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Proximity, candidates, and presidential power: how directly elected presidents shape the legislative party system

Elgie, Robert orcid logoORCID: 0000-0001-5334-4796, Bucur, Cristina, Dolez, Bernard and Laurent, Annie (2014) Proximity, candidates, and presidential power: how directly elected presidents shape the legislative party system. In: American Political Science Association, 29 Aug - 2 Sept 2013, Chicago, IL..

Abstract
The impact of presidential coattails on the legislative party system is a highly intuitive idea. The coattails effect is believed to depend on the number of presidential candidates and the size of the presidential prize. This article proposes a different way of understanding this relationship. We argue that the strategic behavior of political parties and the way in which the number of presidential contenders shapes the legislative party system can only be predicted for an intermediate range of presidential power. Outside this range the effect is indeterminate. We test our proposition on democracies with direct presidential elections from 1945-2011. Our results confirm that the number of presidential candidates is an important determinant of the legislative party system and show that whether or not legislative elections are held close to presidential elections has little influence on party-system fragmentation in countries with directly elected presidents.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:No
Uncontrolled Keywords:Presidential elections
Subjects:Social Sciences > Political science
DCU Faculties and Centres:Research Initiatives and Centres > Centre for International Studies (CIS)
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > School of Law and Government
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License
Funders:Irish Research Council, Ulysses, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
ID Code:19707
Deposited On:28 Jan 2014 14:16 by Robert Elgie . Last Modified 05 Oct 2018 09:16
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