The Presidentialization of Political Executives

This chapter aims to disentagle the ‘presidentialization’ and ‘prime ministerialization’ concepts and to clarify them. The first section begins by noting when the terms first came into common academic usage. It will also discuss the relationship between the concept of prime ministerialization and the more familiar concept of prime ministerial government as it has been used in the work on the core executive. The chapter will then focus on the most important research questions at stake in this area, noting the methods that are traditionally used to study this topic. The second section reviews the existing literature on presidentialization and prime ministerialization. The focus will be on the presidentialization of electoral or party politics only in so far as it affects the nature of executive politics. Finally, the chapter will try to set the research agenda for the future study of the presidentialization by focusing of what aspects have not been sufficiently or adequately investigated, or where there is still a lack of knowledge.