Prime ministers, presidents and ministerial selection in Lithuania

ABSTRACT

In the semi-presidential system of Lithuania, a tradition to elect non-partisan presidents coexists with re-occurring conflicts between prime ministers and presidents over cabinet composition. We investigate what factors increase the probability of presidential activism in this field, i.e. when the president attempts to affect ministerial selection. We explain the outcomes of such activism by the electoral cycles and the political weakness of prime ministers and their party governments. More specifically, we argue that prime ministers are most vulnerable to presidential activism right after presidential elections and when they do not enjoy strong support in parliament. We test these hypotheses with a data set chronicling all instances of competition between the prime ministers and presidents over ministerial selection. The quantitative analysis is supplemented with qualitative insights from interviews with former cabinet members and high-level officials.

KEYWORDS:

• Prime ministers
• semi-presidentialism
• Lithuania
• presidents
• ministerial selection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Lithuania, the support for cabinets usually follows a stable pattern – it is high right after the cabinet formation and then diminishes slowly. Hence, by looking at the impact of the electoral cycles, we also indirectly take into account the popularity of the PM. We also ran correlations between the instances of presidential activism and the support for the president and the PM from the public opinion polls. We found some negative correlation between the support for the PM and presidential activism and some positive correlation between the support for the president and presidential activism, but none of these were statistically significant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lukas Pukelis

Lukas Pukelis is a Lead Data Scientist at Public Policy and Management Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Mažvydas Jastramskis

Mažvydas Jastramskis is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of International Relations and Political Science (IIRPS) in Vilnius University.