Learning to rule

The Third Wave of global democratization swept through Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990s. By 2007, ten of the former communist states of the region (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) had completed sufficiently thorough and credible reforms in their political and economic systems to warrant their inclusion in the European Union (Vachudova 2005). Yet, while the adoption of competitive democratic systems of government was common to all of these post-communist states, the types of democratic institutions they have adopted vary significantly. With regard to their electoral systems, all but two of the ten states adopted various forms of proportional representation to elect members of the national parliament; the two exceptions are Lithuania and Hungary, which have used different mixed-member systems. ¹ The national legislatures of all but four of these new democracies are unicameral; we find bicameral parliaments in Poland. Romania the Czech Republic and Slovenia, although in the latter case it is not a popularly elected chamber. The ten new EU member states also vary considerably with regard to the distribution of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government. In more than half of them, the constitutions provide for a popularly elected President (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia since 1999, and Slovenia); however, the overall levels of presidential powers even in these instances are fairly moderate in comparison with the more powerful head of state in Russia or Ukraine (Krouwel 2003). Nonetheless, even though the constitutional prerogatives of the head of state are carefully circumscribed, presidents in the new democracies of East Central Europe have often played an important role in shaping the games of cabinet formation and composition (Protsyk 2005). In fact, some claim that, even notwithstanding the limitations of the official powers of their office, presidents continue to be politically no less powerful than prime ministers (Baylis 2007)! This chapter starts with a country-by-country description of the constitutional foundations of ministerial selection and de-selection in the ten post-communist member states of the European Union followed by a cross-national comparative assessment and analysis of discernible patterns of variations. The third section deals with empirical indicators on ministerial selection and de-selection in the region. All data are based on Keesing's Contemporary Archives Record of World events, but cross-checked with the RFE/RL database, the annually published Political Data Yearbook of the European Journal of Political Research and various government web pages, as for example the East European Constitutional Review or the websites of the different governments under study. Using the definition of government in Woldendorp et al. (1998, 2000), according to which government is terminated when the prime minister changes, a party leaves the coalition or an election is held, we have counted 103 governments in the ten states (Müller-Rommel, Fettelschoss and Harfst 2004, updated). ² The dataset includes all ministers who assumed office up to 31 December 2006, but minister of governments still in office at that time were excluded.