Career patterns and political performance of Prime Ministers in Central East European Democracies
Final Report Abstract
How do political careers influence the performance of PMs? From a theoretical standpoint, political careers provide crucial experience for PMs to perform their tasks successfully, such as knowledge on processes of decision-making and political skills. However, the relationship between career profiles and performance of PMs was rarely studied systematically and in a comparative perspective. To address this gap, this project developed a theoretically grounded and differentiated concept of prime-ministerial performance which is applicable across parliamentary democracies, and linked this concept to the career profiles of PMs prior to their ascent to the chief executive office. Motivated by the observation of relative weakness of PMs in CEE, which was attributed to their political inexperience, we decided to situate the empirical study of this relationship into the region of CEE. Our empirical analysis rests on the unique dataset which combines the data from expert survey on prime-ministerial performance in eleven countries of CEE with detailed information on PMs’ career profiles, as well as the information on institutional, political and socioeconomic context. Does it matter which political offices PMs held before their position as head of government? The findings of our project suggest that the political career of PMs is indeed important and that those PMs who can gather experiences as head of a political party will perform better. On other hand, our findings also address concerns that the rising number of outsider PMs, who possess no major political experience, may negatively affect the performance of parliamentary systems. While we find that these PMs perform worse than former party leaders, they do not perform worse than former cabinet ministers. Therefore, we find no evidence that the rising number of outsider PMs will adversely affect the working of parliamentary systems. This insight challenges the centrality of the outsider-insider differentiation for prime-ministerial performance in parliamentary democracies and argues that – like insiders – outsiders might possess relevant experiences to perform well. Our research project offers important contributions to future research in the field. First, we have provided a novel theoretical conception of prime-ministerial performance that is not limited to CEE, but can be applied to all parliamentary systems. Second, a large cross-national dataset of prime-ministerial performance is available to the research community for a variety of research questions connected to prime-ministerial performance. Besides the overall prime-ministerial performance, our differentiated concept provides the opportunity to explore the performance of PMs in certain areas, for example on the international stage.
Publications
- “The Performance of Prime Ministers in Central and Eastern European Democracies: Conceptual Framework for an Expert Survey”, Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft Kongress, September 2018, Frankfurt am Main
Grotz, Florian, Marko Kukec, Corinna Kröber and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel
- 2019. “Potent Executives: the Electoral Strength of Prime Ministers in Central Eastern Europe.” East European Politics, 35 (4): 517-537
Berz, Jan
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2019.1662400) - “Explaining Prime-Ministerial Performance: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe”, American Political Science Association Conference, August 2019, Washington
Grotz, Florian, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Jan Berz, Corinna Kroeber and Marko Kukec
- “Explaining Prime-Ministerial Performance: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe”, European Consortium for Political Research, General Conference, September 2019, Wroclaw
Grotz, Florian, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Jan Berz, Corinna Kroeber and Marko Kukec
- 2020. “Executive Power” In The SAGE Handbook of Poltical Science, edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Bertrand Badie and Leonardo Morlino, 760-775. London: SAGE Publications
Müller-Rommel, Ferdinand and Michelangelo Vercesi
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529714333.n48) - 2020. “Party Leaders in Croatia: Comparing Ivo Sanader and Zoran Milanović.” In Party Leaders in Eastern Europe: Personality, Behavior and Consequences, edited by Sergiu Gherghina, 67-91. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Kukec, Marko
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32025-6_4) - 2020. “Political Careers of Ministers and Prime Ministers.” In Oxford Handbook of Political Executives, edited by Rudy Andeweg, Robert Elgie, Ludger Helms, Juliet Kaarbo, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, 229-250. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Müller-Rommel, Ferdinand, Corinna Kroeber and Michelangelo Vercesi
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198809296.013.11) - “Changing Prime Ministers’ Political Experiences and Career Profiles in European Democracies”. European Consortium for Political Research, General Conference (Online), August 2020
Müller-Rommel, Ferdinand, Michelangelo Vercesi, and Jan Berz
- “Prime Ministers as Crisis Managers: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe”, International Political Science Association World Congress, July 2021, Lisbon
Kukec, Marko and Florian Grotz
- “The ‘Best’ of the Elite: Explaining Outstanding Prime Ministerial Duration in Office“, International Political Science Association World Congress, July 2021, Lisbon
Müller-Rommel, Ferdinand and Michelangelo Vercesi
