This book explains why the level of party presidentialization varies from one country to another. It considers the effects of constitutional structures as well as the party's original features, and argues that the degree of party presidentialization varies as a function of the party's genetics.

The Presidentialization of Politics shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies' contingent factors which fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term factors relate to the personalities of office holders, the overall political agenda, and the majority situation in parliament, there are several structural factors which are relatively uniform across modern nations. First, the internationalization of modern politics (which is particularly pronounced within the European Union) has led to an 'executive bias' of the political process which has strengthened the role of political top elites vis-à-vis their parliamentary groups and/or their parties. Their predominance has been amplified further by the vastly expanded steering capacities of state machineries which have severely reduced the scope of effective parliamentary control. At the same time, the declining stability of political alignments has increased the proportion of citizens whose voting decisions are not constrained by long-standing party loyalties. In conjunction with the mediatization of politics, this has increased the capacity of political leaders to by-pass their party machines and to appeal directly to voters. As a result, three interrelated processes have led to a political process increasingly moulded by the inherent logic of presidentialism: increasing leadership power and autonomy within the political executive; increasing leadership power and autonomy within political parties; and increasingly leadership-centred electoral processes. The book presents evidence for this process of presidentialization for 14 modern democracies (including the US and Canada). While there are substantial cross-national differences, the overall thesis holds: modern democracies are increasingly following a presidential logic of governance through which leadership is becoming more central and more powerful, but also increasingly dependent on successful immediate appeal to the mass public. Implications for democratic theory are considered.

In theory, parliamentary elections are a contest between political parties whose leaders do not have a separate identity from their party in the public eye. This case study of Britain shows that this theory no longer holds; the dynamics of parliamentary elections have become more 'presidential' in the sense that the leaders of the major parties now figure more prominently on both media coverage of the campaign and in the party that voters choose at the polls. The implications for our understanding of parliamentary democracy are discussed.

The implications of the personalization of politics are necessarily widespread and can be found across many different aspects of contemporary democracies. Personalization should influence the way campaigns are waged, how voters determine their preferences, how officials (e.g., MPs) and institutions (e.g., legislatures and governments) function, and the place and operations of political parties in democratic life. However, in an effort to quantify the precise degree of personalization over time and to uncover the various causes of personalization, the existing literature has paid little attention to many of the important questions regarding the consequences of personalization. While the chapters throughout this volume certainly document the extent of personalization, they also seek to address some fundamental questions about the nature of personalization, how it is manifested, and its consequences for political parties, governance, representation, and the state of democracy more generally. Indeed, one of the primary objectives of this volume is to speak to a very broad audience about the implications of personalization. Those interested in election campaigns, voting, gender, governance, legislative behaviour, and political parties will all find something of value in the contributions that follow.

Political executives have been at the centre of public and scholarly attention long before the inception of modern political science. In the contemporary world, political executives have come to dominate the political stage in many democratic and autocratic regimes. The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives marks the definitive reference work in this field. Edited and written by a team of word-class scholars, it combines substantive stocktaking with setting new agendas for the next generation of political executive research.

A study of processes of political party formation and change in new democracies. This book argues that to understand party organizations we need to focus on politicians' electoral strategies. The framework is used to analyze political party development in the new democracies of East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.)

This volume has been designed as a key resource in the field of international political leadership research. Written by a team of distinguished leadership scholars from three continents and nine countries, the original chapters gathered in this volume cover all the major fields of political leadership, from executive, legislative and party leadership to leadership in social movements and international organizations. The special value and appeal of this book relates to its genuinely comparative focus that characterizes all chapters.