Designing Health Policy to Fight the Coronavirus in Egypt and Turkey

This paper seeks to answer the following question: Why have the bureaucracies and executive arms of two highly centralized presidential regimes – Egypt and Turkey – produced such different responses to the Coronavirus crisis? Its basic hypothesis is that while the crisis did initially provide scope for ministers, technocrats and bureaucrats specialized in public health to play a greater part in making health policy, their ability to maintain this newfound influence depended on their "policy capability". Through a comparison of the two case studies, this article shows that the more centralized a state is, the more unprecedented the crisis is and the more policy capability it has, the greater the role bureaucrats play at the expense of politicians

Designing Health Policy to Fight the Coronavirus in Egypt and Turkey

This paper seeks to answer the following question: Why have the bureaucracies and executive arms of two highly centralized presidential regimes – Egypt and Turkey – produced such different responses to the Coronavirus crisis? Its basic hypothesis is that while the crisis did initially provide scope for ministers, technocrats and bureaucrats specialized in public health to play a greater part in making health policy, their ability to maintain this newfound influence depended on their "policy capability". Through a comparison of the two case studies, this article shows that the more centralized a state is, the more unprecedented the crisis is and the more policy capability it has, the greater the role bureaucrats play at the expense of politicians.

Preliminaries

This chapter introduces the setting for the study of the executive branch, and sets aside several issues that may be considered as challenges to the project. A short section on the definition of ‘the executive branch’ is followed by an overview of the literature on the executive, showing that the immense body of research is almost entirely system-based, and contains limited theoretical and comparative analysis. To date, no general theory, or model of the executive branch, can be found in the current academic literature. An exposé of the central analytical concept used in this book—that of the ‘internal tension’ element of constitutionalism, leads to the discussion and rejection of two challenges to the project, which draws on the law and political practices of the United States and the United Kingdom. The first focuses on the alleged incomparability of parliamentary and presidential regimes, the second on the so-called ‘breaking down’ of the executive branch and the devolution of many of its functions to agencies placed outside the ‘core executive’. Variations do exist, but sufficient similarities, the existence of complex structures that do not follow simple binary divides, and the de facto dominance of the executive in both systems, fully support the analyses presented in the book.

Semi-Presidentialism

This chapter discusses semi-presidentialism, a relative newcomer to the disciplines of both comparative constitutional law and comparative politics. It first retraces the early transformation of the regime of the French Fifth Republic from parliamentary to semi-presidential regime. Secondly, the chapter analyses the early identification of this regime type and the difficulties encountered in defining it. The attempts to assess this regime are then examined. Afterwards, the chapter sketches the migration of semi-presidentialism around the world so as to understand its present spread. Finally, it suggests broadening the basis for the classification of semi-presidential regimes by highlighting the key role played by institutions other than the executive and legislature.

Legislatures, Executives, and Political Control of Government

This chapter examines how political control over government is exercised today in the UK, the US, and France, focusing on control of the executive branch by the legislature and control of the administrative executive by the political executive. These three jurisdictions were chosen because they are paradigmatic examples of different political regimes: parliamentarism, separation of powers presidentialism, and semi-presidentialism. In theory, these different institutional structures should affect how political control is understood and wielded. In the traditional Westminster parliamentary model, for example, the government is formed from the leadership of the majority party in Parliament and it is the government that controls policy-making. By contrast, the traditional account of a separation of powers regime posits a separate legislature and executive as institutional rivals. Semi-presidential regimes combine a popularly elected presidential-type executive with a legislatively-dependent cabinet executive.

Presidential Regimes

This chapter focuses on the concept, architecture, and control of presidential regimes from the perspective of comparative administrative law, acknowledging that such an analysis is only possible with support of national administrative law, constitutional law, and political science. It first examines the essential premises of the nature of a presidential regime. What is called by this name is essentially a modern construction, built on an essential separation of functions and a complex of relationships woven among them. Next, the chapter deals with the architecture of administration in presidential regimes. Various perspectives are possible. Here, three will be considered: generative, governmental, and organizational. Lastly, the chapter discusses administrative control in presidential regimes—a crucial issue for comparative administrative law.

When do coalitions form under presidentialism, and why does it matter? A configurational analysis from Latin America

This article proposes a new approach to the study of coalition formation in presidential regimes. Drawing on a dataset covering 33 Latin American governments, the article shows that coalition cabinets are, mostly, the product of pre-electoral agreements. I present a six-stage timing of coalition agreements, including four degrees of earliness. Then, I challenge this consideration with the most common – institutional – arguments from the literature about the survival of coalitions in presidential regimes. The findings are quite interesting since they point out that earlier agreements are relevant conditions for enduring coalitions. Moreover, and surprisingly, I show that the institutional argument seems to have been overrated by the literature.

Electoral incentives to coalition formation in multiparty presidential systems

Coalition theories of presidential regimes have frequently assumed coalition formation is a mostly post-electoral phenomenon. We challenge this view by showing that pre-electoral bargaining shapes to a substantial extent minority presidents’ disposition to cooperate with the legislature by forming a majority cabinet. Examining a dataset of pre- and post-electoral coalitions from 18 Latin American countries, we find that majority coalition cabinets are more likely to occur when elected presidents form pre-electoral coalitions (PECs), to the extent that pre-electoral agreements create stronger incentives for cooperation, by relying on a broader set of rewards than any post-electoral agreement. Moreover, we find that the likelihood of majority coalition formation increases as the share of PEC seats increases, thus reducing the need to engage in post-electoral bargaining. Our findings carry important implications for the study of cabinet formation in presidential regimes by introducing pre-electoral agreements as a key determinant of cabinet formation.

The President's dilemma: The Portuguese semi-presidential system in times of crisis (2011‐16)

Economic crises and foreign interventions cause political actors to face a dilemma between responsiveness towards their electorate and responsibility vis-à-vis international institutions. In this article, we analyse how a seldom studied political actor in international affairs (the Head of State in a semi-presidential regime) dealt with this dilemma. We focus on Aníbal Cavaco Silva's (former president of the Portuguese Republic) discourse, and use of veto and constitutionality examination request powers in the 2011‐16 mandate, and on his attitudes regarding the access to power of pro- and anti-austerity political forces in the aftermath of the 2015 legislative elections. We conclude that the Head of State was more concerned with international responsibility than with domestic responsibility and responsiveness, especially at the behavioural level, although he occasionally acted in ways that toned down this feature of his presidential mandate. We therefore suggest that in times of severe crisis the political conditions that usually partly explain variations in the use of the presidential powers in semi-presidential regimes interact with short-term factors related to the crisis that can reduce or even cancel out their effects.