Content area
Full text
Recently there has been an extraordinary increase in female political leaders across the globe. In addition to Chile, Finland, Germany and Liberia--considered in this issue--Ukraine, Argentina, India, and several other countries have recently inaugurated their first female executives. A closer examination, however, reveals that female executives are not exactly poised to take over the world. Most of the new female executives are not running geopolitically powerful countries. In that sense, Angela Merkel is not a typical exemplar of the new female executive. Merkel is the only woman leading a Group of Eight (G8) country. She is also the only female head of state in NATO and the only female head of state in the European Union.
Merkel stands out in the recent spate of women heads of state because most of them have come to power in countries with fragmented executives. The power of the executive position varies by political system. Alan Siaroff (2003) and Farida Jalalzai (2008) both categorize political systems according to the relative power of the executive position. For example, a directly elected president is more powerful than a prime minister who is answerable to the legislature. Mixed systems may have both a president and a prime minister, with one position holding the upper hand. Jalalzai (2008) finds that women are more likely to be elected prime minister than president and that they are more likely to be in the weaker executive position in a mixed system. Generally speaking, there is a tendency for the new wave of female executives to be constrained in their power.
Although Germany does have a split executive with both a president and a chancellor, Merkel holds the unquestionably more powerful post. The German president, as head of state, is almost purely ceremonial. To be sure, the chancellorship is not on a par with the American presidency. Nor is the German chancellor as powerful as the British prime minister, at least from an institutional perspective. In a system with as many veto points as Germany's, the chancellor's powers are constrained, not just by the parliament but by the Federal Constitutional Court and by the federal states or Länder (Tsebelis 1995).
All the same, "weak" is hardly an apt descriptor for this office. The chancellor must answer to...