Government Executive Branch Research Paper

1. Origin

Executives in the modern sense emerged through the piecemeal splitting-off of state functions from a traditionally undivided central government (mostly a monarch) (Shepard 1931, King 1975). In order to limit the government’s power, judicial functions were transferred to courts and legislative functions to parliaments. This process began in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. It had many national variations and in Europe was not completed before the twentieth century. The constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers—as developed first and foremost by Locke, Montesquieu, and Madision—provided a normative justification for the separation of legislative, judicial, and executive institutions which was seen to guarantee liberty and justice (Vile 1967).

In practice the state functions were never separated as neatly as envisaged by normative theorists. The executive has retained important legislative functions, in particular drafting legislation and issuing government decrees and/ordinances (Carey and Shugart 1998). With the full democratization of polities and political parties establishing themselves as the main mechanism to structure elections and to co-ordinate incumbents, executives have gained almost a monopoly in lawmaking in parliamentary systems. In presidential systems this is not true to the same extent, but executives also exercise large influence on legislation. Although recognized early in the literature, this gap between the division of labor between the branches of government as laid down in the constitution and political practice has received much attention in empirical studies of parliamentary systems.

2. Types Of Executives

The shape of the executive and executive–legislative relations traditionally have been crucial for the classification of regime types. In the contemporary world the most important regime types are (a) presidential systems, (b) parliamentary or cabinet systems, and (c) semipresidential systems. In presidential systems the chief executive is elected directly for a fixed term and appoints and dismisses the members of the government. These cannot be dismissed by parliament. In a parliamentary or cabinet system the executive, whether appointed by a head of state or directly created by parliament, remains fully accountable to parliament. Although the prime minister typically has a gate-keeper function, at least formally controlling access to and dismissal from cabinet, formal decision-making is collective for important matters. Less important matters fall in the jurisdiction of individual cabinet ministers. A semipresidential system combines a directly elected and powerful head of state with a prime-minister and government who are accountable to parliament.

There is, however, no full agreement of how precisely to define these regime types or whether the semipresidential type indeed constitutes a distinct regime type (Sartori 1997, Lijphart 1999, Elgie 1999, Strøm 2000). In addition to these widespread regime types, those of assembly government and collegial (or ‘directorate’) government can be identified. In assembly government, decisions are indeed made in parliament and the cabinet is not more than the assembly’s executive secretariat. With the exception of the French Third Republic, it has existed in its pure form only for short periods, often after a revolutionary regime change. There is only one case of collegial (or ‘directorate’) government—Switzerland. There, the cabinet is elected by parliament for a fixed term, that is, it is not accountable to the assembly, and it is fully collegial, with even the chairmanship rotating among its members.

Nondemocratic regimes typically claim to conform to one of the regime types presented here, though they may give other actors, such as the ‘state party,’ special constitutional status.

While these five regime types have belonged to the arsenal of political science for many decades, a new demand for constitutional engineering (which came with the new waves of democratization of the 1970s and particularly the 1980s and 1990s) and the new theoretical research agenda of neo-institutionalism have created new interest in them. The questions which are common to constitutional engineers and neo-institutional theorists are: what types of output are these regime types likely to generate in terms of the maintenance of democracy, the accountability of public officials, and public policy? The best research has demonstrated that each regime type is likely to maximize some effects, but at the costs of others. Hence, the appropriateness of regime types and of specific institutions within the confines of a regime type depend on the most important challenges a polity faces (Weaver and Rockman 1993, Linz and Valenzuela 1994, Moe and Caldwell 1994, Sartori 1997, Lijphart 1999, Strøm 2000).

3. The Study Of Executives

Research on the political executive is a large and increasingly diverse field, including studies on presidents and prime ministers, cabinets, the top layer of bureaucracy, their interaction, and their interaction with other actors.

Classic institutionalism had not much to say about the executive per se. The executive mainly was characterized through its relations with other state institutions, which in turn were important for the classification of regime types. The behavioral revolution inspired many studies in the elite research tradition, which compiled and analyzed data on the social background and career patterns of people in executive functions (e.g., Blondel 1980, Blondel and Thiebault 1991). While certainly valuable to demonstrate cross-national differences and the impact of social and political change of great magnitude, it has remained doubtful that inferences can be made from this data on the behavior of incumbents. At best, plausible hypotheses have been proposed, for example, inferring the relative ineffectiveness of incumbents from short office periods. The bulk of research on the executive, however, always has been historic–qualitative, building on memoires, media reports, the occasional interview, private papers of former members of the executive, and other archival sources. Notwithstanding some impressive individual scholarship, this research traditionally has suffered from three problems. First, with the exception of the US presidency, research on the executive is rare, in particular given the relevance of its subject and compared to the attention other political phenomena have received. Second, compared to other research fields, fewer attempts at original and systematic data collection have been made in executive studies. This partly reflects properties of the research objects, namely small numbers (of chief executives, cabinets, cabinet ministers, and top bureaucrats) and limited access (because they are busy people with greater secrecy requirements). Finally, much research on the executive has also been quite idiosyncratic and more rooted in national peculiarities than, for instance, research on electoral behavior or parliaments.

Although these three points are still valid to some extent, executive research has made important achievements since the 1980s. First, the number of studies in the historic-qualitative tradition has increased. Second, the best work has become much more rigorous, building, for instance, on systematic interviews with former cabinet ministers and theory-guided case studies of executive decisions (e.g., Burch and Holiday 1996, Rhodes and Dunleavy 1995; for research on the US presidency see Edwards et al. 1993). Finally, executive studies have become more theory-guided and comparative. The fact that country expertise is probably more crucial here than in any other subdiscipline is reflected by much cross-national collaborative work. Chief executives traditionally receive most attention (e.g., Rose and Suleiman 1980, Jones 1991), but more recently systematic comparative research on Western Europe has also highlighted cabinet decision-making, the impact of individual ministers (Blondel and Muller-Rommel 1993, Laver and Shepsle 1994), the mechanisms of coalition governance (Muller and Strøm 2000), and the impact of parties on government decision-making (Blondel and Cotta 2000). However, comparative work which includes executives from both sides of the Atlantic is still rare (Weaver and Rockman 1993, Weller et al. 1997).

New frontiers of research are defined by both real world and theoretical developments. Thus, executive studies have begun to explore how European Union member states meet the challenge of multilevel governance, that is, the participation of all levels of the national executive in the decision-shaping and decision-making in EU institutions (e.g., Kassim et al. 2000). A rapidly increasing body of literature is concerned with the changes of the executive below its top political level, in particular the introduction of New Public Management and ‘agencification’ (for a general picture see Peters 1996). At the forefront of theory-inspired research, agency theory has been applied to executive–legislative relations (e.g., Epstein and O’Halloran 1999, Saalfeld 2000) and intra-executive relations (e.g., Andeweg 2000).

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