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⁵ In countries as different as Japan and Germany, the mass media have been identified as veritable functional equivalents of a powerful opposition party. See Ellis S. Krauss, ‘The Mass Media and Japanese Politics: Effects and Consequences’, in Susan J. Pharr and Ellis S. Krauss (eds), Media and Politics in Japan, Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press, 1996, p. 360; Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Regierungen ohne Opposition’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 November 2002, p. 2.Google Scholar

⁶ Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb (eds), The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2005.Google Scholar

⁷ P. Eric Louw, The Media and Political Process, London, Sage, 2005, ch. 3, p. 54.Google Scholar

⁸ Livingstone, Sonia, ‘On the Challenges of Cross-National Comparative Media Research’, European Journal of Communication, 18 (2003), pp. 477–500 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Michael Gurevitch and Jay Blumler, ‘The State of the Art of Comparative Political Communication Research’, in Frank Esser and Barbara Pfetsch (eds), Comparing Political Communication. Theories, Cases, and Challenges, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 325–43.

⁹ This is the essence of actor-centred institutionalism as suggested by Fritz W. Scharpf, Games Real Actors Play: Actor-Centered Institutionalism in Policy Research, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1997.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Indeed, many changes in executive organization came about in response to changing external pressures, including in particular those produced by the media. For the USA, see Stephen Hess with James P. Pfiffner, Organizing the Presidency, 3rd edn, Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2002; for Britain, Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon, The Powers Behind the Prime Minister, London, HarperCollins, 2000; for a comparative perspective, B. Guy Peters, R. A. W. Rhodes and Vincent Wright (eds), Administering the Summit: Administration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries, London, Macmillan, 2000.Google Scholar

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¹² Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand are among those who have been widely considered to represent prime examples of leaders with an exceptional ability ‘to exploit the new dynamics of media-driven politics’; Peele, Gillian, ‘Leadership and Politics: A Case for a Closer Relationship?’, Leadership, 1 (2005), p. 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ See Arend Lijphart, Parliamentary versus Presidential Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992. Within the family of established liberal democracies, the United States has remained the only uncontested case of presidential government, whereas all West European countries (except Switzerland) belong to the rather heterogeneous group of parliamentary systems of government. There has been growing consensus in the more recent literature that the coexistence of a directly elected president with a parliamentary responsible prime minister (which marks several of the West European democracies) should be considered an institutional variation within the group of parliamentary regimes, rather than an independent ‘semi-presidential’ type of representative government. See Siaroff, Alan, ‘Comparative Presidencies: The Inadequacy of the Presidential, Semi-Presidential and Parliamentary Distinction’, European Journal of Political Research, 42 (2003), pp. 287–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ See Stepan, Alfred and Skach, Cindy, ‘Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation: Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism’, World Politics, 46 (1993), pp. 1–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Juan Linz and Arturo Valenzuela (eds), The Failure of Presidential Democracy. Vol. 1: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; Fred W. Riggs, ‘Presidentialism versus Parliamentarism: Implications for Representativeness and Legitimacy’, International Political Science Review, 18 (1997), pp. 253–78

¹⁵ George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Thomas C. Baylis, Governing by Committee: Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1989, p. 147.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Anthony King, ‘“Chief Executives” in Western Europe’, in Ian Budge and David McKay (eds), Developing Democracy. Comparative Research in Honour of J.F.P. Blondel, London, Sage, 1994, p. 153. It should be noted that the focus of this evaluation is on systemic properties (including the constitutional powers of office and the basic political variables) rather than on the much more volatile power basis of individual office holders.Google Scholar

¹⁸ There have been more recent attempts to evaluate the power of prime ministers, including an expert survey focusing on the power of prime ministers within the policy-making process. See O'Malley, Eoin, ‘The Power of Prime Ministers: Results of an Expert Survey’, International Political Science Review, 28 (2007), pp. 1–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The relationship between King's assessments and those produced by O'Malley's country experts has been notably strong, with significantly differing assessments being confined to a small number of cases, such as Ireland and the Netherlands in particular.

