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Research article
First published January 2007

The Power of Prime Ministers: Results of an Expert Survey

Eoin O'MalleyView all authors and affiliations
Volume 28, Issue 1
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512107070398

Abstract

Prime ministers are self-evidently important actors in the politics of parliamentary democracies. While there has been an ongoing debate about prime ministerial power in the political science literature, progress has been slow in a debate dating from the 1960s. This lack of progress is because of two connected factors. One is the lack of a theoretical framework to study prime ministerial power. A framework is less likely to be developed because of the lack of data on which hypotheses could be tested. This article reports in detail the methodology and results of an expert survey that was conducted to measure prime ministerial power. These data will provide a significant resource for the future study of prime ministers, cabinets, and the core executive.

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1. For those countries where coalition governments have either never taken place or have not occurred since 1980 (Canada, Greece, Malta, Spain, and the UK), two questions about a prime minister's freedom to appoint and dismiss members of other parties were omitted.
2. Iceland is probably not comparable because the power estimates for David Oddsson's three premierships were dropped because of high standard errors. The respondents gave Oddsson an average score of seven, which would have increased the Icelandic average considerably.
3. See Note 2.

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Published In

Volume 28, Issue 1
Pages: 7 - 27
Article first published: January 2007
Issue published: January 2007

Keywords

  1. Expert surveys
  2. Parliamentary executives
  3. Prime ministers
  4. Veto players

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Eoin O'Malley
School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland; [email protected]
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