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

• DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997174
• Author: Florian Grotz,Corinna Kroeber,Jan Berz,Ferdinand Müller-Rommel,Marko Kukec
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 54(11) 1907 –1938

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997174

Comparative Political Studies

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997174

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Article

How Political Careers

affect Prime-Ministerial

Performance: Evidence

from Central and Eastern

Europe

Florian Grotz1, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel2,

Jan Berz3, Corinna Kroeber4,

and Marko Kukec1

Abstract

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.

1Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

2Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Niedersachsen, Germany

3Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

4University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Florian Grotz, Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, Holstenhofweg 85, Hamburg 22043,

Germany.

Email: grotz@hsu-hh.de

997174CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997174Comparative Political StudiesGrotz et al.

research-article2021

1908 Comparative Political Studies 54(11)

2 Comparative Political Studies 00(0)

Keywords

presidents and executive politics, cabinets, East European politics, political

parties, quantitative methods

Introduction

Prime Ministers (PMs) are the central actors in parliamentary democracies.

Their performance in office is decisive for the political success of their cabi-

net and their countries’ development. As heads of party governments, they

have different tasks to fulfill, such as managing a cabinet of ministers, pro-

viding direction for domestic policy-making, reacting to crises and serving as

the voice of the executive at the national and international level (Strangio

et al., 2013). Furthermore, PMs execute these tasks under the watchful eye of

the citizenship, which holds the government parties accountable at the next

elections (Lewis-Beck & Stegmaier, 2013; Shabad & Slomczynski, 2011).

What prepares PMs to master all these tasks successfully? The study of

political elites points to career trajectories as a significant determinant of

performance in executive office. Scholarly work engaging with ministerial

careers finds that ministers in West European cabinets who held other execu-

tive or political positions before tend to survive longer in office, arguing that

they are better prepared to meet their responsibilities (Bright et al., 2015;

Fischer et al., 2012). Furthermore, past professional experience of ministers

enhances their influence on the government’s policy agenda (Alexiadou,

2015). While the impact of career features is explored pretty well for cabinet

ministers, surprisingly little is known about the heads of government in this

respect. Even though it appears rational to expect a similar impact of political

careers on performance in PM office, the research engaging with the power

and leadership of individual PMs in different countries (Bennister, 2012;

Helms, 2005; Weller, 1985) did not yet address this question from a compara-

tive perspective (Müller-Rommel et al., 2020). Systematic answers to this

question would not only contribute to a better understanding of how PMs

fulfil their manifold tasks but also of the relevance that different recruitment

paths to the chief executive position have for the functioning of parliamen-

tary democracy.

Against this background, our paper investigates how political careers

affect prime-ministerial performance in the new democracies of Central and

Eastern Europe (CEE). This sample of cases is not only interesting in itself

but also provides a particularly suitable context to examine the general rela-

tionships between career trajectories of heads of government and their per-

formance in office. In contrast to established contemporary democracies,

CEE has seen the formation of a new political elite after communist rule.

Grotz et al. 1909

Grotz et al. 3

Therefore, PMs in the region have been generally characterized by a “short-

age of experience in democratic politics,” which is regarded as one reason

why they “appear to have been relatively weak figures” (Baylis, 2007, p. 81,

91). At the same time, many political leaders in CEE have become career

politicians after 1990, and several countries have seen extraordinarily strong

PMs, like Václav Klaus in the Czech Republic, Vladimír Mečiar in Slovakia

or Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Moreover, party governments in post-commu-

nist Europe have operated in extremely dynamic political and socioeconomic

environments (Blondel et al., 2007; Grotz & Weber, 2012). Hence, CEE

seems to be a “natural laboratory” for exploring how a variety of political

careers influence prime-ministerial performance under heterogeneous con-

textual conditions.

By answering this question, our study contributes to redressing three

major gaps in the extant literature. First, we develop a novel concept of

prime-ministerial performance which is embedded in a principal-agent model

of political delegation and accountability (Strøm, 2000; Strøm & Bergman,

2011). Accordingly, performance is defined as a two-dimensional set of

prime-ministerial tasks: managing the cabinet and directing domestic affairs

are the main tasks delegated to their office, while they have to ensure the sup-

port of parliament and their party as their direct principals. This theoretically

grounded concept enhances our understanding of the core tasks any PM

ought to fulfil for a proper functioning of parliamentary democracy, which

previous research did list but not systematize in a manner applicable for

cross-national analyses (Strangio et al., 2013; ‘t Hart & Schelfhout, 2016).

Second, we present a new argument about the impact of career trajectories

on prime-ministerial performance. Starting from the general assumption that

previous political positions provide executive elites with relevant knowledge

and skills, we not only take up the standard differentiation between “insiders”

and “outsiders” (De Winter, 1991) but also contend that PMs acquire distinct

experiences for their job in three insider offices: as member of the national

parliament, as cabinet member and, most importantly, as party leader. The

results of this paper clearly confirm our theoretical expectation that a certain

kind of insider performs especially well: PMs who were party leader before

are most successful in securing the support of their own party, in settling

cabinet conflicts and shaping government policies. Previous experiences as

parliamentarian or cabinet minister do not unfold similarly consistent posi-

tive effects on prime-ministerial performance.

Third, our empirical analysis utilizes a unique data set covering 86 PMs in

131 cabinets that served in 11 CEE countries between 1990 and 2018. Our

measure of prime-ministerial performance is based on an original expert sur-

vey that captures each of the delegation and accountability tasks by one or