Checks or Toothless Tigers? Powers and Incentives of External Officeholders to Constrain the Cabinet in 25 European Democracies

Abstract

Under what conditions and to what extent do external officeholders in parliamentary democracies constrain the cabinet's freedom of action? The article argues that we must analyse both institutional powers and officeholders’ incentives to use them to obtain an unbiased estimate of the expected constraint. It measures the incentives dimension via the selection method of external officeholders and develops an index to capture the likelihood that such officeholders hold preferences deviant from those of the cabinet. Analysing original data on four external constraint institutions in 25 European democracies, the article shows major variation in the incentives to constrain the cabinet across both offices and countries. Furthermore, it demonstrates that institutional powers and incentives for their use are empirically largely independent dimensions.

Elections inWesternEuropean parliaments

“…I analyse elections for four external offices: heads of state, constitutional judges, heads of audit institutions and ombudsmen. These officeholders can all be conceptualised as external constraints on the cabinet (Sieberer ; Strøm ). At the same time, they differ in their role in the policy‐making process.…”

Hire or Fire? The Link between Cabinet Investiture and Removal in Parliamentary Democracies

“…2 If parliament is actively involved in this process institutional details of the selection process become important. As I argued in more detail elsewhere (Sieberer 2011;2012) four institutional variables are relevant: the 314 Ulrich Sieberer institutional admissibility of competing candidates, the right to nominate candidates (which is closely related to the literature on formateur advantages), the majority requirement, and the voting method. Parliaments enjoy stronger electoral powers if more than one candidate can be nominated (because the agenda-setter power of a single nominating actor is reduced) and if parliamentary as opposed to extra-parliamentary actors may nominate candidates.…”

“…These four variables can be combined in an overall index of parliamentary electoral power that was developed to capture the role of parliament in selecting external office-holders such as constitutional judges or ombudsmen (see Sieberer 2012 for details on index construction and robustness tests). In creating this index, I first distinguish six constellations based on the potential number of candidates (one or more than one) and the actors who may nominate these candidates (parliamentary actors; external ones such as heads of state; government actors), and assign them numerical values between 0 and 1.…”