Party Prime Minister Research Articles

Romania: Political Developments and Data in 2023

AbstractIn 2023, the National Liberal Party prime minister was replaced with a Social Democratic Party prime minister, pursuant to an understanding drafted by the two ruling parties in 2021. As elections were scheduled for 2024, the government adopted populist measures benefiting selected voters. Opinion polls suggested the rise of right‐wing parties. Prominent politicians and government officials were involved in corruption scandals.

The electoral consequences of policy-making in coalition governments

Does policy-making in coalition governments affect cabinet parties’ electoral performance? Previous research shows that about two thirds of all propositions promised in coalition agreements are actually enacted. But does non-compliance with pledges made in the agreement affect subsequent electoral support? Drawing on the literature on performance voting, we expect that non-compliance is punished by voters, but the effect is conditioned by the importance of the issue and by a parties’ seniority status within the coalition. To test our argument, we have compiled the new comparative COALITIONPOLICY dataset on the enactment of more than 7000 policy pledges by 217 cabinet parties in 19 Western and Eastern European countries from 2000 to 2015. Across a broad range of models, we find no effect of pledge fulfillment on subsequent electoral performance. If anything, adherence to policy-promises only increases support for the prime minister party. These results have important implications for our understanding of political representation, coalition governance, and electoral competition in multiparty democracies.

There Is a Lot More to Transplantation Surgery Than the Surgery Itself: The "Other" Sir Peter John Morris, AC, FRS.

There Is a Lot More to Transplantation Surgery Than the Surgery Itself: The "Other" Sir Peter John Morris, AC, FRS.

Analyzing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Decision Making towards modernized Canada – Israel Free Trade Agreement (2015 – 2019)

<em>In the beginning of the State of Israel establishment, western countries showed the most support towards the government in Tel Aviv, including Canada. Strong economic partnership between Canada and the State of Israel that was marked by the ratification of Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA) back in January 1997 which became Canada’s first trade agreement outside the North American area. During the leadership of Canadian Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the agreement began the negotiation of modernization and was done in 2019 during the leadership period of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The second phase of negotiations that were held in 2017-2018 during the Trudeau period has included certain provisions that arguably believe to be Trudeau's personal concern. American and Canadian research mostly shows how Canadian’s leader in certain periods gave their support towards Israel to such an extent that they method of building relationship. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to investigate more about the leader's individual factors towards Jewish government. Question about what influence Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision making process towards continuing negotiations and the ratification of trade agreement was employed by the Juliet Kaarbo theory of Prime Minister Leadership style. The theory uses five variables to assess leaders’ behavior and personality. Result of this study concludes that there are some variables that have significant roles in explaining the decision-making process of Justin Trudeau during the second negotiations until the ratifications process.</em>

ФАКТОРЫ УЧАСТИЯ «ЗЕЛЕНЫХ» ПАРТИЙ В ПРАВИТЕЛЬСТВАХ СТРАН ЗАПАДНОЙ ЕВРОПЫ В XXI ВЕКЕ

In Western Europe, "green" parties enjoy electoral popularity, they regularly represent at in national parliaments, and in some cases, participate in the formation of government coalitions. Since different theoretical approaches offer various explanations for the formation of government coalitions, the author in this article raises the question of what combinations of factors contribute to the participation of "green" parties in the national governments of Western Europe. The study was conducted on the basis of the Manifesto Project database and statistical information on parties, national parliaments and CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Using a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), the author comes to the conclusion that the participation / non-participation of "green" parties in government coalitions is explained by a combination of factors drawing from different theoretical approaches. The most favorable combination is the ideological proximity of the "greens" on issues important to the Prime Minister's party, a large share of seats in parliament, electoral success compared to previous elections, and an environmentally positive situation in the country. At the same time, the study shows that since the prime minister's party is leading in the coalition, it is the proximity of the "green" party on issues that are significant for this party that affects its participation in government to a greater extent than the proximity between them on environmental issues.

Collective Decision-Making and the Economic Vote

Experimental evidence suggests that decision makers with proposal power are held responsible for collective decisions. In the case of coalition governments, voter heuristics assign responsibility for economic outcomes to individual parties, directing the economic vote toward the Prime Minister party. Using extensive survey data from 1988 to 2010 in 28 democracies, we demonstrate that voters also identify the Finance Minister party as responsible depending on whether the coalition context exaggerates or mutes its perceived agenda power. When parties take ownership for particular policy areas, and decision-making is compartmentalized, voters perceive the Finance Minister as having proposal power and it receives a larger economic vote. Online survey experiments in Ireland and the Netherlands confirm that subjects employ compartmentalization signals to identify, and punish, coalition parties with proposal power.

