Puppets of the president? Prime ministers in post-communist Romania

ABSTRACT

With sixteen Prime Ministers (PMs) in thirty years, Romania seems to fit well in the Central and Eastern European pattern of countries with “weak” heads of party governments. This article aims at contributing to the extant literature by focusing on the relationship between presidents and PMs in the Romanian context. In doing so, it challenges the general assumption that in semi-presidential systems heads of state predominate over heads of government. The empirical analysis of all Romanian chief executives since 1989 reveals that the actual power of presidents over PMs largely depends on their political convergence with the parliamentary majority.

KEYWORDS:

• Semi-presidential system
• intra-executive conflict
• presidential powers
• prime-ministerial survival
• party government
• Romania

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurențiu Ștefan

Laurenţiu Ştefan is a senior researcher at the Center for Public Policies at the West University of Timișoara and associate lecturer at the major faculties of political science across the country (National School for Political and Administrative Studies - Bucharest, University of Bucharest, Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca and West University of Timișoara). Since January 2015, he also serves as Senior Adviser for domestic political affairs of Klaus Iohannis, President of Romania. Laurenţiu Ştefan holds an MPhil in Sociology of Modern Societies (Cambridge, UK, 1998) and a PhD in political science (Bucharest, Romania, 2003). He was a fellow of the New Europe College (Bucharest, 1999–2002), and of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna, 2000). He was one of the founders and the chair of the Romanian Society for Political Science (2000–2005). Most of his research focuses on Romanian post-communist political elites, at both the national and local level (including legislators and cabinet ministers). He also wrote on technocratic ministers (before and after 1989), on coalition governments and prime ministers. Laurenţiu Ştefan is the editor of the Dictionary of Fundamental Political Writings (in Romanian, Humanitas, 2000) and the author of the English-language volumes Patterns of Political Elite Recruitment in Post-Communist Romania (Ziua, 2004) and Who Governs Romania? Profiles of Political Elites before and after 1989 (ISPRI, 2012). He contributed to edited volumes, including Landmark 1989. Central and Eastern European Societies Twenty Years after System Change (LIT Verlag, 2010), Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2013), Political Careers in Europe. Career Patterns in Multi-Level Systems (Nomos, 2015), Technocratic Ministers and Political Leadership in European Democracies (Palgrave 2018), The Contested Status of Political Elites. At the Crossroads, (Routledge 2019), and Coalition Governance in Central Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2019). He also authored or co-authored articles in Problems of Post-Communism, Journal of Legislative Studies, East European Politics, La Nouvelle Alternative, Transitions, Romanian Journal of Society and Politics, Polis – among others. His article on ”Party Leaders vs. Technocrats: The Role of Party Credentials in the Selection and Survival of Romanian Prime Ministers” was recently published in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Volume 53(2), June 2020.