Anyway, if any of us bloggers could sucessfully predict the future, we’d be making our living doing something different entirely. LOL.

Yup. And he kind of creeps me out, too.

In a comment to my post on the probability of a Rice candidacy succeeding, Matthew Shug […]

Professor Taylor might have this on the top of his head: How many Colombian presidents have been electoral rookies? I think several have been. The incumbent of course was not. He had been a governor (a position that only became elective after 1991, so he was one of the first presidential candidates who could have held elective subnational executive office). Several other Colombian presidents may have been legislators before entering the cabinet, but many have built their credentials for the presidency by serving in the cabinet.

Mexican presidents in the era of PRI dominance were almost always electoral rookies, and members of the incument cabinet. Now with real electoral competition, the front-runners, like the incumbent, tend to be governors–though the PAN’s candidate for 2024 has not been. So Mexico may be moving in a somewhat US-style direction.

Of course, in the US, the successful candidates are almost always experienced in elective executive positions, i.e. governors, and rarely come right from the legislature, let alone any non-elective positions.

My tentative conclusion would be that the more federal a presidential system is, and the more open the party nomination process, the more advantageous a governorship is for presidential candidates. Obviously, in Chile, a unitary state, the gubernatorial recruitment channel is not available.

It is striking that the US has effectively closed off the cabinet as a place from which one could launch a presidential candidacy. And it has apparently mostly closed off the federal legislature as a place to launch a successful candidacy.