A demokrácia lebontása Magyarországon [The dismantling of democracy in Hungary

A demokrácia lebontása Magyarországon [The dismantling of democracy in Hungary

Race, Colonialism, Resistance and Denial

The death of George Floyd in July 2020 shook the world. It brought many people to face to face with the reality of the institutional state violence that is an integral part of the racism that Black communities face in the Western world and sparked Black Lives Matter movements around the world. In the UK, George Floyd’s death sparked demonstrations involving young Black and white activists resulting in direct action that challenged the national historical narrative about Britain’s involvement in slavery and the nature of the British Empire. During a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol in June 2021, the protesters toppled a statue of Edward Colston, a figure presented as a philanthropist and municipal benefactor in Bristol’s history and sank it in the harbour. The reaction from the State was one of fury. The Prime Ministers Officer issued a statement saying that the tearing down of a Bristol statue was a ‘criminal act’ and the people responsible should be ‘held to account’. The Home Secretary responded to a question about the incident in the Parliament stated, ‘What we witnessed yesterday was mob rule, which is completely out of kilter with the rule of law and unacceptable’. There was no acknowledgement in the Government response that the toppling of Colston’s statue was influenced by the fact that from 1669 – 1692, Colston was the Deputy Governor of the Royal Africa Company. During his tenure as deputy governor, he effectively ran the company; an estimated 84,000 African people were transported to the Caribbean and Americas, with an estimated 20,000 deaths during transportations. No echoes of the sentiments expressed by Marvin Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, who said, ‘I can not pretend that the statue is anything but an affront to me. Not just as a Jamaican heritage man but as a human being’. The government response reflected a wellestablished white-washing of British history. A narrative that says that even though Britain was involved in the slave trade, the British were the good guys because they were the first to abolish it. A narrative that barely mentions the period of colonialism and Empire other than promoting the racist view that Britain brought civilisation and values to the world. The desire to ignore the realities of past the has not only emerged in the context of a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Black lives matter protest but in a more sustained attempt by leading British politicians to rehabilitate the Empire over the past two decades. In 2002, former Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated that Britain must stop apologising for its colonial past and recognise that it has produced some of the greatest ideas in history. He also stated I think we should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it, that we should talk, rightly so, about British values, and called for the ‘great British values’ - freedom, tolerance, civic duty to be admired as some of our most successful exports. Similarly, in 2013 former Prime Minister David Cameron, when visiting the memorial in India to the 1919 Amritsar Massacre where hundreds of Sikh protesters were gunned down by troops under British command, declared, ‘I think there is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did and was responsible for – but, of course, there were bad events as well as good. ‘The bad events we should learn from – and the good events we should celebrate’. The State reaction resulting from the toppling of the Colston statue typified this. A feeling of national panic was engendered by the claim that Black Lives matters protesters were likely to topple a statue of Winston Churchill as part of a protest in London. A narrative was constructed that extremists had taken over the Black Lives Matter protests. In a series of tweets in the run-up to the BLM London protest, Prime Minister Boris Johnson asserted ‘We cannot now try to edit or censor our past’, ‘We cannot pretend to have a different history’, ‘Those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history and impoverish the education of...

How Do They Get In? Radical Parties and Government Participation in European Democracies

AbstractDespite their alleged anti-systemness and ‘non-coalitionability’, radical right and radical left parties have, since the early 1990s, both supported and entered coalition governments in a number of European liberal democracies. Using the classical ‘size and ideology’ framework, this study sets out to examine how – or, put differently, under what circumstances – radical right and radical left parties are able to overcome the obstacles associated with governing and enter coalition governments. Inspired by previous observations regarding the complex and multicausal nature of radical government participation, the study relies on a configurational method. By means of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 37 radical parties at 207 coalition formation instances in 22 (Western and Central and Eastern) European countries, the article sheds light on different paths that lead to government inclusion (and exclusion) of radical actors. The empirical evidence indicates that electoral success in combination with a fairly similar policy position to a weak prime minister party is sufficient for government inclusion. The paths to government exclusion, by contrast, underline the importance of ideological distance in combination with size-related factors.

