Is there a presidentialization of US presidential leadership? A European perspective on Washington

This article revisits the different notions and concepts of ‘presidentialization’ that have held an exceptionally prominent status in recent comparative European politics but have conspicuously failed to capture the attention of the American political science community. It then applies a slightly amended version of the influential conceptual framework suggested by Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb to the analysis of presidential leadership in the United States to demonstrate the analytical usefulness of the concept beyond the family of parliamentary democracies. This stock-tacking exercise reveals that there are some manifestations of presidential leadership that could in fact be described as ‘presidentialization’ and others that are better characterized as ‘de-presidentialization’. Interestingly, the recent developments towards a less ‘presidentialized’ mode of politics and leadership seem to have been induced by the institutional incentives of the presidential system.