¹⁹ David S. Bell, Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, Oxford, Berg, 2000; Robert Elgie, ‘“Cohabitation”: Divided Government French-Style’, in Robert Elgie (ed.), Divided Government in Comparative Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 106–26; Jack Hayward and Vincent Wright, Governing from the Centre: Core Executive Coordination in France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar

²⁰ For an empirical overview of the different patterns of constitutional veto players to be found in the established democracies see Manfred G. Schmidt, ‘The Impact of Political Parties, Constitutional Structures and Veto Players on Public Policy’, in Hans Keman (ed.), Comparative Democratic Politics, London, Sage, 2002, p. 178, table 8.2. On this basis, Schmidt distinguishes between ‘sovereign democracies’ and ‘semi-sovereign democracies’, which differ from one another in terms of constitutional and other institutional constraints on democratic majorities and democratically elected governments. Note that this differentiation is not a neat equivalent of the more influential distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracies suggested by Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1999, that has been readily adopted by scholars studying the institutional determinants of actors' political communication strategies in different national contexts; see Hanspeter Kriesi, ‘Strategic Political Communication. Mobilizing Public Opinion in “Audience Democracies”’, in Esser and Pfetsch, Comparing Political Communication, pp. 201–2. The different character of the two indices becomes manifest in particular in the competing classifications of the United States which may be considered either a classic example of majoritarian democracy or a power-sharing polity.Google Scholar

²¹ See Ludger Helms, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors: Executive Leadership in Western Democracies, London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 11–15, table 1.2.Google Scholar

²² Sergio Fabbrini, ‘The Semi-Sovereign American Prince: The Dilemma of an Independent President in a Presidential Government’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 313–35.Google Scholar

²³ Helms, Ludger, ‘The Changing Chancellorship: Resources and Constraints Revisited’, German Politics, 10 (2001), pp. 155–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a comparative perspective, see also Ludger Helms, Executive Leadership and the Role of ‘Veto Players’ in the United States and Germany, Working Paper No. 03.02, Program for the Study of Germany and Europe, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2003.

²⁴ This marks one among several important theses developed and substantiated by Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini in their path-breaking comparative study on the historical evolution and change of Western media systems. See Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. It should be noted, however, that the authors do not identify a purely unidirectional process of convergence. Whereas the more dominant move has been towards ‘Americanization’, there have been several traces of ‘Europeanization’ in the United States, including, for example, the belated emergence of nationwide American newspapers. For a more detailed reconsideration of the ‘Americanization’ thesis from a British perspective see also Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, ‘“Americanization” Reconsidered: U.K.–U.S. Campaign Communication Comparisons Across Time’, in Lance Bennett and Entman, Mediated Politics, pp. 380–403.Google Scholar

²⁵ Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems.Google Scholar

²⁶ See, for example, Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty and the Internet Worldwide, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001. For a critique of the ‘digital divide’ paradigm, which has been considered to be misleadingly static, see Rose, Richard, ‘A Global Diffusion Model of e-Governance’, Journal of Public Policy, 25 (2005), pp. 5–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²⁸ Schmidt, ‘The Impact of Political Parties’, p. 178.Google Scholar

²⁹ For a concise overview of different approaches see Anthony King, ‘Do Leaders' Personalities Really Matter?’, in Anthony King (ed.), Leaders' Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 1–44.Google Scholar

³⁰ Michael Foley, The Rise of the British Presidency, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 278.Google Scholar

³¹ See on this the groundbreaking study by Anthony Mughan, Media and the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. ‘Electoral presidentialization’, as described by Mughan, reappears in the work of Poguntke and Webb as ‘the electoral face of presidentialization’; see Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb, ‘The Presidentialization of Politics in Democratic Societies: A Framework for Analysis’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

³² Even Poguntke and Webb in their conclusion readily acknowledge that the assumption of strong direct electoral effects of individual leaders ‘is probably the least convincing aspect of the presidentialization thesis’. Paul Webb and Thomas Poguntke, ‘The Presidentialization of Contemporary Democratic Politics: Evidence, Causes, and Consequences’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, p. 345.Google Scholar

