Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism: Democratic Design & the Separation of Powers. By Steffen Ganghof. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224p. $85.00 cloth. - Democracy and Executive Power: Policymaking Accountability in the US, the UK, Germany, and France. By Susan Rose-Ackerman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. 424p. $65.00 cloth. - Comparing Cabinets: Dilemmas of Collective Government. By Patrick Weller, Dennis C. Grube, and R. A. W. Rhodes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 288p. $100.00 cloth.

Abstract

The political executive has been an established subject of study in political science for decades. Early research was often dominated by single-country studies or approaches that built their assumptions on the institutional structure and practices of classic archetypes, while truly comparative approaches only emerged later. Nevertheless, to this day the field remains highly heterogenous in both theory, method, and focus of research (e.g., see Rudy Andeweg et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Executives, 2020). The three books reviewed here are indicative of this heterogeneity—although the authors address interrelated questions of executive accountability and the practice of democratic executive governance that are at the core of many studies of political executives and even cover some of the same cases in their empirical analyses, the books arguably each represent a different stream of the literature.