Prime Ministerial Power in 22 Countries, 1980-2000 (ICPSR 24341)
Version Date: Jul 8, 2010 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Eoin O'Malley, Dublin City University
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR24341.v1
Version V1
Summary View help for Summary
This study offers a measure of prime ministerial power to set government policy in 22 countries with established parliamentary democracies. The collection comprises variables relating to the power of prime ministers including an index of prime ministerial power, which consists of a quantitative score of the power of individually named prime ministers in their different terms based on an expert survey conducted in 2001-2003. The expert survey included questions in regard to the prime minister's degree of freedom in selecting cabinet ministers, moving or removing the cabinet ministers, and calling an election when desired. In addition, respondents were queried about the prime minister's ability to influence the cabinet agenda and the policy output of the current government, and the degree of government control over the parliament agenda. Additional variables in the data examined the political and institutional resources available to the prime ministers, of which the following topics were explored: the composition of the cabinet and prime minister's party, rate of government survival, strength of prime minister's party in the parliament, impact of the opposition party on policy, score of leadership influence, policy diversity in government, and government's ideological complexion.
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Funding View help for Funding
Subject Terms View help for Subject Terms
Geographic Coverage View help for Geographic Coverage
Smallest Geographic Unit View help for Smallest Geographic Unit
country
Distributor(s) View help for Distributor(s)
Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)
Date of Collection View help for Date of Collection
Data Collection Notes View help for Data Collection Notes
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These data for this collection were initially gathered by Dr. Eoin O'Malley for his PhD thesis entitled "Give Them Awkward Choices: A theoretical and empirical investigation into the operation of Prime ministerial influence on policy in 22 countries" from Trinity College, Dublin, 2005.
- The data were sourced from editions of the European Journal of Political Research (EJPR) Political Data Yearbook, from various journal articles and books, and from an unpublished work. For further information about the data, please refer to the "Codebook for data on Prime ministerial power and its causes" section of the ICPSR codebook for a description of each variable and its source.
- The "Expert Survey on Prime Ministers in Established Parliamentary Democracies" for the Netherlands has been provided in the ICPSR codebook. The variables pertaining to the questions asked in the expert survey are indicated in navy text in the "Codebook for data on Prime ministerial power and its causes".
- Variables PARTYLAB and PMSPARTY have the same variable label; PMSPARTY does not appear in the "Codebook for data on Prime ministerial power and its causes."
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Variable ID (unique identifier) has the following duplicate values: 16, 22, 41, 69, 115, 123, and 152.
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PMID (identifier for individual PMs): Please note that one code may be associated with more than one prime minister, or one or more codes may have been assigned to one prime minister.
Sample View help for Sample
(1) Prime ministerial terms of office for 22 parliamentary democracies. The data is time limited to those prime ministerial terms between January 1, 1980, and December 31, 1999, for most countries. For countries with more than 7 ministerial terms in the 20 year time span, only the 7 most recent prime ministerial terms are included. (2) Experts were selected for participation utilizing a number of criteria and sources, with the aim to contact the universe of political scientists in each of the 22 countries with an established parliamentary democracy who study that country's executive or policy-making process. Out of the 413 expert surveys that were mailed, 249 completed expert survey responses were obtained. For more detailed information about sampling please refer to: O'Malley, Eoin. 2007. The Power of Prime Ministers: Results of an Expert Survey. International Political Science Review, 28(1): 7-27.
Universe View help for Universe
(1) Prime ministerial terms in 22 established parliamentary democracies (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) between January 1, 1980 and December 31, 1999. (2) Experts from each of the 22 countries with an established parliamentary democracy, including political scientists and academic experts who study that country's executive or policy-making process and have published in English academic work.
Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation
Data Source View help for Data Source
Huber, John D., and Ronald Inglehart. 1995. Expert interpretations of party space and party locations in 42 societies. Party Politics, 1:73-111.
Lijphart, Arend. 1999. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in 36 Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Siaroff, Alan. 2000. Comparative European Party Systems: an analysis of parliamentary elections since 1945. New York: Garland.
Woldendorp, Jaap, Hans Keman, and Ian Budge. 1998. Party Government in 20 Democracies - an update 1990-1995. European Journal of Political Research, 33:125-164.
King, Anthony. 1994. Chief Executives in Western Europe. In Developing Democracy, edited by I. Budge and D. McKay. London: Sage.
O'Malley, Eoin. 2005. Give Them Awkward Choices: The operation of prime ministerial power. Unpublished PhD, Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Dublin.
Gallagher, Michael. 1991. Proportionality, disproportionality and electoral systems. Electoral Studies, 10:33-51.
Huber, John D. 1996. The Vote of Confidence in Parliamentary Democracies. American Political Science Review, 90 (2):269-282.
Budge, Ian, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, and Eric Tannenbaum. 2001. Mapping Political Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments, 1945-1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woldendorp, Jaap, Hans Keman, and Ian Budge. 1993. Political data 1945-1990 - Party Government in 20 Democracies. European Journal of Political Research, 24:1-119.
O'Malley, Eoin. 2006. Investigating the effects of directly electing a prime minister. Government and Opposition, 43: 137-62.
Janda, Kenneth F. 1980. Political Parties: A cross-national survey. New York: The Free Press.
Laver, Michael, and W. Ben Hunt. 1992. Policy and Party Competition. New York: Routledge.
Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)
Mode of Data Collection View help for Mode of Data Collection
Response Rates View help for Response Rates
63 percent
Presence of Common Scales View help for Presence of Common Scales
Lijphart's index, Gallagher's index
HideOriginal Release Date View help for Original Release Date
2010-07-08
Version History View help for Version History
2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
- O'Malley, Eoin. Prime Ministerial Power in 22 Countries, 1980-2000. ICPSR24341-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2010-07-08. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR24341.v1
2010-07-08 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
- Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
Notes
These data are freely available to data users at ICPSR member institutions. The curation and dissemination of this study are provided by the institutional members of ICPSR. How do I access ICPSR data if I am not at a member institution?