The Agenda-Setting Power of the Prime Minister Party in Coalition Governments

Despite coalition governments being the most widespread form of government, many aspects of coalition politics are still poorly understood. This is especially true for questions relating to the role of the prime minister party within the coalition. Being the prime minister party seems to imply considerable influence, but little evidence actually exists as to the factors shaping the influence of the prime minister. This paper offers a new approach to studying the factors conditioning the influence of the prime minister party in a coalition. The approach is focused on the extent of issue overlap between the party manifesto of the prime minister party and the first government speech after the election. This approach makes it possible to actually analyze the factors shaping the influence of the prime minister party. The results show that the PM party is constrained by the issue emphasis of its coalition partners but less so when it holds dissolution power and more, also when it has many coalition partners when controlling for the seat share of the PM party. The paper, thus, both offers a new approach to study the coalition compromise and new evidence on the factors shaping the influence coming from holding the PM position.

Don’t Look Now

Don’t Look Now

Portfolio-specific accountability and retrospective voting: the case of Italy

How do voters attribute responsibility for government outcomes when they are the result of a collective decision taken by multiple parties within a coalition government? In this article we test the argument that in a multiparty coalition system, responsibility attribution should vary according to the quantity and quality of portfolios that the coalition partner controls. The article uses data from the Italian National Election Study in Italy, a country usually characterized by governments formed by more than two parties. We find no consistent empirical evidence that coalition parties collectively suffer from perceived negative performance. While the prime minister party is held responsible on average more than the other coalition partners, responsibility attribution decreases by party size in the parliament rather than by the quantity of ministerial portfolios the incumbent party controls. Issue saliency, however, plays an important role in the retrospective voting mechanism. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral behaviour and democratic accountability.

Offline: Sweden seeks a renaissance in global health

We gather in the atrium of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, founded in 1739, surrounded by statues of Carl Linnaeus and portraits of the great (male) heroes of science (Newton, Galileo, Brahe). Reflecting on the pride and responsibility that Swedish scientists feel for their stewardship of the Nobels, some recalled with fond nostalgia the great lost years of Swedish influence in global health. The amplification of Sweden's presence in health stemmed from the nation's distinctive values, innovative research, policy translation, and strong activism. That was back in the 1970s and 1980s. But for reasons unexplained and unexamined, Sweden slowly disengaged from the global health community. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) has continued to play an important part in promoting attention to health systems, maternal and child health, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. There are still pockets of research excellence, such as Stig Wall's international epidemiological research centre at Umeå University. We mourn and miss Hans Rosling. A rather too quiet Ambassador for Global Health goes about his business. To add insult to injury, as Sweden lost its voice, so Norway gained their's. But thanks to the vision of two individuals, Peter Friberg and Göran Tomson, this trajectory of decline is about to change. With the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, last week saw the launch of SIGHT—the Swedish Institute for Global Health Transformation. SIGHT's vision is “to contribute to health and wellbeing globally for all, with a particular focus on vulnerable groups, including women and children”. An international faculty was assembled to offer ideas for SIGHT's future work. The list of suggestions was long: from adolescent health to pandemic preparedness, universal health coverage to the biosphere. But the challenge facing SIGHT's ambitious, and small, team is to identify a niche in global health that complements Sweden's strengths. One strength is the country's values. Sweden's concern for equity, gender, environment, and peace, together with its history of political neutrality and civil society advocacy, provides the firm foundation for a radical reframing of global health in an era of sustainable development. And the moment for radicalism is supremely urgent. During one working dinner, news broke that President Trump was withdrawing America from the Paris Climate Agreement. He was fulfilling a campaign pledge. It is easy to be angry at Trump's decision. I am. Many are. But we should be wiser. He is riding on a feeling of voter rage against elites. Global health is a classic elite. A vote for Trump, a vote for Brexit, was a vote, at least partly, against us. For here is a truth we prefer to overlook. Global health represents an uneasy paradox. It stands for two contrary ideas that exist in perpetual opposition. The idea of “health” suggests the lived experiences of a particular person at a particular time and place. The idea of “global” is, by contrast, ethereal, distant, everywhere, and at the same time nowhere. For us to protect and strengthen the notion of global health, we must constantly strive to root it in the lives of those who make up authentic and identifiable communities and societies. Abstract inquiry and advocacy will justifiably earn us contempt. Moreover, there is no single global health. Your global health is different from mine because our experiences, perceptions, and understanding of the world are different. What is Sweden's experience, perception, and understanding? It is the fourth best nation in terms of health-care access and quality. The third best in progress towards the health-related SDGs. The second best for innovation. And Sweden enjoys flourishing artistic creativity (it recently won the Palme d'Or for Ruben Östlund's film, The Square). But Swedes have fears too. They are living in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, which took place in Stockholm on April 7 with the loss of five lives. The rapid rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats—a party Prime Minister Stefan Löfven calls “neofascist”—is eroding the country's historically liberal political culture. The Green Party has seen its support collapse. One Green Party leader has pointed to feelings of hopelessness in Swedish society. The global context for Sweden's anxieties is not propitious. Democracy is in recession, and the world is a less peaceful place. But these trends and inclinations are all arguments in favour of SIGHT. To discover solutions to our most dangerous challenges demands disruptive thinking, interdisciplinary inquiry, collective action—and new institutions that will confront lazy orthodoxies.

