Book review: presidents, parties and prime ministers: how the separation of powers affects party organization and behaviour

When political science scholars first asserted the essential connection between political parties and democracy, most of the world’s democracies were parliamentary. Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, most new democracies had directly elected presidents. David Samuels and Matthew Shugart provide a theoretical framework for analyzing variation in the relationships among presidents, parties, and prime ministers across the world’s democracies, revealing the important ways that the separation of powers alters party organization and behaviour. Jack Blumenau applauds the authors’ enormous data collection project, which examines biographical information of all prime ministers and presidents in democratic countries from 1945 to 2007.