The Causes and Consequences of Prime Ministerial Replacement Types

• Applicant: Roni Lehrer, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 529506857

Prime ministers (PMs) head governments, exert considerable influence on policymaking, and take center stage in election campaigns. However, our knowledge of when and why PM change occurs and what consequences it bears remains incomplete. This project analyzes the causes of PM change and to what extent PM change affects party policy change as well as citizens’ perceptions of party policies. The project yields important insights into the consequences of PM change for political representation. The project takes a novel perspective on why PMs leave office, distinguishing between three different cases: First, their party can lose the privilege to choose the PM, resulting in a rival partisan assuming the office. Second, the PM party can decide to replace the PM. Third, the PM can resign for non-partisan reasons (e.g., death). Prior studies do not discern PM replacements types and can hence only partially explain PM replacements and their consequences. The project’s first part asks what factors determine when and why PMs leave office. The novel perspective enables us to study the mechanisms that force PMs from office and the consequences of PM changes in more detail. The project develops corresponding theoretical arguments and tests them by exploiting data from several parliamentary democracies. The project’s second part analyzes how parties change their policy positions once PM change occurred. Its focus lies on the question of the extent to which different PM replacement types and intra-party democracy affect party policy positions. This is relevant beyond our understanding of policy perceptions because party policy positions and intra-party democracy are crucial factors for ensuring high-quality political representation. I expect that parties’ incentives to change their policy position hinge on the type of PM replacement. Further, I ask whether the influence of intra-party democracy on a party’s policy position is muted when the party loses the premiership to a rival party. These theoretical expectations will be tested against party policy data from several democracies. The analyses will be particularly instructive, as they include parties that replace their PM for non-partisan reasons. The project’s third part focuses on voters. It asks how they alter their party policy perceptions in light of PM change. Corresponding knowledge is of utmost importance because these perceptions shape vote choices and thus concern the central mechanism of political representation. The project studies to what extent voters use the PM and her party as reference points for assessing party policy. It further scrutinizes to what extent PM replacements affect voter perceptions of other parties than the PM party, e.g., junior coalition parties. Survey experiments on the different PM replacement types allow for a thorough analysis of these effects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants