The Elephant in the Room in Presidential Politics: Informal Powers in Western Europe
| Author | Selena Grimaldi |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211041957 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211041957
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(1) 21 –41
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299211041957
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The Elephant in the Room in
Presidential Politics: Informal
Powers in Western Europe
Selena Grimaldi
Abstract
Presidents’ informal powers remain under-investigated especially in Western European
democracies. This gap might hamper the full understanding of how presidents ultimately behave
and act. The objective of this article is twofold. First, it aims at adopting a definition of presidents’
informal powers by distinguishing them from formal ones and from informal institutions. Second,
it distinguishes among different kind of informal powers by focusing on why presidents use them.
To this end, a typology based on the following two criteria is proposed: (1) the existence of formal
powers at disposal of the president in a specific sphere and (2) the evaluation of public support
each individual president thinks to enjoy should they act or refrain. Four types of informal powers
can be derived from these dimensions: substitutive informal powers, parallel informal powers,
risk-taking informal powers and subverting informal powers.
Keywords
presidents, informal powers, formal powers, leadership capital, inter-institutional relations, public
opinion
Accepted: 9 August 2021
Introduction
Presidential powers have been investigated in depth by comparative literature. However,
most scholars assumed that presidential powers are simply formal ones namely those
powers written in Constitutions and almost all have relied on the classical distinction
provided by Shugart and Carey (1992) between legislative powers and non-legislative
powers. The same distinction with different nuances has been proposed by other schol-
ars (Frye, 1997; Metcalf, 2000). Only few ones chose to rely on different categorisation
trying to capture not only formal powers but also the real praxis of the presidency
(Amorin Neto and Costa Lobo, 2009; Cranenburgh, 2008; Siarof, 2003; Tavits, 2008).
However, the problem with such categorisations is that they did not actually depart
Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Corresponding author:
Selena Grimaldi, Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies, University of Padova, Via del
Santo 28, 35123 Padova, Italy.
Email: selena.grimaldi@unipd.it
1041957PSW0010.1177/14789299211041957Political Studies ReviewGrimaldi
research-article2021
Article
22 Political Studies Review 21(1)
from the traditional one, but simply added some presidential behaviour to the existing
check-lists.
The most recent and complete study on presidential powers (Doyle and Elgie, 2016)
pools together the most important existing measures of presidential powers trying to
address certain methodological concerns (Fortin, 2013). However, the problem is that, the
different indexes of presidential powers do not consider that the powers enjoyed by the
presidents might go beyond those actually conferred by the constitution (Elster, 1997).
Therefore, presidential informal powers remain an almost unknown territory.
In European presidential studies, there are only few attempts to recognise the existence
of informal powers. However, a clear definition is totally missing – not to mention any
reflection about the possibility to measure them in some way. Conversely, in the United
States, a flourishing strand of literature emerged in relation to the importance of the use
of informal powers by presidents. Many scholars have emphasised US presidents’ ‘power
of persuasion’ as a function of reputation and prestige (Neustadt, 1990) and their ability
to appeal to the public to place pressure on Congress (Canes-Wrone, 2005; Kernell, 1997;
Lowi, 1985; Neustadt, 1990; Rudalevige, 2005; Schlesinger, 1974). However, most of
these works are focused on presidential influence on policy-making only. Furthermore,
attempts to measure such presidential informal powers have been scarce so far, also in the
United States.
In addition, even scales of presidential power based exclusively on formal powers
have been disputed in the American context in recent times, that is, by Morgenstern
et al. (2013) who have compared the US presidents’ and Latin American presidents’
capacity to implement policy. Their starting point was evidence that the formally
weaker president of the United States manages to achieve similar policy goals than
formally stronger Latin American presidents. In order to solve this puzzle, they com-
plained that in comparative literature, the primary independent variable is in all cases
variance in formal constitutional powers and therefore ‘comparative scales of presiden-
tial powers are lacking’ (Morgenstern et al., 2013: 39) since they cannot overcome the
problem of presidents exercising similar powers through other tools. As they posit, ‘if
the ability to implement policies is similar but formal/constitutional powers are differ-
ent, then scales must be missing important tools available to presidents’ (Morgenstern
et al., 2013). Morgenstern et al. (2013) demonstrated that even in Presidential systems
– where presidents typically enjoy large amount of powers, all presidents have recoursed
to a mix of formal and informal (or as the say reinforced) powers to implement their
agenda.
The aim of this article is to fill this gap in European presidential studies, namely to
define what Presidents’ informal powers are. In doing so, two different strands of
American literature have been combined: one deals with presidential-going public strate-
gies and the other deals with informality, informal governance, and informal institutions
(Azari and Smith, 2012; Christiansen and Neuhold, 2012; Helmke and Levitsky, 2004;
Lauth, 2012).
The article proceeds as follows: in section ‘Literature Review and Research Strategy’,
a review of literature is presented and the research strategy is explained; section
‘Presidential Activism and Presidential Power’ distinguishes between presidential power
and functions and section ‘Presidential Formal and Informal Powers: A Definition’ pro-
vides a definition of formal and informal powers, while section ‘What Purpose Can
Informal Powers be Used For? A Typology and Conclusive Remarks’ concludes by pro-
viding a typology of informal powers.
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