Kukec, Marko

Prime ministers (PMs) significantly contribute to making parliamentary democracy work, but cabinet reshuffles can undermine the PM's ability to perform successfully. New ministers may have less policy expertise, intensify intra-cabinet struggles and hamper the control of government bureaucracy. This article explores the relationship between cabinet reshuffles and prime-ministerial performance in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Building on a data set covering 131 cabinets in 11 CEE countries between 1990 and 2018, we find that frequent cabinet reshuffles decrease prime-ministerial performance. In particular, the reshuffling of ministers belonging to other coalition parties than the PM's unfolds a strong negative effect on prime-ministerial performance, while reshuffles in core portfolios and turnover of ministers from the PM party have less negative consequences. These results have important implications for understanding executive politics and government stability in the dynamic environments of CEE democracies and beyond.

Question Time (QT) in parliamentary democracies allows parliamentarians (MPs) to publicly scrutinise the government and influence the policy agenda. This paper explores how the other side, the cabinet members, make use of the event. Prime Minister (PM) and other ministers have incentives to inform and persuade the public and might adjust their responses to oral questions accordingly. The paper tests this expectation on the responses of Croatian cabinet members in QT between 2003 and 2020. The analysis demonstrates that when ministers respond to the questions from co-partisan MPs, which are likely coordinated within the party, their responses include more numerical evidence. Moreover, both PMs and ministers respond to their co-partisan MPs with a more positive sentiment, which is driven by the positive sentiment of the respective questions. These findings have important implications for executive-legislative relations, the quality of parliamentary scrutiny and the public perception of parliament.

Nationalisation of politics generally decreased the voter participation at municipal elections by lowering their salience, but the variation in nationalisation has been underestimated. Leveraging variation in two dimensions of localisation of municipal political competition – ethnic minority concentration and number of non-partisan local lists – this paper tests whether increased stakes and salience at ‘localised’ municipal elections increase electoral participation in respective municipalities. Based on the data from Croatian local elections (2001–2017), non-partisan lists drive voter participation, particularly in smaller municipalities. The effect of ethnic minority concentration depends on the minority status of the ethnic group within a municipality.

This article calls for greater attention to immigration attitudes of members of national parliaments (MPs) who absent harmonized immigration policy at the EU level remain the chief decision-makers and are thus responsible for swift government reaction to large influx of immigrants as witnessed in summer 2015 and spring 2020. Against this background, attitudes of MPs toward non-EU immigrants can be highly informative for understanding the foundation and direction of future immigration policy reforms. Although knowledge of MPs immigration attitudes is seemingly important, studies interested in this topic remain scarce. To test the relative importance of identity and economic aspects of MPs' immigration attitudes, this study adopts few well-established theoretical approaches from citizen-level research. Our data come from an MP survey that was administered in 11 Western and Eastern European countries in late 2014 as part of the European National Elites and the Crisis project. Our results suggest that social identity (religiosity) along with political ideology rather than economic concerns drive MPs' immigration attitudes. In addition, we find that in Eastern Europe immigration is only a light force behind political competition unlike in Western Europe, while economic left in Eastern Europe is more anti-immigrant than in Western Europe.

Even though Prime Ministers (PMs) are the central actors in parliamentary democracies, little comparative research explores what makes them perform successfully in office. This article investigates how the political careers of PMs affect their performance. For this purpose, we make use of a unique expert survey covering 131 cabinets in 11 Central and Eastern European countries between 1990 and 2018. Performance is defined as a two-dimensional set of tasks PMs ought to fulfill: first, managing the cabinet and directing domestic affairs as tasks delegated to their office, second, ensuring support of parliament and their own party, who constitute the direct principals. The findings indicate that a simple political insider career is not sufficient to enhance prime-ministerial performance. Rather, PMs who served as party leaders have the best preconditions to succeed in office.

This article is the introduction to a special issue on Prime Ministers (PMs) and party governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that the political survival of PMs in post-communist democracies depends on their interrelationships with other actors in three different arenas. The first arena encompasses the linkages between PMs and their parties. In this respect, being a party leader is a major power resource for PMs to retain their office even under critical circumstances. At the heart of the second arena is the PMs’ relationship to other parliamentary parties. In this regard, the high fragmentation and fluidity of many post-communist party systems pose enormous challenges for PMs to secure constant parliamentary support. In the third arena, PMs are confronted with state presidents. Relatively strong CEE presidents, especially in semi-presidential systems, may use their constitutional powers to interfere in the political domain of PMs and thus jeopardise the stability of party governments. For each of these interrelationships, the article provides systematic evidence for eleven CEE democracies from 1990 to 2019 and situates the findings of the volume’s contributions within a broader comparative perspective.

A crucial component in the strategies of regionalist parties in their promotion of regional self-government is a clear differentiation of the region from the central state at both societal and elite levels. This chapter introduces the concept of populism derived from the ideational approach to the phenomenon, relating its components to the basic tenets of regionalism. The strategy applied by HDSSB in striving for regional differentiation is often labeled “populist”, not only by domestic politicians and media but also in the international scholarly literature. The pure and virtuous people are contrasted with a corrupt and self-serving elite who have betrayed the will of the people. A defining programmatic feature of regionalism is the pursuit of some form of regional self-government. The credibility of a regionalist party’s drive for more extensive self-government crucially depends on a clear differentiation between the region and the central state at societal and elite levels.