Executive Power

The separation of powers theory, as developed by the 18th-century French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, distinguishes between executive, legislative, and judiciary power as three branches of government that are not to infringe on each other's constitutionally vested competences. The executive consists of a government, its ministerial bureaucracy, and subordinate governmental agencies.

The separation of powers doctrine more or less accurately describes power relationships in presidential systems, but in parliamentary systems, executive and legislative powers are fused because the executive's capacity to govern depends on the parliamentary majority's willingness to support it. In place of an institutional separation of powers, parliamentary systems are therefore characterized by a functional division of powers between the government majority and the opposition. All this is only empirically relevant in democratic political systems because in autocratic regimes formal allocation of powers has no systematic consequences for how real power is executed by dictators, ruling parties, or military juntas.

The executive power is the authority to enforce laws and to ensure that they are implemented as intended. Organizational structures to carry out these functions vary considerably. Intra-governmental relationships in presidential systems vary between a clearly dominant president with subordinate departmental chiefs in the United States and a more evenly balanced power structure in some of the Latin American countries. In parliamentary systems, the role of the prime minister varies relative to ministers, depending on cabinet manuals or informal traditions and on whether the government is formed by just one party or is a coalition government. Whereas the British prime minister is clearly first among equals, the constitutional position of the German federal chancellor with his or her competence on guidelines is politically limited because the chancellor has to respect the autonomy of his or her coalition partner(s). In other parliamentary democracies, Italy being a good example, the prime minister has virtually no prerogative competences at all. In addition, presidents in presidential systems combine the roles of head of [Page 229]state and head of government, whereas in parliamentary systems with their dual executive, there exist elected presidents or monarchs as heads of state alongside the prime minister. In some instances, these presidents hold real political power that has given rise to a—however heavily debated—new type of democratic governance: semi-presidentialism.

The relationship between the government, no matter how power is internally allocated, and the bureaucracy has traditionally been seen as hierarchically structured. On this account, ministers are seen as principals who rely on ministerial civil servants and agencies as agents with all the agency loss problems that delegation of power relationships implies. Parallel to delegation theory, which studies the opportunities to prevent or minimize agency loss and to maintain political control of bureaucratic implementation, core executive studies have recently begun to criticize the traditional hierarchical accounts of the interorganizational structure of the executive by pointing out that network governance may be a more appropriate concept.