Breaking the parliamentary chain of delegation: Presidents and non-partisan cabinet members in European democracies

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 619-643

  Neto, Octavio Amorim ^a   Strøm, Kaare ^b  

^a FUNDAÇÃO GETÚLIO VARGAS   (Brazil)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33747893351     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123406000330     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. Maurice Duverger, 'A New Political System Model: Semi-Presidential Government', European Journal of Political Research, 8 (1980), 165-87.
2. Robert Elgie, 'The Politics of Semi-presidentialism', in Robert Elgie, ed., Semi-presidentialism in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1-21.
3. Kaare Strøm, 'Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies', European Journal of Political Research, 37 (2000), 261-89
4. Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang C. Müller and Torbjörn Bergman, eds, Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
5. See Elgie, 'The Politics of Semi-presidentialism'.
6. Duverger, 'A New Political System Model'
7. Robert Elgie, 'Semi-presidentialism and Comparative Constitutional Engineering', in Elgie, ed., Semi-presidentialism in Europe, pp. 281-9
8. and Gianfranco Pasquino, 'Duetti e Duelli: L'adattabilità dei Semipresidenzialismi', in Stefano Ceccanti, Oreste Massari and Gianfranco Pasquino, eds, Semipresidenzialismo: Analisi delle Esperienze Europee (Bologna: II Mulino, 1996), pp. 99-148.
9. Svanur Kristjansson, 'Iceland', in Strøm, Müller, and Bergman, eds, Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, pp. 399-417
10. Wolfgang C. Müller, 'Austria: The "Authority in Reserve" Presidency', in Elgie, ed., Semi-presidentialism in Europe, pp. 22-47.
11. Elgie, 'The Politics of Semi-presidentialism'
12. Oreste Massari, 'I Sistemi Semipresidenziali: Differeze e Analogie in Prospettiva Comparata', in Ceccanti, Massari and Pasquino, eds, Semipresidenzialismo, pp. 9-53
13. Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes, rev. edn (New York: New York University Press, 1997)
14. Matthew S. Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
15. and Cindy Skach, 'Semi-presidentialism and the Dangers of Divided Minority Government' (paper presented at the IPSA World Congress, Quebec City, 2000).
16. Kaare Strøm and Stephen M. Swindle, 'Strategic Parliamentary Dissolution', American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 575-91.
17. Strøm, 'Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies'
18. Strøm, Müller and Bergman 'Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies'.
19. Strøm, Müller and Bergman, 'Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies'.
20. Gary W. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
21. Strøm, Müller and Bergman, 'Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies'.
22. Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
23. Kaare Strøm, 'Parties at the Core of Government', in Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds, Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 180-207.
24. Strøm, 'Parties at the Core of Government', p. 207.
25. According to Juan J. Linz, 'Introduction: Some Thoughts on Presidentialism in Postcommunist Europe', in Ray Taras, ed., Postcommunist Presidents (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1-14:
26. 'The most difficult situation arises in a stalemated party system in which there is a very unstable or no majority in the legislature and the president cannot have either support or influence on a party or party coalition, as was the case in the second presidency of Hindenburg. In such a situation the president might turn to extra-parliamentary leaders to provide support in forming a government, or to a shadow government of persons with access to him or her' (p. 11).
27. Mattei Dogan, 'Career Pathways to the Cabinet in France, 1870-1986', in Mattei Dogan, ed., Pathways to Power: Selecting Rulers in Pluralist Democracies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 19-44, at p. 27.
28. Karlheinz Reif, 'Party Government in the Fifth French Republic', in Richard S. Katz,ed., The Future of Party Government, vol. 2: European and American Experiences (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), pp. 27-77, at p. 62.
29. Duverger, 'A New Political System Model'
30. Pasquino, 'Duetti e Duelli'
31. Raymond Aron, 'Alternation in Government in the Industrialized Countries', Government and Opposition, 17 (1982), 3-21.
32. Maurice Duverger, Échec au Roi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978), pp. 176-208.
33. Jean Massot, Chef de L'État et Chef du Gouvernement: Dyarchie et Hiérarchie (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1993), pp. 71-2.
34. Jean-Bernard Raimond and André Giraud were appointed to the ministries of foreign affairs and defence, respectively. According to Samy Cohen, 'La Politique Étrangère entre L'Elysée et Matignon', Politique Étrangère, 3 (1989), 487-503:
35. 'Le choix des ministres des Affaires étrangères et de la Défense nationale se fait sans difficulté majeure mais non sans discussion. Plusiers noms défilent pour le poste de ministre des Affaires étrangères. L'accord se fait finalement sur Jean-Bernard Raimond. Cet ancien conseiller de Georges Pompidou a gardé entre 1981 et 1986 de bons rapports avec les diregeants socialistes. C'est François Mitterrand qui en 1985 l'a nommé ambassadeur à Moscou. L'entente est plus rapidement trouvée pour le poste de ministre de la Défense sur la personne d'André Giraud, et de loin, à François Léotard' (p. 488).
