Potent executives: the electoral strength of prime ministers in Central Eastern Europe

Berz, Jan

doi:10.1080/21599165.2019.1662400

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…The literature on PMs offers a wide range of terminological choices to delineate the role and function of chief executives in parliamentary democracies, such as “prime-ministerial power” (O’Malley, 2007) or “prime-ministerial strength” (Baylis, 2007; Berz, 2019). For the following analysis, we take the notion of “prime-ministerial performance” (Azzi & Hillmer, 2013; Byrne et al, 2017; ‘t Hart & Schelfhout, 2016) because it brings attention to the different tasks that individual PMs have to fulfill as chief executives.…”

Section: Prime-ministerial Performance In Parliamentary Democraciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Grotz

Müller‐Rommel

Berz

et al. 2021

Comparative Political Studies

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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.

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Section: Prime-ministerial Performance In Parliamentary Democraciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Grotz

Müller‐Rommel

Berz

et al. 2021

Comparative Political Studies

Self Cite

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“…In turn, the literature identifies three main strands of research claimed to drive an increase in leader effects on voting behaviour. By resorting to the admittedly limited amount of longitudinal variation in the most recent decades, institutional-level analyses have linked the increasing concentration of power both within cabinetsat the Prime Minister position (Berz 2019) -, and within political partiesat the party leadership level (Silva 2019) -, to increasing leader effects on individual voting behaviour. Moreover, this strand has also investigated differences across regime types and electoral systems (i.e.…”

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confidence: 99%

Partisan dealignment and the personalisation of politics in West European parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Garzia

Silva

Angelis

2020

West European Politics

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Partisan dealignment is recurrently presented in the literature as one of the main drivers of the 'personalisation of politics'. Yet, on the one hand, the claim that leader effects on voting behaviour are increasing across time is short on comparative evidence. On the other hand, there is limited empirical evidence that such an increase is due to dealignment. This article explores the longitudinal relationship between partisan dealignment, leader effects and party choice, through a novel dataset pooling 109 national election surveys collected in 14 Western European parliamentary democracies across the last six decades. The results show that leader effects increased over time as a function of the decline of party identification. Additional panel evidence from selected countries shows that partisan dealignment is responsible for increasing leader effects on party choice at the individual level. The longitudinal dimension of this study contributes to the most contested aspect of the personalisation of politics debate.KEYWORDS Dealignment; leader effects; party identification; personalisation of politics; voting behaviourThe centrality of political leaders in contemporary democracies has been sustained by an increasing amount of research in political science. From an institutional point of view, research documents a transformation in the structure and organisation of modern political parties in favour of the leadership position. From the rise of catch-all parties to the emergence of personal parties, contemporary party scholars ascribe a more prominent role to party leaders both within party organisation and as executives in government. This describes a trend towards the presidentialisation of party structures (Passarelli 2015;Poguntke and Webb 2005).

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“…The literature on PMs offers a wide range of terminological choices to delineate the role and function of chief executives in parliamentary democracies, such as "prime-ministerial power" (O'Malley, 2007) or "prime-ministerial strength" (Baylis, 2007;Berz, 2019). For the following analysis, we take the notion of "prime-ministerial performance" (Azzi & Hillmer, 2013;Byrne et al, 2017;'t Hart & Schelfhout, 2016) because it brings attention to the different tasks that individual PMs have to fulfill as chief executives.…”

Section: Prime-ministerial Performance In Parliamentary Democraciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Transformation and Violence: Evidence from U.S. Reconstruction

Stewart

Kitchens

2021

Comparative Political Studies

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How do political actors create and institutionalize revolutionary social transformation, and what are the consequences of their efforts? In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which revolutionary social transformation unfolds and becomes institutionalized over time. We argue that a direct consequence of social transformation and the institutionalization thereof, however, is violence against the revolution’s beneficiaries which can likewise endure over the long-term. We test our arguments using historical, county-level data on post-U.S. Civil War Reconstruction and we supply both quantitative and qualitative evidence for our mechanisms. We ultimately demonstrate that social transformation and violence are often causally linked, not mutually exclusive outcomes, thereby expanding our understanding of how social orders are created and maintained.

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Potent executives: the electoral strength of prime ministers in Central Eastern Europe

Cited by 10 publications

References 38 publications

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

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

Partisan dealignment and the personalisation of politics in West European parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Social Transformation and Violence: Evidence from U.S. Reconstruction

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