³³ See King, Leaders' Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections.Google Scholar

³⁴ Larry M. Bartels, ‘The Impact of Candidate Traits in American Presidential Elections’, in King, Leaders' Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections, pp. 44–69.Google Scholar

³⁵ Kellner, Peter, ‘Clearing the Fog: What Really Happened in the 2005 Election Campaign’, Political Quarterly, 75 (2005), pp. 327–9.Google Scholar

³⁶ Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V., Bundestagswahl. Eine Analyse der Wahl vom 18. September 2005, Berichte der Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V., 122, Mannheim, 2005, pp. 25–8, 45.Google Scholar

³⁷ As Bakvis and Wolinetz maintain, ‘the basis for labelling the Canadian system as presidentialized … can be found … in the political rather than the electoral face of the phenomenon.’ Herman Bakvis and Steven B. Wolinetz, ‘Canada: Executive Dominance and Presidentialization’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, p. 217. In Finland, the major constitutional reform of the late 1990s clearly stands out as the key factor responsible for the rise of prime ministerial government. See Heikki Paloheimo, ‘Finland: Let the Force Be with the Leader – But Who is the Leader?’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 246–68; see also Nousiainen, Jaakko, ‘From Semi-presidentialism to Parliamentary Government: Political and Constitutional Developments in Finland’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 24 (2001), pp. 95–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³⁹ See Mauro Calise, ‘Presidentialization, Italian Style’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 91–6. For a more detailed study on this subject see Cristina Barbieri and Luca Verzichelli, Il governo e i suoi apparati: l'evoluzione del caso italiano in prospettiva comparata, Genoa, Name, 2003. Other assessments by Calise have been somewhat less compelling. In particular, the increased powers of the executive as a whole vis-à-vis parliament do not mark a systemic feature that may be meaningfully judged as a move towards presidentialization, or certainly not as a feature that would move the new Italian model closer to the structures and logics marking presidential government in the USA.Google Scholar

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⁴¹ Clay Clemens, ‘Party Management as a Leadership Resource: Kohl and the CDU/CSU’, in Clay Clemens and William E. Paterson (eds), The Kohl Chancellorship, London, Frank Cass, 1998, p. 108.Google Scholar

⁴² See Helms, Executive Leadership in Western Democracies, p. 215. The Kohl experience has prompted some innovative theoretical reflections on the possibility of maintaining a high degree of control in the absence of a strong personal mandate and public charisma. One of the most inspiring contributions of this kind is Ansell, Christopher K. and Fish, Steven M., ‘The Art of Being Indispensible: Noncharismatic Personalism in Contemporary Political Parties’, Comparative Political Studies, 32 (1999), pp. 282–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴³ While the position of the head of government as a country's ‘chief executive’ in the international arena has long become a familiar feature, the establishment of such de facto prerogative powers of the chief executive in international relations actually marks a comparatively recent historical occurrence. This holds true not only for some of the smaller West European countries with their notably collegial executive structures, but even for world powers such as the United States or Britain. As Richard Rose, The Postmodern President, 2nd edn, Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, 1991, p. 21, has pointed out, until the early twentieth century not a single American president had ever travelled abroad while in office, and it was even argued that presidents lacked the legal authority to do so. In Britain, too, foreign policy was very much perceived to be a task solely of the foreign secretary before the Second World War. Churchill's lengthy and unsuccessful battle with his cabinet for permission to go to Russia to ease East–West tensions suggests that, even in the first decades after 1945, the personal involvement of the prime minister in foreign affairs was still far from being generally accepted. See Graham P. Thomas, Prime Minister and Cabinet Today, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, pp. 103–4. In many West European countries, the growing importance of ‘summit politics’, and the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive, was to some considerable degree a direct result of European integration. One of the first to elaborate on this has been Andrew Moravcsik, Why the European Community Strengthens the State: Domestic Politics and International Cooperation, Working Paper 52, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1994.Google Scholar

