President and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book: Introduction to Special Issue
| Author | Anna Fruhstorfer,Gianluca Passarelli |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919862135 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919862135
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(1) 2 –11
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919862135
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President and Assemblies—25
Years After Shugart and
Carey’s Book: Introduction to
Special Issue
Anna Fruhstorfer1 and Gianluca Passarelli2
Abstract
Why are some institutions capable of enhancing democracy, while others struggle under
pressure? Shugart and Carey wrote their seminal book Presidents and Assemblies at a crucial time
in modern history in an effort to answer these fundamental questions. Because of bold claims
and huge theoretical and conceptual contributions, their timely publication became the starting
point for a new way to think about institutional specifications and types of political systems. And
although their examples are by now dated, the idea of “trade-off” or “balancing efficiency and
representativeness” still speaks to the fundamental questions of regime change and democratic
sustainability. While their study made clear that there are distinctions between system types, they
also argued that not a specific type is more conducive or damaging to democracy; rather specific
institutional configurations lead to a vulnerability of a political regime. Twenty-five years after the
first publication of Presidents and Assemblies, this special issue uses this argument and reconnects
Shugart and Carey’s book with the recent debate on individual attributes of legislative–executive
relations and their effect on democracy. This article serves as an introduction and highlights the
rationale and the major themes that run through the contributions to the special issue.
Keywords
Presidents and Assemblies, parliamentarism, presidentialism, functional equivalence,
semi-presidentialism, presidential power
Accepted: 10 March 2019
Preface to Political Studies Review Volume (by Matthew S
Shugart and John Carey)
We are honored for this edition of Political Studies Review to focus on Presidents and
Assemblies. We are delighted that the group of scholars whose work is gathered in these
pages would devote such careful attention to our research. More than anything, we are
1Department of Political Science, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2Department of Political Science, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Corresponding author:
Anna Fruhstorfer, Humboldt University of Berlin, Institute of Social Sciences, Unter den Linden 6, Berlin
10099, Germany.
Email: anna.fruhstorfer@uni-goettingen.de
862135PSW0010.1177/1478929919862135Political Studies Review X(X)Fruhstorfer and Passarelli
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
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