Towards Prime Ministerial Mandates? The Uncertain Foundations of Political Authority in the Era of Personalization

The idea that national political leaders should enjoy a mandate by the people to govern the country belongs to the most fundamental credentials of representative democracy and responsible government. Other things being equal, presidential systems with directly elected chief executives would seem to be structurally advantaged when it comes to meeting that expectation. That said, the recent, and closely related, dynamics of personalization and presidentialization have raised this issue in particular within and across the family of parliamentary democracies, and fueled assumptions that contemporary prime ministers typically command a ‘personal mandate’. Taking the largely unproven notions of prime ministers being genuine political mandate holders as its starting point, this paper seeks to break new ground in the study of chief executives in established parliamentary democracies. By its very nature, this exploratory paper can only mark the very first stage of what seems likely to grow into an exceptionally complex research agenda in the years to come. We set out by establishing the political relevance and the wider theoretical implications of the topic. We then proceed with revisiting the literature on mandates in presidential democracies and the scattered debate about mandates in parliamentary democracies. Eventually, we seek to develop a reasonably robust conceptualization of ‘prime ministerial mandates’, a set of criteria, which allows us to determine under what conditions it would seem justified to speak of a particular mandate for the prime minister, and when not. While a large-scale comparative empirical assessment has to be reserved for future research, even the cursory glances we cast at selected cases to illustrate our conceptual criteria suggest that strong and clear-cut electoral mandates are clearly not a defining feature of prime ministers of the twenty-first century.