Abstract
We focus on the level of conflict between the president and the cabinet in 21 European countries since 1995. We report the results of an expert survey that identifies the level of president/cabinet conflict in all cabinets in these countries. We adopt a probabilistic statistical method to identify the sources of variation in president/cabinet conflict. We also use set-theoretic methods, specifically crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, to identify the local conditions under which president/cabinet conflict has been present. We show that presidential power is a significant predictor of president/cabinet conflict in combination with cohabitation, and a government that has not been formed immediately after a presidential election.
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Notes
- 1.
This rule means that we exclude all parliamentary monarchies , as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Switzerland.
- 2.
This rule means that we exclude Belarus, Moldova , Russia , Turkey, and Ukraine.
- 3.
Available at http://www.parlgov.org (accessed 8 October 2015).
- 4.
Thus, if the incumbent president is returned to office, we do not include a new unit.
- 5.
We also find that we have to exclude both Montenegro and Serbia because we do not have presidential power scores for either country.
- 6.
The survey was conducted between the beginning of August and October 2015. We acknowledge the help of all the respondents in the Introduction to this volume.
- 7.
- 8.
Information about the ICR measures used here is presented by Mary Joyce, “Picking the best intercoder reliability statistic for your digital activism content analysis”, 11 May 2013, available at: http://bit.ly/2hIvPuy (accessed 13 December 2016).
- 9.
We use the normalized prespow2 scores available from http://presidential-power.com/?page_id=2154 (accessed 13 October 2015).
- 10.
Available at http://www.parlgov.org (accessed 8 October 2015).
- 11.
The second recession variable (Recession 2) is coded 1 where GDP per capita growth in the year of government formation is 1 per cent below the average growth rate in the previous two years. We do not report the findings for models that include this variable rather than Recession 1. However, we note them below.
- 12.
World Development Indicators, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicators (accessed 13 October 2015). The figures for Lithuania are unavailable.
- 13.
The results with the larger sample are the same as those for the smaller sample.
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Elgie, R. (2018). Presidential Power and President/Cabinet Conflict. In: Political Leadership. Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34622-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34622-3_5
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