Why are some governments more corrupt than others? Why do high-level officials in some countries seem to extract more rents than others? In our recently-published article we present an answer to such questions, focusing on the role of the Prime Minister in controlling high-level corruption.
We take our starting point in the idea that power-relationships in parliamentary democracies can be described as a “chain” with several links, where voters are delegating power to legislators through elections, who in turn delegate power to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. This means that voters only indirectly delegate power to cabinet members in a parliamentary system, and we suggest that it is more important to focus on actors who can directly hold ministers accountable when analyzing high-level corruption. Therefore, we focus on the fact that the Prime Minister directly delegates power to line ministers within the cabinet, and also has the power to hold them accountable.
We know from previous studies that the constitutionally provided powers of Prime Ministers vary significantly across countries. Sartori describes this variation eloquently: “The head of government may relate to the members of his government as: i) a first above unequals; ii) a first among unequals, iii) a first among equals.” For example, the UK Prime Minister can be described as being “first above unequals”, since the constitutional powers of the Prime Minister are very high. In countries with high Prime Ministerial powers, the Prime Minister can freely select and fire or demote cabinet members, and the ministers are clearly subordinate to the Prime Minister.
Our main expectation is that corruption among high-level officials should, all else equal, be lower in systems where the constitutional power of the Prime Minister is high. We assume that the Prime Minister typically has strong incentives to limit corruption within the cabinet since policy outcomes are less likely to be in line with his or her preferences when ministers are corrupt. One important way for the Prime Minister to limit corruption is to fire or demote those ministers that are not behaving in accordance with his or her wishes. Hence, if the Prime Minister has the power to freely dismiss cabinet members, he or she should be able to limit high-level corruption.
We evaluate our hypothesis using a new dataset on corruption, which allows us to obtain more specific measures on the perception of corruption across longer periods of time. Our analysis focuses on cabinets formed during the post-war period in 26 Western and Eastern European countries, where we also have information on the constitutional powers of the Prime Ministers.
Figure 1 presents a simple portrayal or the relationship between Prime Ministerial powers and corruption. Confirming our expectation, there is a general tendency that with more Prime Ministerial powers, levels of corruption are lower (analyses where we take alternative explanations into account show similar results, see our article. Hence, the analyses, comparing countries over time, show that corruption levels are significantly lower in contexts where the Prime Minister has stronger constitutional powers.
Figure 1. The relationship between Prime Ministerial power and corruption
As can be seen, there is a fairly good fit between the two lines before 1995 indicating that the hypothetical case should be able to proxy for the development of Belgium in the counter-factual scenario with no exposure to the strengthening of Prime Ministerial powers. While the lines track each other for a couple of years also post-1995, they diverge from 2001 onward and stabilizes at a clear difference in the level of corruption, with a lower level of corruption for the Belgian case where Prime Ministerial powers were strengthened.
Hence, our results found in both a comparative analysis of 26 European countries, and a case study of Belgium, indicate that corruption is significantly lower when the Prime Minister has strong constitutional powers, suggesting that a strong Prime Minister is able to limit high-level corruption. This does not mean that a country automatically has a low level of corruption when the Prime Minister has strong constitutional powers – clearly other features, such as the level of democracy, also influence how corrupt officials are in a country.
What are the implications of this research? Should countries with high levels of corruption make constitutional reforms introducing stronger powers for the Prime Minister? Our results speak in favor of such constitutional reforms. However, one should of course be aware of that a stronger Prime Minister may come at the expense of a weakening of other actors, for example the parliament. This may be problematic for other reasons, since a shift of power between legislature and executive may make it more difficult for the directly elected representatives to hold a Prime Minister or government accountable. Hence, such constitutional reform may clearly come with some costs.
Hanna Bäck is Professor of Political Science at Lund University. Jan Teorell is Professor of Political Science, also at Lund University. Staffan Lindberg is Professor of Politics at the University of Gothenburg.
