Abstract
This chapter presents the theoretical framework for studying changes in the career experience and the career profiles of prime ministers that will be applied to the empirical analysis in Chaps. 4 and 5. Our basic argument states that the decline of party government has supported the emergence of populist, technocratic, and presidentializing trends in European democracies. These trends have been jointly conducive to decreasing levels of prime ministerial political experience and increasing levels of technical experience, as well as to shifting prime ministers’ career profiles from a ‘party-agent’ to a ‘party-principal’ type.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that the selection of prime ministers also depends on factors other than previous political careers. For example, parties value the intra-party ideological position of possible prime ministers, their popularity within the party, or their relationship with other coalition partners (Bäck & Dumont, 2008).
- 2.
For the conceptual distinction between mainstream and challenger/populist party, see De Vries and Hobolt (2020).
- 3.
Countries are listed according to their general degree of partyness of government.
- 4.
Moreover, testing David Easton’s argument, Linde and Peters (2018, p. 301) find that, when voters perceive that governments are responsive to short-term demands, governing parties benefit from a ‘responsiveness capital’. This capital allows governments to make non-responsive (and responsible) decisions, which citizens are more likely to accept.
- 5.
Following Zulianello’s (2018) revisited concept of anti-system party, a party is anti-systemic when it has no visible interactions with the system and presents meta-antipolitical ideological instances. As the author states, ‘[i]n contrast to the historical cases, the vast majority of contemporary anti-system parties do not question democracy as such’ (Zulianello, 2018, p. 667).
- 6.
Austria; Belgium; Czech Republic; Denmark; Finland; France; Germany; Greece; Hungary; Ireland; Italy; Netherlands; Norway; Portugal; Slovakia; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; United Kingdom.
- 7.
Before the 1970s, populist parties hardly existed in Europe. There were only cases such as the Common Man’s Front (Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque) in Italy between 1946 and 1949 and the French Poujadists in the 1950s.
- 8.
We are aware that the concept of presidentialization as introduced by Poguntke and Webb has been heavily criticized in the literature. Yet, their analysis fits prominently with our empirical observations and theoretical assumptions. For a critical discussion, see Dowding (2013a) and Elgie and Passarelli (2020).
- 9.
See ‘A Conte l’incarico di Mattarella per il governo: “Sarò l’avvocato difensore del popolo italiano”’. La Stampa, 23 May 2018.
- 10.
In this context Dowding (2013b) argued that prime ministers, who are free from the system of checks and balances of the presidential form of government, can even become stronger than (constrained) presidents.
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Müller-Rommel, F., Vercesi, M., Berz, J. (2022). Change of Prime Ministers’ Careers: Theoretical Considerations. In: Prime Ministers in Europe. Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90891-1_3
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