Who “Wins”? Determining the Party of the Prime Minister

Abstract

The prime ministership is the preeminent political post in parliamentary democracies. Yet few studies examine PM party choice, perhaps under the assumption that the choice is a simple function of party size. In this article, we argue that key strategic actors and the context in which government negotiations take place can play a critical role in PM party choice. We test our hypotheses using a mixed logit with random coefficients on an original data set comprising PM selection opportunities in 28 European countries. Our methodological approach allows us to incorporate qualitative concerns about heterogeneity and causal complexity into our analysis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the largest party is often disadvantaged when it comes to PM party choice, that some presidents play an influential role in choosing the PM, and that the value of being the incumbent depends on one's performance in office and how the previous government ended.

How voters' perceptions of junior coalition partners depend on the prime minister's position

“…Voters may also infer that larger PM parties can extract greater policy concessions from smaller junior coalition partners. Indeed, Duch et al (forthcoming) present evidence that size is the next best predictor of responsibility attribution for policy after PM status (this accords with Duch and Stevenson's (2008) observational evidence) and that the largest party in parliament is most likely to supply the prime minister (Glasgow et al (2011) report that the largest party supplies the prime minister about 75 per cent of the time). To account for this possibility, we include a measure of the relative sizes of the junior partner and the PM party.…”

Dissolution Threats and Legislative Bargaining

“…Glasgow, Golder, and Golder () demonstrate that seat gains increase the probability that the party previously in control of the prime ministry will get to keep it. Also see Mattila and Raunio ().…”

Investiture rules and formation of minority governments in European parliamentary democracies

“…We briefly discuss each of these dimensions and then turn our attention to the differences in the decision rule required to 2 The approach in cross-country analyses is to employ a dummy variable indicating the presence or absence of an investiture vote (not counting the cases in which investiture is obtained with the support of a negative majority). Examples of work that use the "investiture dummy" include De Winter (1995), Diermeier and van Roozendaal (1998), Diermeier and Stevenson (1999), Martin and Stevenson (2001), Mattila and Raunio (2004), Bäck and Dumont (2008), De Winter and Dumont (2008), Conrad and Golder (2010), Glasgow, Golder, andGolder (2011), andHellström (2015). invest a government.…”