36. e République (Paris: Grasset, 1994), p. 372.
37. Klaus von Beyme, Parliamentary Democracy: Democratization, Destabilization, Reconsolidation, 1789-1999 (Houndmills, Hants.: Macmillan, 2000), p. 137.
38. Ania van der Meer Krok-Paszkowska, 'Poland', in Elgie, ed., Semi-presidentialism in Europe, pp. 170-92, at p. 186.
39. If we make the 'tie-breaking' assumption that whenever otherwise indifferent, the prime minister will select a co-partisan rather than a non-partisan nominee, then in equilibrium, when the prime minister represents the same coalition as the president, she will always propose a cabinet consisting strictly of co-partisans, and the president will approve.
40. Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm, eds, Coalition Government in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
41. Timothy Frye, 'The Politics of Constitutional Choice: Post-Communist Presidencies', Comparative Political Studies, 30 (1997), 523-52
42. Christian Lucky, 'A Comparative Chart of Presidential Powers in Eastern Europe', East European Constitutional Review, 2/3 (1993/1994), 81-94
43. Lee Kendall Metcalf, 'Measuring Presidential Power', Comparative Political Studies, 33 (2000), 660-85
44. Steven D. Roper, 'Are All Semipresidential Regimes the Same? A Comparison of Premier-Presidential Regimes', Comparative Politics, 34 (2002), 253-72
45. Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies'
46. and Alan Siaroff, 'Comparative Presidencies: The Inadequacy of the Presidential, Semi-presidential and Parliamentary Distinction', European Journal of Political Research, 42 (2003), 287-312.
47. Strøm, 'Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies'.
48. We thank Acir Almeida for kindly sharing his data on the party affiliation of presidents and cabinet ministers.
49. Mogens Pedersen, 'Changing Patterns of Electoral Volatility in European Party Systems, 1948-77: Explorations in Explanation', in Hans Daalder and Peter Mair, eds, Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983), pp. 29-66.
50. Alberto Alesina and Roberta Perotti, 'Fiscal Expansions and Adjustments in OECD Countries', Economic Policy, 21 (1995), 205-48.
51. Data on growth rates were culled from World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (CD-ROM).
52. Maarku Laakso and Rein Taagepera, 'Effective Number of Parties: A Measure With Application to West Europe', Comparative Political Studies, 12 (1979), 3-27.
53. See, e.g., Gary W. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
54. Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
55. Rein Taagepera and Matthew S. Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).
56. Metcalf, 'Measuring Presidential Power'.
57. Bradley Palmquist, 'Analysis of Proportions Data' (mimeo, Vanderbilt University, 1999), available at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/psci/palmquist.
58. Our sample of countries varies in many institutional parameters that we cannot fully capture in our model. Thus, the constitutions of Ireland and Malta require that cabinet members be selected from those who have been elected to parliament, which obviously reduces the pool of non-partisan candidates. In five countries, Bulgaria, Estonia, Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia, the president plays no formal role in the appointment of cabinet members, and the interaction between him and the prime minister is therefore played out in different forms from that our model portrays. It is worth noting that even under such rules the president may well have preferences over cabinet appointments and ways of influencing the prime minister's choice. In order to check the robustness of our results to such institutional variation, we re-estimated our models excluding first Ireland and Malta and then all of the countries listed above. The only meaningful change in our results is that when all seven countries are deleted, the estimated effect of economic recession falls below conventional significance levels, though it retains the expected sign.
59. i be the i-th element of the diagonal of a regression's projection matrix. Any observation whose has higher than 2p/n should be considered an influential observation. Only three such observations (in our case, cabinets) were found: the Popov I cabinet in Bulgaria (formed in 1990); the Galis cabinet in Latvia (formed in 1994); and the Guterres I cabinet in Portugal (formed in 1995). We have re-run Model 2 on a sample excluding the three influential observations, and found that only our estimate for semi-presidentialism is affected. While this coefficient retains the correct sign throughout, it falls below conventional significance levels when these three observations are discounted. Neither the sign nor the significance level of any of our other parameter estimates is affected. We see no substantive reason to disregard these particular cabinets, which were formed in three different corners of Europe in three different years, but note that the results for semi-presidentialism may be somewhat more sensitive than the other parameter estimates to the composition of our sample.