Breaking the Parliamentary Chain of Delegation: Presidents and Non-partisan Cabinet Members in European Democracies

Abstract

Europe has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. Many of the new democracies since the mid-1970s are semi-presidential regimes that combine a popularly elected president with the traditional features of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the frequency of the appointment of non-partisan cabinet members has risen. Cabinet appointments are the most important personnel decisions in parliamentary systems, and traditionally such appointments have been virtually monopolized by the governing political parties. Under semi-presidentialism, however, cabinet appointments may instead become a tug-of-war between a prime minister and a president with different partisan preferences. In this article the relationship between presidential power and the incidence of non-partisan cabinet appointments is examined and a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointments in parliamentary systems with a strong president is developed. In this model the prime minister has proposal power over cabinet appointments and the president an ex post veto. This model yields three comparative statics predictions concerning non-partisan cabinet appointments. The incidence of such appointments should covary positively with the president's powers and negatively with the prime minister's electoral prospects. The likelihood of such appointments should also correlate in a non-intuitive way with the value that the president and the prime minister attach to non-partisan appointees. Based on these results, eight operational hypotheses are developed, which are tested against a sample of 134 European cabinets representing twelve semi-presidential and twelve purely parliamentary regimes in the 1990s. Significant empirical support is found for all three comparative statics results and for most of the specific hypotheses.

Commitment or expertise? Technocratic appointments as political responses to economic crises

“…Regarding alternative explanations and control variables, we find that technocrats are more likely to be appointed when the prime minister's party controls the portfolio of finance than when it has shared control of the economy with other coalition partners. This finding indicates that technocrats are not appointed to reach a compromise between coalition partners (Amorim & Strom ). In addition, the type of the government, whether it is multiparty or not, fails to predict the appointments of technocrats, but positively predicts the appointments of high‐ranking ministers.…”

The Formateur’s Bonus in European Constitutional Monarchies, 1901–99

“…The early democratic era in post‐Soviet Eastern Europe affords a third example of influential heads of state generating large formateurs’ bonuses. The literature on semipresidential regimes describes a number of tactics that presidents have utilized to influence government formation—such as limiting the coalitions that formateurs can consider (Marradi , 57; Verzichelli and Cotta , 447); manipulating the timing of dissolution (Schleiter and Morgan‐Jones ); and packing cabinets with nonpartisan allies (see Amorim Neto and Strøm ; Schleiter and Morgan‐Jones ; Tavits ). Our finding that formateurs’ bonuses were large in early democratic West Europe resonates with Druckman and Roberts’s () discovery that formateurs’ bonuses were large in post‐1990 Eastern Europe—where presidents exerted substantial influence over government formation in the early years of the post‐Soviet democratic era.…”

The Politics of Minister Retention in Presidential Systems: Technocrats, Partisans, and Government Approval

“…The need to recruit based on technical skills to face the growing complexity of multilevel governance and the organizational decline of political parties has been posed as the main explanation for the new phenomenon, in addition to factors such as the "presidentialization" of politics and the institutional separation between executive and legislative powers. 4 In presidential democracies, where rulers are expected to nominate more ministers without party backgrounds, scholarly attention has focused on experts without political experience but with considerable political power. Initially triggered by the performance of successful "technopols" during the nineties, this research has linked technocratic politics to the increased impact of economists, neoliberalism, and structural reforms.…”