Career patterns and political performance of Prime Ministers in Central East European Democracies

该项目涉及作为欧盟成员国的中东欧(CEE)年轻民主国家的总理。更具体地说，它试图探索政府比较研究的一个关键问题，这个问题迄今尚未得到回答：中东欧国家总理的职业模式以什么方式影响他们的政治表现？为了系统地回答这个问题，项目被细分为三个里程碑，这些里程碑将在相应的工作单元中实现。第一个工作模块的里程碑在于对中东欧国家总理的政治表现进行多维度的概念化、系统化调查和比较描述。为此，研究小组将根据二级汇总数据和标准化的专家判断，建立1989/90至2017年间11个中东欧国家总理业绩的系统和详细的经验记录。这一新的数据集将是对政治高管比较研究的重大贡献，应该经常被该领域的未来研究使用。第二个工作模块的主要目标是对被调查的11个国家的总理的职业模式进行系统的调查和比较描述。这些简介包括社会人口特征以及1989/90至2017年间个别公职人员政治经历的不同指标。这包括数据集和各自的首相职业简介地图，将弥补比较中东欧内外政治精英的文献中的一个主要差距。最后的工作模块旨在对在比较政治精英研究中最突出的“个人-做事情”假说进行背景研究。更准确地说，该项目将系统地探索中东欧国家总理的职业概况如何影响他们的政治表现。这种跨国家和跨期的分析并不局限于两个变量的关系。遵循最近文献所阐述的“互动主义方法”和“以行为者为中心的制度主义”，我们将论证中东欧国家总理的职业概况有条件地影响他们的政治表现，即取决于他们运作的制度、政党制度和社会经济背景。在对这些背景因素进行系统的调查之后，相关的交互假设将从理论上加以阐述，并在多变量分析中进行实证检验。总而言之，这个项目将大大增加现有的文献在经验和理论角度。其结果将对中东欧国家政府制度的比较研究以及政治精英研究的一个基本问题作出重大贡献。

This project deals with prime ministers in the young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that are member states of the European Union. More specifically, it seeks to explore a key question of comparative government research that has not been answered so far: in what way do career patterns of prime ministers in CEE countries affect their political performance? To answer this question in a systematic manner, the project is subdivided into three milestones that are to be reached in corresponding work modules. The milestone of the first work module consists in a multidimensional conceptualization, systematic survey and comparative description of the political performance of prime ministers in CEE. To do so, the research group will create a systematic and detailed empirical record of prime ministerial performance in the eleven CEE countries between 1989/90 and 2017 that is based on secondary aggregate data and standardized expert judgments. This novel dataset will be a major contribution to the comparative study of political executives and should be frequently employed by future research in the field.The main target of the second work module is a systematic survey and comparative description of the career patterns of prime ministers in the eleven countries under investigation. These profiles include sociodemographic characteristics as well as different indicators of political experience of individual office-holders between 1989/90 and 2017. This encompassing dataset and the respective mapping of prime ministers career profiles will bridge a major gap in the literature comparing political elites within and beyond CEE.The final work module aims at a contextualized examination of the "individuals-do-matter" hypothesis that is most prominent in comparative political elite studies . More precisely, the project will systematically explore how the career profiles of CEE prime ministers affect their political performance. This cross-national and inter-temporal analysis is not confined to a bivariate relationship. Following the "interactionist approach" and "actor centered institutionalism" that has been elaborated by the recent literature, we will argue that the career profiles of CEE prime ministers affect their political performance conditionally, i.e. depending on the institutional, party-system and socioeconomic context in which they operate. After a systematic survey of these contextual factors, relevant interactive hypotheses will be elaborated theoretically and examined empirically in multivariate analyses. In sum, this project will substantially add to the extant literature in both empirical and theoretical perspective. Its results will be major contributions to the comparative study of governmental systems in CEE as well as to a fundamental question of political elite research .