Between policy issues and values: the public discourse of constrained presidents in Western Europe

Constrained presidents considerably use going-public strategies among their possible patterns of behaviour. However, presidential going public is under-investigated in Europe. This paper specifically addresses this gap in literature by focusing on New Year (NY) and Christmas (CH) speeches of Western European presidents in office since the 1990s. The paper aims at investigating if and to what extent policy issues are relevant in their public discourse and what issues they specifically prime. This is a comparative research involving four semi-presidential (Austria, Finland, Ireland and Portugal) and two parliamentary regimes (Germany and Italy) for a total of 21 presidents and 144 speeches. By combining qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics the most relevant coding references have been linked to the characteristics of presidents (i.e. their party family and their term of office) as well as to the characteristics of the political system where they operate (parliamentary vs. semi-presidential systems) to understand if certain specific patterns may be identified or not. The main findings are that although policy issues are not always the most developed compared to polity issues and values, presidents often succeed in transforming a ceremonial speech into a means of agenda setting. In addition, domestic issues are more developed than EU and foreign policy issues in presidential speeches, and presidents tend to prime the policy issues owned by their original party.