The Power of Prime Ministers: Results of an expert survey

How much power do prime ministers have? How does this power vary between individual officeholders, and across countries over time? In autumn 2023, we invited scholars in 22 countries with expertise in executive-level politics and parliamentary politics to participate in an online survey to assess the power held by PMs in their country of expertise from 2000 to 2021, including the freedom to form a cabinet, exercise constitutional prerogatives, and implement preferred policies. This paper is a detailed account of the methodology and early findings, which are compared with those in a 2007 article (O’Malley 2007) to see how prime ministerial power has evolved since the 1990s, including new contexts such as changes in the gender composition of executive governance. The results identify trends of prime ministerial power across countries and across history within each country, and can be used to test theories within political science.