Jean-Louis Thiébault
When we examine the links between a president and his party, in a certain number of countries with a presidential system, the party plays a reduced role and its autonomy in relation to the president is weak (Jean-Louis Thiébault, Le parti du président. Les liens entre le président et son parti à travers le monde. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2024). Many authors have focused on a phenomenon of the presidentialization of political life in democratic societies, through the domination of executive power and the personalization of this domination by a single leader (David J. Samuels, “Presidentialized parties. The separation of powers and party organization and behavior”, Comparative Political Studies, vol 35, no 4, may 2002, 461-483).
To discover the political and social forces which characterize the relationship between the president and his own party, in order to measure the autonomy left to the presidential party, we have chosen forty-two presidential parties in countries with either a presidential system (United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines and Sri Lanka, Ghana, Kazakhstan), or a semi-presidential system (Cameroon, Peru, Russia, Senegal, Taiwan, France, Portugal, Turkey).
The party is expected to play an important role in the process of selecting candidates for the presidential election and in organizing the electoral campaign. It needs to select a candidate who is likely to win the presidential election and conquer power. It has the choice among several methods of selecting a candidate for the presidential election (from a nomination by the party leadership to a primary election). The choice of a candidate is the essential function of a political party. However, once the candidate is chosen, he can use his party to organize his electoral campaign. Yet, it happens, more and more often, that the party is supplanted by a campaign team created by the candidate in order to distance himself from the party and freely to choose the main members of this team.
The analysis shows that this autonomy tends to decrease when the candidate is nominated in an open primary election process. Voters in an open primary election can give victory to a candidate who is not part of the party leadership. In circumstances of this type, the presidential party loses both its position as a key player in the electoral process, as well as its decision-making autonomy in terms of recruiting the candidate for the presidential election. This autonomy also tends to diminish when public financing of the presidential campaign is paid directly to the candidate.
The presidential parties leave significant latitude of action to the president, once he is elected. This latitude is manifested particularly in the choices both of leaders of the presidential party and the party’s candidates in the legislative elections. The candidate elected as president, therefore, has a strong influence on the leaders and the activists of the party. The dominance is further accentuated when the president is the founder of the presidential party. The president often even serves as leader of the presidential party.
It is also the president who must choose a government formula: either his own party, the presidential party, has the majority of seats in parliament and, in this case, he has the possibility of forming a homogeneous majority government; or, his own party does not have a majority of seats and, in this case, he must form a minority government or a coalition government. The president can recruit ministers from within his own party, independently, without pressure from it. His margin of autonomy is great, especially when the government has an absolute majority. However, this freedom is more limited when he must form a coalition government. The president must manage the size of the coalition, its proportionality, and its ideological diversity. Although he certainly retains a latitude in the choice of ministers from his own party, he has much less latitude in choosing ministers belonging to the other parties of the coalition.
Finally, the president must have a stable majority in parliament to vote on the program presented to voters during his election. In the event of difficulty with his own party or with the other parties in the coalition, he can use his power of veto. Many presidents also have power of executive order, which gives them extraordinary rather than ordinary means of legislative initiative. In exceptional circumstances, the president may invoke a state of emergency.
The major traditional presidential parties are increasingly experiencing situations of crisis or decline. They have sometimes demonstrated an inability to face the challenge of the presidential election by universal suffrage. They have not complied with its main requirement in the same way: to rely on an undisputed leader who is given wide latitude of action in the definition of political strategy. Certain parties have, thus, remained very unevenly “presidentialized” in their internal organization and, variously, preoccupied with the presidential election.
Some of these traditional presidential parties have experienced a significant decline (PLC and PCC in Colombia, AD and COPEI in Venezuela, URC in Argentina …). They are sometimes strongly contested (GOP in United States, PS and LR in France, PRI in Mexico, Kuomintang in Taiwan, NP in the Philippines). The reduction in the role of the traditional presidential party is the result of several factors: the personalization of political life; the accentuation of the power of presidents, sometimes leading to the emergence of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian presidential systems; the increase in the term of office of the president due to the opportunity offered to him to seek re-election; and, the proliferation of small parties, defenders of specific interests. The personalization of political life has established itself as a pragmatic rule of the political game in presidential systems.
In many presidential systems, particularly in Latin America, the number of authorized mandates was limited to a single mandate. The objective was to prevent the holder of the mandate from remaining in office, to avoid a personalization of executive power. Most presidential systems set limits on the presidential term. The rule is most often a limitation of two mandates. It strengthens the president’s control over his party. However, some presidents have benefitted from a lifetime mandate after the abolition of any limit on the number of mandates (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, until his death in 2013). There are a significant number of presidents who have remained in power for a long time after the abolition of the rule (Alexander Baturo and Robert Elgie, Eds., The politics of presidential term limits. Oxford University Press, 2019).
