How Political Careers affect Prime-Ministerial Performance: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Even though Prime Ministers (PMs) are the central actors in parliamentary democracies, little comparative research explores what makes them perform successfully in office. This article investigates how the political careers of PMs affect their performance. For this purpose, we make use of a unique expert survey covering 131 cabinets in 11 Central and Eastern European countries between 1990 and 2018. Performance is defined as a two-dimensional set of tasks PMs ought to fulfill: first, managing the cabinet and directing domestic affairs as tasks delegated to their office, second, ensuring support of parliament and their own party, who constitute the direct principals. The findings indicate that a simple political insider career is not sufficient to enhance prime-ministerial performance. Rather, PMs who served as party leaders have the best preconditions to succeed in office.

Cabinet Reshuffles and Prime-Ministerial Performance in Central and Eastern Europe

“…According to our findings, changes in ministers who belong to the PM's coalition partners appear to induce the highest cost for her performance, while changes in ministers from her party or those in charge of core portfolios are less consequential. These results add to our understanding of the intra-cabinet determinants of prime-ministerial performance and enrich the extant literature that focused on the effects of PMs' careers (Grotz et al 2021) as well as their relationships with their principalsthat is, the parliamentary majority and their own parties (Samuels and Shugart 2010;Strangio et al 2013).…”

“…Third, our article sheds new light on the differentiated impact of government stability in the post-communist democracies of CEE where cabinets have been relatively short-lived compared to Western democracies (Grotz and Weber 2012;Somer-Topcu and Williams 2008). While previous research found that prime-ministerial performance does not strongly correlate with cabinet duration in the CEE context (Grotz et al 2021), our analysis shows that it is significantly affected by the frequency of ministerial turnover. Hence, the findings contribute to the debate on which forms of government instability are more detrimental for the functioning of political executives (Huber 1998;Huber and Martinez-Gallardo 2008).…”

“…Previous research highlights the role of political experience as well as the party constellation in government as determinants of a PM's success in fulfilling these manifold tasks. For instance, Florian Grotz et al (2021) find that PMs who were party leaders before coming to office perform considerably better than their counterparts without such experience. Moreover, conflicts among key party elites or disunity of the parliamentary party group were found to destabilize the PM's political position (Baylis 2007).…”

“…To operationalize prime-ministerial performance, we make use of an index introduced by Grotz et al (2021). The measure captures a PM's success in office defined as the ability to manage the cabinet and direct domestic affairs as well as to ensure the permanent support of the parliamentary majority and the PM's party.…”

Are all politicians the same? Reproduction and change of chief executive career patterns in democratic regimes

“…In this regard, Table 3 provides data about trends of political experience over the centuries. Following an established path in the study of political careers and chief executives' political performance, experience is simply operationalised as having occupied major political offices before being elected (see Grotz et al 2021).…”