Economic Conditions Affect Support for Prime Minister Parties in Scandinavia

Previous research has not been able to identify a relationship between objective economic indicators and support for governing parties in the Scandinavian countries. This is potentially problematic, as it suggests that political leaders are not held electorally accountable for the economic conditions they provide for their electorates. In this article, it is suggested that this null‐finding is a result of the particularities of the Scandinavian electoral context, which makes it difficult to identify the effects of the economy on electoral support. To bolster this argument, the relationship between unemployment, economic growth and support for prime minister parties is re‐examined in two datasets. The first is a dataset of Scandinavian elections, and the second is a yearly Danish vote function, which was constructed using election polls. Across both datasets, it is found that if one simply correlates support for the prime minister's party with economic conditions, there is no relationship; however, if one specifies a statistical model, which takes the Scandinavian context into account, it is possible to identify a statistically significant effect of economic conditions on electoral support. Based on this finding, the article concludes that economic conditions do shape electoral support for prime minister parties in Scandinavia.

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

How voters' perceptions of junior coalition partners depend on the prime minister's position

AbstractRecent studies document that voters infer parties' left‐right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left‐right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that ‘niche’ parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government.

Japan's Post-Fukushima Energy Politics

A 2011 earthquake damaged the Fukushima nuclear reactor and provided a galvanising point for anti-nuclear resistance groups in Japan. Their public cause slowly faded from the political arena after the Democratic Party of Japan fell out of power and anti-nuclear politicians lost the 2014 Tokyo gubernatorial election. The current Liberal Democratic Party Prime Minister Abe holds a pro-nuclear position and urges the reactivation of Japan's nuclear reactors after all safeguards have been satisfied.

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. 1, Not for Turning, by Charles Moore

Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. I, Not for Turning London: Allen Lane, 2013. 895 pp. $39.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0713992823The first volume of Charles Moore's official biography of Margaret Thatcher is in some ways surprising. Presumably picked for the task because of his Thatcherite predilections, the long-time Tory journalist wrote with exclusive access to the former prime minister and her papers, as well as many of her associates. The portrait he paints is elegantly crafted if overlong, and, while more richly detailed than the highly critical biographies by Hugo Young and John Campbell, confirms their essential findings. He too finds a leader whose fabled resolve sometimes tips into obstinacy but is as often tempered by a surprising pragmatism. Moore flirts unconvincingly with the idea that Thatcher was an embryonic libertarian from an early age, but more plausibly settles on the view that she identified with, and reflected the views of the small-business, lower-middle-class, Tory grassroots who had never fully reconciled themselves to the party leadership's acceptance of Keynesian economics and the postwar welfare state.Not all of the new material Moore has found rewards his industry. The muchballyhooed discovery of a cache of youthful letters to her sister shows the undergraduate Margaret to have been less preoccupied with politics and more with fashion, food, and previously unknown early boyfriends than other biographers have known. Likewise, is no more than mildly surprising or illuminating that her eventual husband, Denis, decamped for a time to South Africa during a midlife crisis when it was... possible that their marriage would end (175). Moore is on solid ground when he highlights the implausibility of her ascent in light of her humble origins and lack of the standard political gifts of charm and easy eloquence. Instead, she relied on remorseless labour to master her brief; for all her fabled affinity for Ronald Reagan, in her triumph of fortitude over lack of natural talent she is closer to Richard Nixon. Discipline carried her from candidate in unwinnable riding to backbencher to ministerial office in the government of Edward Heath.At crucial moments, she was lucky. In 1975 she won the leadership largely because Heath had not only lost three out of four elections but also alienated even like-minded MPs by his ham-handedness in personal relations. And in much of the run-up to the 1979 election she was significantly less popular than the Labour Party prime minister James Callaghan, who cleaved to the centre ground and himself took steps away from the Keynesian consensus Thatcher was determined to shatter. But Callaghan shied away from calling an election in late 1978, which he might well have won, and by 1979 a resurgence of trade union militancy had destroyed his standing with the electorate and made Thatcher's victory as close to inevitable as politics allows.Moore is sympathetic to the economic program of Thatcher's early years, which stressed the defeat of inflation over that of unemployment, the setting of wages by the free play of market forces rather than government incomes policy, and the control of state spending. There is no discussion here of whether a more measured version of her program (rather than what the Labour politician Denis Healey labeled sado-monetarism) might have worked better, nor acknowledgement that Thatcher never succeeded in either reducing spending or boosting the prod- uctivity of Britain's economy. Moore provides the most detailed description to date of internal debates over the government's economic direction, and plausibly argues that the public debate between Thatcherites and proponents of a return to the Keynesian consensus was less consequential for the making of policy than debates among those who were in broad agreement about the correctness of the Thatcherite course but differed over the timing and details of implementation. …

