Presidents’ (mis)use of public accountability ‘Going public’ tactics in European semi-presidential regimes
ENIn this chapter I examine the link between the presidents’ use of going-public tactics and intra-executive conflicts in European semi-presidential regimes. The idea is to investigate when and how perceived popular legitimacy by the president impedes and sometimes even outperforms formal constitutional power in intra-executive relations. Using both primary and secondary data on president-cabinet relations and intra-executive conflicts, including expert interview materials from three countries (Finland, Lithuania, and Romania), I examine how presidents with relatively weak constitutional powers use informal strategies of going public to increase their influence on government and policy. The empirical analysis covers the period from the early 1990s to 2019 and highlights a number of intra-executive confrontations where the presidents’ perceived popular legitimacy has played a role in the direction and outcome of conflicts. In the next section, I present this study’s comparative design and data, followed by definitions and theoretical standpoints, where I briefly elaborate on how to define semi-presidentialism but discuss in more detail the built-in institutional logic of semi-presidentialism, including how the president’s popular mandate is relevant to intra-executive relations. In the subsequent empirical section, I cover a contextual presentation of the three countries’ semi-presidential systems, followed by the analysis, in which I examine a number of intra-executive conflicts where the presidents have used going-public tactics to influence political outcomes in their favour. Finally, I discuss how the popular mandate and the perceived popular support of the president function as an informal institution and an accountability mechanism where popular opinion has a determining effect on political behaviour between elections.
