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Prime Ministers unchained? Explaining Prime Minister Policy Autonomy in coalition governments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2018

Nicola Martocchia Diodati ,
Bruno Marino Open the ORCID record for Bruno Marino [Opens in a new window]  and
Benedetta Carlotti
Nicola Martocchia Diodati
Affiliation:
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy
Bruno Marino*
Affiliation:
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy
Benedetta Carlotti
Affiliation:
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy
*
*E-mail: bruno.marino@sns.it
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Abstract

The personalization of politics has become a central concern in political science. This is also true for parliamentary governments, where the Prime Minister has allegedly acquired an increasing relevance. Nonetheless, a key question remains unanswered: How can we estimate the Prime Minister Policy Autonomy (PMPA) in parliamentary governments? Moreover, what are the determinants of this autonomy? This article aims to answer these questions by proposing a novel and easily replicable index of PMPA, based on data from an analysis of Prime Ministers’ and members of Parliament’s parliamentary speeches, and specifically from cosine similarity analysis. In this article, we explore PMPA by focussing on two most different cases of coalition governments, Italy and Germany between 1994 and 2014. A multilevel regression analysis shows that coalition-related factors strongly influence PMPA, party-related factors are somewhat relevant, and the Prime Minister-related factor (its selectorate) does not have a significant impact on such autonomy.

Keywords

coalition governmentspolitical elitestext analysiscosine similaritypersonalization of politics
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 515 - 536
Copyright
© European Consortium for Political Research 2018 

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