Abstract
This chapter examines the development of prime ministers’ career profiles over time. Based on a factor analysis, we identify two primary types of career profiles: party-agents and party-principals. Overall, the analysis shows that prime ministers with a party-principal career profile have become more common than prime ministers with a party-agent career profile. In fact, the party-principal profile became the dominant career profile in the 1990s, following the decline of party government and the increase of the presidentialization of politics. The chapter’s sections examine several additional relevant factors that may affect career profiles, including the form of government, electoral volatility, prime ministers’ formal agenda-setting power, party family membership, and gender. Our empirical findings suggest that all five factors affect prime ministers’ career profile, albeit in different directions.
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Notes
- 1.
The terms party-agent and party-principal refer to the relationship between prime ministers and their party before being appointed. See Chap. 6 for a discussion on the relationship between career profiles and behavior in office.
- 2.
Unlike heads of parliamentary parties in government, leaders of parliamentary party groups in opposition fulfill a role of major importance within the party by acting as counterparts to the incumbent prime minister in parliament.
- 3.
For this purpose, we use the polychoric package implemented for Stata (Kolenikov & Angeles, 2004).
- 4.
The Italian case similarly reveals low levels of party-agents and party-principals in recent years. This may be explained by the presence of ‘outsider’ prime ministers in recent decades, who score low in both career profiles.
- 5.
See Chap. 1 for the classification of the 26 countries according to their form of government. Slovakia turned from being a parliamentary country to a semi-presidential country in 1998. Despite this change, we decided to consider it as a semi-presidential country for the whole period, since only the first president (Michal Kováč) was elected by parliament for one term in office. Soon after the termination of his mandate, a constitutional change introduced the direct election of the president.
- 6.
The aggregated data cover prime ministers career profiles in the semi-presidential countries of Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic since 2013, Finland, France, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
- 7.
The presidents in republican countries rank as follows from the strongest to the weakest (Doyle and Elgie 2015): Portugal (1976–1982); Finland (1995–1999); Portugal (1983–); Poland (1993–1996); France (1963–2008); Romania (1992–); Finland (1957–1994); Poland (1997–); Italy (1948–); Hungary (1991–2011); Lithuania (1993–); Croatia (2001–); Austria (1945–); Poland (1990–1992); Slovakia (2002–); Bulgaria (1992–); Ireland (1938–); Czech Republic (2001–2011); Finland (2000–2011); Slovakia (1993–1998); Slovakia (1999–2001); Czech Republic (1993–2000); Estonia (1992–); Slovenia (1992–); Germany (1946–); Greece (1986–); Bulgaria (1990–1991); Latvia (1992–1997); Latvia (1998–).
- 8.
Prime ministers have governed in several democratic monarchies. These include: Belgium (20 prime ministers), Denmark (15 prime ministers), the Netherlands (14 prime ministers), Norway (14 prime ministers), Spain (seven prime ministers), Sweden (nine prime ministers), and United Kingdom (15 prime ministers).
- 9.
The only Green prime minister (Indulis Emsis from Latvia) is included in the ‘Liberal’ category. When appointed in 2004, Emsis had been already member of parliament, cabinet minister, and party leader since the 1990s. The choice of including this Green prime minister among the Liberals is due to the common sharing of libertarian values, in terms of civil rights, between Green and Liberals and, most importantly, the fact the Latvian Green Party is conservative in economic terms.
- 10.
One major problem when it comes to comparing career profiles of both women and men over time is that no woman was appointed before 1979. This implies that it is not possible to fully assess the long-term effects of presidentialization on the selection of women prime ministers as much as it is possible with men.
- 11.
Since Margret Thatcher was the first woman to become prime minister in the United Kingdom in 1979, our sample in Fig. 5.17 only includes those European prime ministers who entered office for the first time in the 1970s.
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Müller-Rommel, F., Vercesi, M., Berz, J. (2022). Changing Career Profiles: From Party-Agents to Party-Principals. In: Prime Ministers in Europe. Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90891-1_5
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