Dr Paul Chaisty, Dr Nic Cheeseman and Dr Timothy Power awarded ESRC research grant

Dr Paul Chaisty, Dr Nic Cheeseman and Dr Timothy Power have been awarded over 700, 000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Reference: RES-062-23-2892) to study the dynamics of executive-legislative relations in Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union.

The project will run for three years from 1st September 2011 and will feature a 13-person research team, comprising the three co-investigators, a post-doctoral research fellow to be based in Oxford, and local researchers covering executive-legislative relations in each of the nine national case studies across the three regions. The cases are Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine.

In their project abstract Nic, Paul and Tim say:

This research is motivated by the surprising sustainability of multiparty presidentialism in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. Despite predictions to the contrary, presidents have been remarkably successful at winning legislative support from fragmented parliaments. Our comparative project aims (1) to identify the tools that presidents use to govern in concert with multiparty legislatures, and (2) to assess the effects of these tools on horizontal accountability.