsyk 2006; Yan 2021). However, Anglo-American comparisons as well as European perspectives on Washington more broadly have remained of major importance (see e.g. Sykes 2000; Fabbrini 2005; Hargrove 2001; Heffernan 2005; Helms 2005, 2015). There is now even a handbook specifically devoted to the personal relations between different pairs of (American) presidents and (British) prime ministers in international politics (Cullinane and Farr 2022).

  3. 3.

    For a full-scale state-of-the-art review of the field of executive politics, see Andeweg et al. (2020b).

  4. 4.

    While there are presidents in quite a few West European countries, I include here only what Robert Elgie has referred to as ‘executive presidents’ (Elgie 2015a), that is, those presidents that can convincingly claim to be their country’s political chief executive, even though there is a prime minister as well. The most prominent example of this type of president is obviously the president of the Fifth French Republic.

  5. 5.

    Some leaders, such as Austria’s Sebastian Kurz (aged 31 in 2017), were significantly younger than that.

  6. 6.

    The emergence of ‘going public’ as a distinct political strategy has been explained with the changing background of modern presidents (lacking legislative experience, and therefore being more willing to avoid having to deal with legislators directly; see Mans 1995, 850). To the extent that different experiences are considered to shape political leaders’ strategies and styles more generally, the decreasing parliamentary experience of some recent, and arguably many future, prime ministers should be expected to become a major factor in transforming leadership patterns in many parliamentary democracies as well.

  7. 7.

    Conservative parties also have hosted more women leaders of the opposition (see Dingler and Helms 2023), which, according to the constitutional myths of Westminster democracy, are ‘prime ministers in waiting’. That said, only a fraction of women leaders of the opposition from the major Westminster democracies have won the office of prime minister; in fact, most of them were temporary leaders that were denied the opportunity to lead their party into a national election campaign (Helms 2023).

  8. 8.

    Indeed, in France, all presidents since the late 1960s have prompted comparisons with General de Gaulle, giving rise to more (Macron) or less (Sarkozy) favourable assessments; see e.g. Flandrin (2021).

  9. 9.

    The significantly increased vulnerability of (unpopular) prime ministers is notable especially in countries with until recently low levels of personalization, such as Japan (see Uchiyama 2022).

  10. 10.

    However, Berlusconi’s continued questioning of the result of the Italian 2006 election, which evicted him from office based on a tiny 24,000 votes lead for the centre-left, displayed a mindset similar to Trump’s.

  11. 11.

    President Kennedy after his first meeting with Chancellor Adenauer, more than 40 years his senior, reportedly noted that he had a feeling of not talking to someone from a different generation but from a different age.

  12. 12.

    For example, in the United Kingdom, the temporary return of more collective forms of cabinet government during the Cameron years was largely owed to the unexpected turmoil of the party system and the formation of a coalition government, rather than any personal preferences of the prime minister (Bennister and Heffernan 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Ludger Helms

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  1. Ludger Helms
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Correspondence to Ludger Helms .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Michael Keating

  2. School of Politics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Ian McAllister 

  3. Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Edward C Page

  4. Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    B Guy Peters

Additional information

I am grateful to Michelangelo Vercesi and the co-editors of this volume, in particular B. Guy Peters and Edward C. Page, for their most useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Very special thanks are due to Richard Rose for providing me with inspiration, encouragement and generous advice throughout my academic career.

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Helms, L. (2023). Presidents and Prime Ministers: Then and Now. In: Keating, M., McAllister , I., Page, E.C., Peters, B.G. (eds) The Problem of Governing . Executive Politics and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_6

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