1 the Presidentialization Debate

Notes 1 The Presidentialization Debate 1. While it may be its central characteristic, the construction and conduct of the election campaign around the party leaders is only one aspect of a syndrome that might be called the ‘new’ campaigning in modern elections. Other aspects of this syndrome are: (i) campaigns are increasingly centralized and national in scope, with battle lines being drawn between the contending party leaders; (ii) professional advisors or consultants are increasingly used to provide advice in specialist areas like marketing and the leader’s presentation of self; (iii) professionals in other areas have adapted their skills and talents to suit the electoral market. This is especially apparent in the area of opinion poll research. In the past, campaign strategists would have relied on volun- teer party workers, party spokesmen, and the like to provide them with feedback on how the campaign was progressing. Increasingly, this feedback is being provided by scientific opinion polls (see, for example, Bowler and Farrell 1992). 2. It is worth noting that for the first time ever there was serious consideration of staging debates between the leaders of the British Conservative and Labour parties during the 1997 election campaign (Butler and Kavanagh 1997: 85–9). 3. Similar sentiments are evident in a book written by the former Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson. He simply refuses to entertain the possibility of convergence between the parliamentary and presidential forms of government (Wilson 1976: 169–90). 4. Much of the presidentialization debate is frustrating because the participants in it, starting with dissimilar definitional frameworks, talk past each other. Foley (1993: 119) observes astutely of opponents of the presidential analogy: ‘They can overstate their case by denying (it) in one respect, or even in sev- eral respects, solely on the ground that it is not a valid comparison in all possible respects.’ 5. It is an empirical statement to say that parliamentary elections are contests between parties. Individuals and non-party collectivities can perfectly legally contest elections as long as they satisfy the minimum requirements of the electoral law. The truth of the matter, though, is that political parties have emerged as by far the most important vehicle for aggregating voters’ demands and interests on the one hand and organizing governments on the other. Democracy, at least as we know it, is inconceivable without political parties. ‘While the study of politics may be approached through other processes besides political parties, notably the judicial or the administrative, the growth and evolution of democracy and rule by public opinion has been uniquely connected with the rise of party government since the seventeenth century’ (Leiserson 1967: 34). 6. In his thoughtful essay on the concept of party government, Katz (1986: 55) confirms party government’s close links with parliamentarism. ‘Party 151 152 Notes government is more likely in parliamentary systems because party is more useful to leaders in such systems … Party is a device by means of which sta- ble majorities may be achieved … Presidential government, on the other hand, both makes personalism more likely and entails two rival arenas for decision-making.’ 07. The term presidential is also often used in a static, constitutional sense to imply institutionalized dissimilarity that does not admit of the possibility of convergence. Thus, a number of parliamentary regimes are presidential in the straightforward sense that they have a president rather than a constitutional monarch as head of state. See Riggs (1988: 248). 08. A still more subtle and dynamic balance between presidentialism and parliamentarism is struck in the ‘semi-presidential’ constitution of the Fifth French Republic. Constitutional ambiguity and political circumstance have allowed the president to hold the upper hand over the prime minister and cabinet (council of ministers) for most of the republic’s existence, but parliamentary supremacy has reasserted itself on occasion (Elgie and Machin 1991). As in the German case, this kind of transition from parliamentary to presidential supremacy is constitutional presidentialization and the circum- stances making for it may be of interest to students of this phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is a fundamentally different process of change from, say, the British case because the Fifth Republic’s constitution creates a president vested with his own independent powers. ‘Pure’ parliamentary constitu- tions, in contrast, do not make provision for a political executive independent of the government so that any increase in the power of party leaders in them is informal. 09. This is not an iron law, however. Political circumstance and individual personality sometimes combined to produce strong, decisive prime ministers even under conditions of factionalism and/or multipartism. Recent exam- ples are Craxi in Italy and Nakasone in Japan. 