Prime Ministers unchained? Explaining Prime Minister Policy Autonomy in coalition governments

Abstract

The personalization of politics has become a central concern in political science. This is also true for parliamentary governments, where the Prime Minister has allegedly acquired an increasing relevance. Nonetheless, a key question remains unanswered: How can we estimate the Prime Minister Policy Autonomy (PMPA) in parliamentary governments? Moreover, what are the determinants of this autonomy? This article aims to answer these questions by proposing a novel and easily replicable index of PMPA, based on data from an analysis of Prime Ministers’ and members of Parliament’s parliamentary speeches, and specifically from cosine similarity analysis. In this article, we explore PMPA by focussing on two most different cases of coalition governments, Italy and Germany between 1994 and 2014. A multilevel regression analysis shows that coalition-related factors strongly influence PMPA, party-related factors are somewhat relevant, and the Prime Minister-related factor (its selectorate) does not have a significant impact on such autonomy.

Simulating pluralism: the language of democracy in hegemonic authoritarianism

“…In this sense, my text-analytic approach is similar to those quantitative text analyses which examine party manifestos and speeches in democracies to infer policy positions on a left-right scale (e.g. Laver and Garry 2000;Laver, Benoit, and Garry 2003;Lowe et al 2011;Proksch and Slapin 2012;Martocchia Diodati, Marino, and Carlotti 2018). Several of these left and right classifiers, particularly concerning liberal and traditional values, are also reflected in the concept of democratic and autocratic styles of language.…”