Political executives

Aspects of political executives in democracies often serve as variables in political science research, but studies of political executives as such tend to focus on either executive-legislative relations or on their internal dynamics. Executive-legislative relations form the inspiration of the widely used typology of regime types: presidential systems, parliamentary systems and semi-presidential systems. The debate about the relative merits of these types of executives eventually led to the realization that they have modest explanatory power. Meanwhile, there is growing interest in the internal dynamics of executives, primarily in their distribution of power and the thesis that all executives are growing more hierarchical. In addition, political executives vary in the extent to which they function as a collective or in a more fragmented mode. This chapter argues that these two dimensions (hierarchy-collegiality) and (fragmentation-collectivity) are often confounded, but can be usefully combined in a two-dimensional typology.