10. Especially when they have been successful in winning elections, the Conservative party has traditionally been more deferential to its leaders than the Labour party (Beer 1965: 79–102). But, as discussed more fully in Chapter 6, this deference would appear to be eroding. Mrs Thatcher was ejected from the Conservative party leadership in November 1990 despite having a record three consecutive election victories under her belt and a serious challenge was mounted to Mr Major’s leadership in July 1995 despite his having steered the party to an unexpected outright election victory some three years earlier. A key element in both these challenges was the fear among backbenchers that the sitting prime minister had become so unpopular as to be likely to lead the party to defeat in the next general election. 11. This line of argument can be criticized for being speculative when it is in principle amenable to empirical testing. The problem is that what is possible in principle is not always feasible in practice. The insuperable barrier to any kind of comparative analysis of presidentialization in parliamentary democracies is the lack of relevant, comparable data collected over time. While cross-sectional studies of leader effects are sometimes possible (see, for example, Graetz and McAllister 1987), to the best that I have been able to determine, no other parliamentary democracy has survey data that allow Notes 153 a longitudinal study of leader effects comparable to what is possible for Britain. As will become apparent as the analysis in this book proceeds, this is far from saying that the data available for Britain are perfect. Nonetheless, they do afford some systematic insights into stability and change in the role of party leaders in elections in that country over the last three decades. 12. This contrast makes the general point that British heads of government have on average enjoyed long stays in the premiership. There is, of course, great individual variation. The position has in fact been dominated by four individuals since 1945. These are Attlee (75 months in the office), Macmillan (81 months), Wilson (92 months) and Thatcher (129 months). In other words, four of ten prime ministers held the position for just over 60 per cent of the 1945–97 period. This variation is repeated in other coun- tries, like Canada and West Germany, whose premiers have also enjoyed long tenure in the job on average. See Strom (1990: 246–69) for details of prime ministerial turnover in a number of western democracies. 2 Presidentialization of Presentation and Impact 01. This conclusion is the more persuasive for being shared by a number of vot- ing studies conducted in the 1950s in other parliamentary democracies shar- ing the Westminster model of government. For Australia and New Zealand, see respectively Rawson and Holtzinger (1958) and Mitchell (1962). 02. Something like the same exercise could have been carried out using the Nuffield general election studies since their inception in 1945. This is the usual ‘bible’ for accounts like this one. From the perspective of this analysis, however, a shortcoming of this series is that it reports events without com- menting normatively on them, whereas an important concern of the presidentialization thesis is the normative reaction to the emergence of the politics of personality in general elections. The editorial pages of a leading newspaper, like The Times, provide a more suitable mix of interpretative journalism and normative reaction. 03. These figures were provided by the Broadcasting Research Department of the British Broadcasting Corporation in private correspondence. I am most grateful to Robin McGregor for his cooperation. 04. Unlike television coverage, the strict rules governing campaign financing have barely changed over the post-war period. A more complete account of these and other facets of post-war broadcasting is Seymour-Ure (1991). 05. For example, while not figuring prominently in Conservative party political broadcasts, Mr Macmillan’s considerable skill at manipulating television to create just the right effect did shine through in other ways. In an interview with me in April 1990, a former Tory cabinet minister who first entered Parliament in 1959 recalled two contrived television images intended to persuade voters of Macmillan’s status as a leading world statesman. The first was a broadcast in the company of the US president, Eisenhower, and the second was one of Macmillan standing beside a globe and ‘patting [it] affectionately’. 06. I am grateful to Dominic Wring for pointing out to me that the ‘talking head’ format was the norm, but there were deviations from it. In its single 154 Notes 1951 party election broadcast, for example, Labour had sought to engage viewers by having a dialogue between Hartley Shawcross and Christopher Mayhew. More generally, see Cockerell (1988: 1–95). 07. There is also, of course, radio. This medium is ignored in this analysis for two reasons. First, few British voters use it for political information. Dunleavy and Husbands (1985: 111), for example, found that only 4 per cent of their respondents named it as their most important information source.

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