Where and why does the president go, when she goes public? Analysis of presidential weighs-ins on the performance of ministers in the Lithuanian and Latvian media

Going public tactics under the semi-presidential systems usually favor the presidents, as they often emerge victorious from the intra-institutional conflicts (Raunio and Sedelius, 2020; Protsyk ,2006; Pukelis and Jastramskis, 2021). However, research (until now) focused on the most prominent cases of going public, such as expressions of no confidence by the presidents over some ministers or even prime ministers. Such an approach highlights the key points in the competition for power under a semi-presidential system. However, it also ignores the day-to-day functioning of semi-presidential republics and the routine efforts by the presidents to insert themselves into the decisions by government. Moreover, in the absence of substantial formal competencies, presidents in the parliamentary republics may also try to influence the government through the power of public word. In this paper, we conceptualize the going public by the presidents as an instance when a president weighs in on the performance of the cabinet and/or individual minister in media. Cases of going public may vary according to their intensity (how often the president goes public), focus (policy areas and ministers that are targeted) and tone (the level of criticism expressed by the president). In this paper, we focus on the first and second criteria and compare two culturally similar Baltic countries with different political regimes: Lithuania (semi-presidential) and Latvia (parliamentary). Our method is quantitative analysis of texts that mention the cabinet members in media since 2001. We analyze a corpus of web-scraped articles from Delfi: the largest internet news portal in Lithuania and Latvia. In order to capture the overall attention paid to a particular policy sphere and minister, we algorithmically analyze the media texts searching for relevant keywords, such as the name of minister or ministry. To capture the president’s attention to the cabinet and/or individual policy spheres we also look for instances where mentions of cabinet occur alongside the mentions of incumbent president. We then move to the testing of our hypotheses. Our preliminary explanations for the intensity and focus of public attention by the presidents are as follows. First, the patterns of presidential attention will mirror the general pattern of attention to the cabinet and individual policy areas. However, this attention should be relatively larger in areas where the president has most power (foreign policy under a semi-presidential republic). Additionally, presidential attention should be greater in the first year of a presidential term and when a cabinet is weak. Finally, we expect that the intensity of presidential attention should mirror the general powers of the president and thus should be greater in Lithuania than in Latvia.