The aim of this book is very clear: to investigate “how it matters for the functioning of a regime if the president is elected directly by the people or indirectly by some representative body” (p. 1). Margit Tavits rightly asserts that indirectly elected presidents in parliamentary systems are understudied and claims that this is because it is assumed that they are of little relevance (ibid.). She also asserts that, by contrast, scholars assume that the direct election of the president affects the functioning of a regime (p. 7). Specifically, she identifies three claims (pp. 12–23): that directly elected presidents are more active than indirectly elected presidents, that direct presidential elections are more confrontational and divisive than elections where the president is selected by the legislature, and that direct elections are associated with less voter apathy and less political disillusionment. The author is skeptical of these claims. Relying on a mixed-method approach, she demonstrates that there is no support for any of them. She concludes: “Presidents are presidents, regardless of how they come to power” (p. 235). Instead, she explains variation in presidential activism on the basis of a political opportunity framework. According to this approach (pp. 35–40), incentives for presidential activism will be greater when political consensus is low, notably during periods of cohabitation or divided government, and when other political institutions are weak, particularly during periods of coalition and minority government. She finds strong support for this contention.

The strength of this book lies in the presentation of the empirical material. There is a nice mix of quantitative and qualitative work. Using the share of nonpartisan ministers in government as the dependent variable, Tavits shows that there is no relationship between a directly or indirectly elected president and the level of presidential activism (p. 50). By contrast, she shows that variables consistent with a political opportunity framework have considerable explanatory power. The author then presents six separate country narratives (Austria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland). She shows that presidents in the three countries with indirectly elected presidents have at various times been active. She also shows that there is variation in the level of activism both across and within the three countries with directly elected presidents. This “diversity” (p. 118) is inconsistent with the direct election argument. She also presents a natural experiment (Slovakia), where there was a shift from an indirectly elected president to a directly elected president. She concludes (p. 128) that the mode of election did not seem to influence the level of presidential activism. Next, Tavits demonstrates that direct elections are not necessarily divisive and that indirect elections can be. Finally, she shows that the level of turnout at legislative elections is lower in countries where the president is directly elected, probably because of voter fatigue, and that generally there is no evidence that direct election increases or decreases political disillusionment. Overall, she concludes, “the focus of constitution designers on the election mechanism of the head of state is largely misplaced. For many important aspects of the functioning of the regime, this selection mechanism has little, if any, effect” (p. 235).

The main weakness of the book is the simplified presentation of the direct election argument, particularly in relation to presidential activism. Tavits portrays the “conventional wisdom” (p. 54) as saying that direct presidential election is the sole explanatory variable of interest. Therefore, if there is a similar level of activism in countries with indirectly and directly elected presidents and, assuming that the mode of election does not change, if there is variation in activism over time in countries with directly elected presidents, then the conventional wisdom must be wrong. This line of reasoning misreads the existing scholarship. For example, earlier work by writers such as Juan Linz and Giovanni Sartori focused on the effect of directly elected presidents with quite considerable powers. These scholars were not selecting solely on direct election when explaining presidential activism. They did not even consider countries such as Austria and Ireland to be semipresidential. Therefore, they would not be surprised to find that the level of presidential activism in Estonia and Ireland was similar. Instead, they would argue that presidential activism in France is higher than in both Estonia and Ireland.

More recent work by scholars such as Matthew Shugart, Petra Schleiter, and myself does classify countries with directly elected but very weak presidents as semipresidential, but it explicitly assumes that there is considerable variation within semipresidentialism. This variation is operationalized and is shown to have a profound impact on political outcomes. For example, David Samuels and Shugart (Presidents, Parties, Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior, 2010) have demonstrated that countries with a president-parliamentary form of semipresidentialism are more likely to have presidentialized parties than those with a premier-presidential form. What Tavits misses is that when writers like myself classify countries such as Austria and Ireland as semipresidential, it is precisely because we assume that direct election does not by itself explain the substantive functioning of a regime. Classification, an exercise in taxonomy, is different from explanation. In the recent work on semipresidentialism, the explanation is usually related to some assessment of presidential power, whether operationalized as a dichotomous variable in the form of the distinction between president-parliamentarism and premier-presidentialism or continuously on the basis of an index of presidential power. Given Tavits's acknowledgment that “constitutional powers are the most important aspect of the opportunity structure” (p. 52), there is very little substantive difference between her mode of explanation and equivalent explanations in work on countries with directly elected presidents. So, while it is certainly the case that many recent studies have failed to include consideration of indirectly elected presidents, this is not because of a “conventional wisdom” that they are inherently less active than all directly elected presidents, but out of a separate and entirely legitimate research agenda, namely, the desire to explain why countries with a common institutional feature—the direct election of the president—operate so differently from one another.

There is great value in this book. Tavits is correct that insufficient attention has been paid to the study of indirectly elected presidents. The case studies here help to redress the balance. The political opportunity framework is not new, but it is operationalized very carefully. There is also a clear policy implication. By itself, the direct election of the president does not necessarily change the level of presidential activism. Tavits may not acknowledge it, but this is a statement with which most scholars who study directly elected presidents would completely agree.