Some of the elements that weaken presidential parties are the proliferation of small parties, and the need to build coalitions which tend to multiply in presidential systems. The multiplication of small parties leads to an increase in the number of parliamentary groups, especially where the electoral system is proportional. The model that has developed since the end of the 20th century has been to form coalition governments. Majority parties are rare, although they were predominant in many countries, particularly Latin American ones. A “coalition presidentialism”, therefore, exists in many presidential regimes around the world, far from the traditional image of presidentialism in the United States (Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, Timothy J. Power, Coalitional presidentialism in comparative perspective. Minority presidents in multiparty systems. Oxford University Press, 2018).
The crisis of traditional presidential parties has led to the development of new forms of partisan organization. These traditional parties are contested, but the partisan form seems reinforced. New parties were born. They easily present candidates in presidential elections, but have more difficulty in legislative elections. Above all, they value different organizational practices and diversified funding. They reject the traditional form of parties, and particularly the form of large mass parties.
Several elements must be analyzed to identify the main characteristics of this development. First of all, political parties have always been the subject of fundamental criticism of their nature. In the eyes of some, the logic of the presidential election by direct or indirect universal suffrage requires a harmony between a candidate and the people. A natural candidate must inevitably emerge as the presidential election approaches. Then, nothing prevents the natural candidate from obtaining the support of one or more political parties, subsequent to his declaration of candidacy.
Traditional presidential parties also suffer from party competition, either resulting from splits or led by “outsiders” (Miguel Carreras, “Institutions, governmental performance and the rise of political newcomers”, European Journal of Political Research, vol 56, issue 2, 2017, 364-380; Miguel Carreras, “The rise of outsiders in Latin America, 1980-2010”, Comparative Political Studies, vol 45, no 12, 2011, 1451-1482). They put into question some of the characteristics of traditional presidential parties by developing membership without commitment, the refusal of internal democracy and the lightness of statutes, the defense of a social or territorial anchor, the personalization of leadership, or the multiplication of sources of financing (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, etc.). Many candidates, newcomer to politics, have been elected president in recent years by relying on this type of party. “Outsiders” can even win without the support of any traditional party, especially in moments of deep economic and political crisis (Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Alberto Fujimori in Peru). They were elected in weakly institutionalized democracies, but the electoral appeal of “outsiders” also increases in more solid democracies (Donald Trump in the United States).
Recent political developments in many presidential regimes have paved the way for the institutionalization of authoritarian political parties. They are often dominant parties rather than single parties (United Russia in Russia, AKP in Turkey, Nur Otan in Kazakhstan, CPDM in Cameroon, MAS in Bolivia, PSUV in Venezuela). Dominant ruling presidential parties play a critical role in maintaining and promoting the stability of authoritarian rule. They can help the president monitor citizens and offer patronage to social groups.
Around the world, conflicts over contentious elections are common. Such contestations are particularly common in situations of “electoral authoritarianism,” that is, in political systems that have the attributes of democracy without its norms and practices (Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral authoritarianism: The dynamics of unfree competition. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006).
These contentious elections end in heated partisan debates, street protests, and legitimacy challenges. In the worst cases, disputes trigger government collapses and military coups. Such events are not supposed to happen, however, in countries, where democratic norms prevail. In these countries, contested elections are handled through legal appeals to electoral courts. A contested election does not end in a mob insurrection. Yet, this is what happened to the United States in 2021 (Pippa Norris, “It happened in America. Democratic backsliding shouldn’t have come as a surprise”, Foreign Affairs, January 7, 2021).
There are, in fact, leaders of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries who, whatever the decision of the voters, declare themselves winners of the elections. Most of these leaders defy voters before even voting, excluding opposition political parties from the ballot and flooding radio and television with propaganda. There is even a strong tendency for these presidents to manipulate electoral campaigns, to avoid too open fraud on election day. They are the main institutions that enable democratic erosion. Unlike how new dictatorships were formed in the 20th century, most authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in the 21st century are created when presidents dismantle democracy from within (Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Carina Nietsche, Joseph Wright, “How personalist politics is changing democracies”, Journal of Democracy, vol 32, no 3, 2021, 94-108; Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jia Li, Joseph Wright, “Personalist ruling parties in democracies”, Democratization, vol 29, issue 5, 2022, 918-938). When they face truly competitive votes and the outcome goes against them, they often ignore the outcome, denouncing it as the work of traitors, and therefore invalid. By refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election and working to delegitimize the vote, Donald Trump followed a similar strategy on January 6, 2021.
These developments seem to support Juan J. Linz’s thesis on the dangers of the presidential system and its consequences on the characteristics and nature of presidential parties, particularly in authoritarian regimes. But even democratic presidential systems are not immune to such developments (Juan J. Linz, « The perils of presidentialism », Journal of Democracy, vol 1, no 1, winter 1990, 51-69).
