Following Russia's invasion, Ukraine exemplifies presidential leadership during full-scale war. This study examines executive coordination from Zelenskyi's mid-2019 election to the February 2022–July 2023 war period, using media sources and official data. It introduces three new leadership models – figurehead-leader, arbiter-management and leader-implementer – to capture evolving intra-executive relations in semi-presidential systems. Power centralisation around the president has accelerated, fitting the leader-implementer model. However, in accordance with the arbiter-manager model, a stricter division of labour, especially in domestic policy, is evident. Despite semi-presidentialism's perceived conflict-proneness, the study shows it can function efficiently and allow executive flexibility during significant crisis.

The French term ‘cohabitation’ is commonly used to describe situations in semi-presidential systems where the prime minister and the president represent different political parties. The present contribution sets out to test to what extent cohabitation affects the powers of the president. Theoretically, the link between the phenomena in question is complex; there are arguments both for an assumption that cohabitation enhances the powers of the president and for a presumption that cohabitation is linked to decreasing powers of the head of state. It is far from self-evident how cohabitation should be operationalized, however. For instance, a president and a prime minister can represent different parties, but the parties can have a long tradition of working together in government coalitions. In some cases, the president and prime minister represent different parties, but the president’s party is included in the coalition government. Another variant is that either the president or the prime minister (or even both) are unaffiliated with political parties. In the framework of the present study, we make use of several operationalizations of cohabitation to assess to what extent the relationship between cohabitation and presidential powers is affected by whether cohabitation is broadly or narrowly defined. Empirically, the study is extensive in time and space. The research population consists of all democratic republics with a separate president and prime minister during the time period 1850-2021. In the literature, cohabitation is a term generally associated with semi-presidential forms of governments in which the president is popularly elected. The present paper takes a broader view and accordingly sets out to test if cohabitation is linked to presidential powers both in dual executives with popularly elected presidents and in systems with indirectly elected presidents. Since constitutional powers tend to remain unaltered irrespective of whether periods of cohabitation occur or not, the present study measures presidential powers with reference to actual, or ‘real’ powers. The powers of the president are measured with reference to seven questions in the V-dem dataset. Three of the questions refer explicitly to powers in the executive sphere, two to legislative powers, and two to powers that do not fall explicitly in either of the categories.

Varför utvecklas vissa länder men inte andra till väl fungerande demokratier? Är det ekonomisk utveckling, en viss uppsättning institutioner, en gynnsam medborgarkultur, civilsamhället, stödjande internationella förutsättningar eller samarbetande politiska eliter som avgör? Kan alla länder i världen bli demokratier, eller är vissa stater dömda att för alltid styras av auktoritära regimer?

I denna uppdaterade tredje upplaga av Demokratiseringsprocesser presenteras och granskas de viktigaste teoretiska och empiriska bidragen inom forskningen om demokratiseringsprocesser. Författarna introducerar centrala begrepp som demokrati, modernisering, transition, konsolidering och diffusion, samt visar hur forskningen har utvecklats från den tidiga efterkrigstiden fram till idag. Även demokratins tillbakagång och olika varianter av samtida auktoritära styrelseskick diskuteras. Boken inleds med ett förord av professor Li Bennich-Björkman.

Demokratiseringsprocesser är särskilt lämplig för kurser i statsvetenskap, sociologi, internationella relationer, utvecklingsstudier, Europastudier samt freds- och konfliktforskning.

This article seeks to explain variations in presidential activism in semi-presidential countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa is one of the continents where semi-presidentialism is most prevalent, but the dynamics of intra-executive relations are severely understudied. The four case studies discussed here—the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Cabo Verde, and São Tomé e Príncipe—belong to the premier-presidential subtype. In this exploratory study, we aim to examine how institutional dimensions of premier-presidentialism interact with contextual factors to explain variations in presidential activism among Sub-Saharan African countries. In addition to fundamental contextual differences among the two pairs of countries, francophone and lusophone, there are specific institutional factors associated with the design and operation of premier-presidentialism that contribute to greater presidential activism in the two francophone cases. Taken together, these contextual and institutional factors skew effective executive power heavily toward the president in our francophone countries. We also find that the degree of political institutionalization matters for the impact of presidential activism on intra-executive conflict and government policymaking capacity. The article increases our understanding of the operation of semi-presidentialism in this understudied region, underscoring the importance of both contextual and constitutional factors for explaining variations in presidential activism in Africa.

The Baltic presidents have in common that they are supposed to embody the ‘nation’ and provide an image of their countries abroad. But can the president embody the people if ‘the people’ itself is divided? In this article, we will focus on public trust in the presidency between the majority and minority population in the Baltic states. Drawing on public opinion surveys, the aim is to examine the determinants of public trust in the presidential institution and support for the performance and principles of the political system as well identification with the political community itself. Among our findings, we conclude that ethnic or linguistic identity explains trust to a considerable degree, which suggests that trust is not only an expression of specific political support, but also part of a more deep-seated, diffuse support.

From presidential regimes, in particular the US, scholars have shown that in times of crisis or war, the president’s power rises by a rally-round-the-flag effect and by centralization of power as extraordinary procedures, and emergency powers come into effect. Very few studies, however, have examined how the condition of war impacts on executive dynamics in semi-presidential regimes. This study addresses this gap by examining how executive coordination in Ukraine has been (re-)organized during the war and how this has influenced the balance of executive power between the president, prime minister, and parliament. Our analysis is based on a systematic collection of analytical materials and media reports, updates, expert comments, and official data covering the period Feb 2022 to March 2023. Among the study’s main findings and consistent with our hypotheses, we conclude that the war has accelerated centralization of executive powers around the president, thereby further strengthening the president’s dominance over the cabinet, but also that the overwhelming demands on the presidency during the war have necessitated the delegation of significant levels of executive governance from the president to the cabinet, particularly evident in areas of domestic policy.