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Studying Prime Ministers’ Careers: An Introduction

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Prime Ministers in Europe

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership ((PSPL))

Abstract

This chapter highlights the changing role of prime ministers in European party governments. It argues that the career experiences and profiles of prime ministers change in times of changing job requirements. Departing from a review of existing research on prime ministers’ careers in liberal democracies, this chapter presents the theoretical and empirical innovations of the book as well as additional research questions that go beyond the origin and the political effect of different career types. It also defines the geographical focus and the sample of prime ministers in 26 European democracies from 1945 to 2020.

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Change history

  • 06 August 2022

    The original version of this chapter was revised; “the chapter numbers have been included under the section “Outline of the Book””.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Our book’s argument is not meant to be valid for all existing political regimes nor for all advanced democracies. Rather, it holds for European liberal democracies and their patterns of party representation. In the United States, for example, populism has developed in a significantly different political environment, characterized by polarized partisanship in the context of a fairly closed two-party system.

  2. 2.

    In countries adopting the president-parliamentary version of semi-presidentialism, the prime minister can be dismissed by the elected president. Semi-presidential systems can, in fact, be distinguished into two sub-types: the premier-presidential sub-type, where the prime minister and the cabinet are accountable solely to the parliament, and the president-parliamentary sub-type, where the prime minister and the cabinet are accountable to both the parliament and the president (Shugart & Carey, 1992). Most semi-presidential democracies in the world have adopted the first version, whereas only a couple of democratic regimes have opted for the second version (Müller-Rommel & Vercesi, 2020, pp. 765–766).

  3. 3.

    Parts of this section are drawn from an earlier publication (Müller-Rommel et al., 2020).

  4. 4.

    According to our criteria based on the Polity V dataset, Croatia is considered democratic only from 2000 onwards.

  5. 5.

    The United Kingdom was still member of the European Union on 31 December 2019, which is the time limit of our observations in the dataset (see Appendix).

  6. 6.

    According to the Polity V dataset, France scores only 2 for 1958.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

    Ferdinand Müller-Rommel & Michelangelo Vercesi

  2. Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Jan Berz

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  1. Ferdinand Müller-Rommel
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  2. Michelangelo Vercesi
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  3. Jan Berz
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Correspondence to Ferdinand Müller-Rommel .

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Müller-Rommel, F., Vercesi, M., Berz, J. (2022). Studying Prime Ministers’ Careers: An Introduction. In: Prime Ministers in Europe. Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90891-1_1

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