Abstract
Many studies and articles summarize the composition of parliament or governments from the sociological perspective (age, education, etc.). Nevertheless, the area of the composition of heads of states is not researched so much.
The aim of the paper is to describe the basic sociological characteristics of European directly elected presidents after 1989 and compare their trends in two European regions. For the paper two research questions are defined: 1) What do basic development trends look like when it comes to age, education, previous political experience, and gender of European presidents in the period after 1989? 2) How do these sociological characteristics differ in the region of traditional Western European democracies and in the region of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe? In the introduction of the paper the topic and its importance will be introduced.
The second chapter will focus on the literature review and will map the current state of knowledge in the composition of constitutional offices or parliamentary assemblies. The next part of the article will introduce the methodology and sources of data.
The fourth chapter will briefly summarize the history of direct presidential election in the European continent. The analytical part of the paper will map the basic sociological characteristics of European presidents - age, education, previous political experience, and gender.
After that, the results will be described in trends after 1989 and compared in two European regions - traditional Western democracies and post-communist Europe. In the conclusion, the results of the analysis will be summarized and evaluated.