Presidentialisation: One Term, Two Uses – Between Deductive Exercise and Grand Historical Narrative
This article focuses on the two main contributions to the contemporary academic debate about the term ‘presidentialisation’, namely the books by Samuels and Shugart and Poguntke and Webb. The aim is not to rehearse critiques that have already been made about this term or to add another to the list. Instead, the aim is to distinguish between two different ways in which the same term has been applied in the two studies. Both sets of authors are concerned with the same term, but each operationalises it in a different way.