Executive Power

Executive power has been and will continue to be a prominent and widely used concept in political science. This chapter shows that executive power has mostly been examined in context with political power and political institutions. After providing an overview of different concepts under historical perspective, the chapter introduces various definitions of executive power and advocates that executive power should be studied in context with the functioning of political institutions. In a third step, we examine different forms of executive power in authoritarian and democratic regimes. Fourth, we study the internal structure of political executives in democratic regimes particularly in light of their linkage to political parties and legislative support. Fifth, we discuss the issue of gender representation in the context of executive power. Finally, we tackle the pressing debate on how to measure executive power. We conclude that executive power should be treated not as a rigid, but as a flexible concept for analysing the complex interaction of political actors in their institutional environment.