The Fiscal Case against Statehood: Accounting for Statehood in New Mexico and Arizona by Stephanie D. Moussalli (review)

Reviewed by: The Fiscal Case against Statehood: Accounting for Statehood in New Mexico and Arizona by Stephanie D. Moussalli Jon Reyhner The Fiscal Case against Statehood: Accounting for Statehood in New Mexico and Arizona. By Stephanie D. Moussalli. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012. Pp. 234. Figures, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780739166994, $65.00 cloth.) Stephanie D. Moussalli’s study of spending changes that occurred when the territories of New Mexico and Arizona became states in 1912 tests the “Leviathan” model that predicts that with more independence under statehood their governments would increase their taxing and spending. Using Nevada, which achieved statehood much earlier during the Civil War as a control, Moussalli documents how Arizona and New Mexico after statehood increased their spending over and above what they lost in federal funding (about 10 percent of their budgets) as territories. Both New Mexico and Arizona saw a jump in the size and cost of their governments right after statehood in contrast to Nevada, which, during the same time period, showed only steady slow growth. The loss of federal territorial funding and other related perks is one reason Moussalli gives for Puerto Rico today resisting becoming a state. While the federal subsidy for territories was a plus, drawbacks included the U.S. Congress being able to nullify laws passed by territorial legislatures, with no time limit on such nullifications. Moussalli notes how the Progressive political movement was at its height in 1912. Unlike today, in 1912 Arizona tended to vote Democratic and supported progressive political and financial reforms, including woman suffrage, right after statehood, while New Mexico tended to vote Republican. Progressive reforms include equalization of taxation and government efficiency. Moussalli also found that statehood “dramatically changes and improves the financial reporting of government” (66) and documents how it led to better, fairer tax collection that increased tax revenues, which facilitated government expansion. She quotes C. M. Zander, one of Arizona’s first state tax commissioners and an admirer of Britain’s Liberal party prime minister Lloyd George, on income taxes: Tremendous fortunes [were] created and handed down from generation to generation . . . which paid no taxes or tribute to federal, state or local governments. As a result we had upon the one hand a class of people restless under a smarting sense of deep injustice…and upon the other hand a class of people becoming more and more autocratic because they. . . less and less performed the greatest requirement of democracy, namely, the contribution from their wealth for the purposes of democracy (123). Some progressives also supported eugenics, and Arizona as a new state passed anti-miscegenation laws. Interesting sidelights in Moussalli’s study include how government funds were lost through bank failures, such as occurred during the depression of 1920–21. The Fiscal Case Against Statehood has more than most anyone would ever want to know, even most accountants, about the fiscal affairs of New Mexico and Arizona in the early twentieth century. Moussalli concludes, “The long and short of property tax reform in New Mexico and Arizona is this: tax and other fiscal officials greatly improved the system, making it more honest, efficient, and transparent. [End Page 106] These changes helped collect a lot more money from the people, as the officials knew it would” (127). Jon Reyhner Northern Arizona University Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

The Political Consequences of the Financial and Economic Crisis in Europe: Electoral Punishment and Popular Protest

The Political Consequences of the Financial and Economic Crisis in Europe: Electoral Punishment and Popular Protest