Grotz, Florian

Prime ministers are the most powerful and visible politicians in established parliamentary democracies. But is this also true for post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? Conventional wisdom suggests that prime ministers in CEE perform weakly because they lack political experience and operate in an extraordinarily difficult context, but this assumption has not been systematically examined. To close this research gap, this book presents a new approach to measuring prime-ministerial performance and offers a novel dataset of 131 cabinets in eleven CEE countries between 1990 and 2018. Comparative analyses of this data reveal that post-communist prime ministers range from politically inexperienced outsiders to insiders with long-standing careers in parliament, government, and party leadership. Their institutional, political, and economic contexts are more favourable in some countries and periods than in others. Some incumbents have performed rather poorly, while others have been very successful. Moreover, analyses of quantitative data and qualitative cases demonstrate that the variations in the careers, contexts, and performance of prime ministers are systematically connected. Their success particularly depends on their experience as party leaders, on the strength of their political allies in the executive and legislative arenas, and on favourable economic conditions. In this way, the book not only qualifies conventional assumptions about prime ministers in CEE but also substantiates the theoretical relationship between their careers, contexts, and performance. Prime Ministers in Central and Eastern Europe thus contributes to an enhanced understanding of the functioning of post-communist democracies and provides new insights for scholarly work engaging with political leadership.