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⁴⁵ One of them was the growth of strong lobbies pressing for change in media policy, in particular the advertising lobby, which pushed hard in many countries for access to the electronic media. From a different corner of the political spectrum, various social movements also pushed towards private broadcasting, often finding their first new platform in pirate radio stations. In addition, public demands for a greater number and diversity of television programmes also played a role. From the early 1980s, the introduction of private broadcasting appeared as the only way to expand television beyond the limited number of channels that could be funded by licence fee revenues from public broadcasting. Finally, the emergence of transnational private broadcasting in particular was facilitated by processes of economic globalization, including the project of European integration. See Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems, pp. 274–6.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ This is an important point to be elaborated in a comparative context by Katrin Voltmer, Structures of Diversity of Press and Broadcasting Systems: The Institutional context of Public Communication in Western Democracies, Discussion Paper FS 00-201, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), March 2000.Google Scholar

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⁵⁰ See Baum, Matthew A. and Kernell, Samuel, ‘Has Cable Ended the Golden Age of Presidential Television?’, American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), pp. 99–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin P. Wattenberg, ‘The Changing Presidential Media Environment’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (2004), pp. 557–72

⁵¹ See Seaton, Jean, ‘Public, Private and the Media’, Political Quarterly, 74 (2003), pp. 174–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also James Stanyer and Dominic Wring (eds), Public Images, Private Lives: The Mediation of Politicians around the Globe, a special issue of Parliamentary Affairs, 57: 1 (2004).

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⁵⁶ This is at least what the history of the American executive branch suggests. See Shirley Anne Warshaw, Powersharing: White House-Cabinet Relations in the Modern Presidency, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996; Anthony J. Bennett, The American President's Cabinet: From Kennedy to Bush, London, Macmillan, 1996; Ronald C. Moe, ‘The President's Cabinet’, in James P. Pfiffner and Roger H. Davidson (eds), Understanding the Presidency, 2nd edn, New York, Longman, 2000, pp. 173–93.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ One of the more substantive studies on this phenomenon is Thomas Meyer, Media Democracy: How the Media Colonize Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ A. Rawnsley, ‘Mr Blair versus the Barons’, Observer, 16 June 2002.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ There are several reasons as to why the amount of time required for practising effective and responsible democratic decision-making has increased over the past decades. Perhaps most importantly, issues become more and more complex, often extending well beyond the horizon of the present generation of citizens and decision makers, as is particularly obvious in such fields as genetic research and nuclear energy. At the same time, the capacity of contemporary pluralist societies to draw on traditional consensus, which could form the basis of bold and forward-looking decision-making, has largely declined. See Rosa, Hartmut, ‘The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics’, New Political Science, 27 (2005), pp. 445–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶⁵ In fact, this perception has been the driving force behind the spectacular rise of the governance paradigm in international political research. For a concise overview of the competing approaches see Anne Mette Kjær, Governance, Cambridge, Polity, 2004, and Van Kersbergen, Kers and Van Waarden, Frans, ‘“Governance” as a Bridge between Disciplines: Cross-Disciplinary Inspiration Regarding Shifts in Governance and Problems of Governability, Accountability and Legitimacy’, European Journal of Political Research, 43 (2004), pp. 143–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶⁹ This is a point made by Vedel, who argues that ICT (information and communication technologies) ‘allow party members to be provided with more information on what their leaders are doing and thus can allow a better accountability of parties’ elites. Besides the redistribution of power between local members and elites, ICTs might result in the decentralization of political forces. Minority groups within parties may communicate their view independently to the other members and express dissent, and link up with other minority groups to challenge party elites.' Thierry Vedel, ‘Political Communication in the Age of the Internet’, in Maarek and Wolfsfeld, Political Communication in a New Era, p. 44.Google Scholar

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⁷⁶ Even though this may prove difficult enough at times, see note 20.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ For a carefully balanced discussion see Brandice Canes-Wrone, Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and the Public, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2006.Google Scholar

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