Who ‘Wins’? Determining the Party of the Prime Minister∗

The prime ministership is widely recognized as the preeminent post in parliamentary democracies. To date, existing research on prime ministerial party choice focuses almost exclusively on party-specific factors relating to party size and ideology. We extend previous research by recognizing the important role played by key strategic actors such as the incumbent prime minister and head of state, as well as how institutional and dynamic contextual factors constrain the ability of these actors to influence the selection of the prime ministerial party. We test our hypotheses on an original dataset that includes information on 369 prime ministerial selection opportunities in 28 Western and Eastern European democracies. Our results challenge conventional wisdom concerning the determinants of prime ministerial party choice. Methodologically, we employ a mixed logit model with random coefficients. This allows us to not only examine the factors that affect which party obtains the prime ministership, but to also explore how the influence of these factors varies across prime ministerial party selection opportunities due to unique aspects of each case that are difficult or impossible to capture in a quantitative model. Our analysis demonstrates that the mixed logit model is an extremely valuable tool for comparative scholars engaged in cross-national research. ∗Note: We would like to thank Nathaniel Beck, Torbjörn Bergman, Brad Gomez, Shin-Goo Kang, G. Bingham Powell, Christo