Indirect Executive Accountability of Prime Ministers

Abstract

This study develops a formal model to analyze the replacement of an incumbent prime minister (PM), focusing on the incentive of the legislators within the PM's party to signal the competence of their leader. The model shows that a lower cost of replacement and clearer PM responsibility weakly reduce the risk of over-retaining an incompetent PM, relative to the voter's optimum, but may also weakly increase the likelihood of multiple equilibria, one of which involves the under-retention of a competent PM. When only over-retention is a problem, lower costs and clearer PM responsibility improve voter welfare. However, these effects become ambiguous when the possibility of under-retention arises.