"To what extent have west European prime ministers full control of their cabinets? Discuss with reference to at least Three European states?"

Authors Avatar

“To what extent have west European prime ministers full control of their cabinets?

Discuss with reference to at least Three European states?”

‘The cabinet is a board of control chosen by the legislature, out of persons whom it trusts and knows, to rule the nation.’                   (Bagehot, 1963:66-7)

There are many frameworks of executive branch power relations: monocratic, collective, ministerial, shared and segmented government.

However, our main concern here will be with the first two types of government since those two are the most applicable to the western democracies. The monocratic government means having and exercising complete political power and control by one person such as the prime minister or the president.

Certain criteria need to be fulfilled in order to form a monocratic government. These conditions were mentioned in Donleavy and Rhodes - " a generalised ability [by the president or by prime minister] to decide policy across all issue areas in which she or he takes an interest; by deciding key issues which subsequently determining most remaining areas of government policy; or by defining a government "ethos" "atmosphere" or operating ideology…." 

 In the collective government, no one person is in control of decision making-all the decisions are made collectively and not individually. Donleavy suggested that the ministerial government is  when the "individual ministers by virtue of their positions as the political heads of the major departments of state, are able to have a significant impact on policy in areas that fall under their jurisdictions." 

Another model is segmented government and shared government - these are types of  mixed government in which the decisions making is shared between two or three individuals and  power is also shared across all the whole government.

Many Western European states are governed under A Parliamentary system. The most important aspect is described by Kaare Storm- “the parliamentary democracy is a particular regime of delegation and accountability that can be understood with the help of agency theory, which allows us to identify the conditions under which democracy agency problems may occur.”

In Storm’s article quoted from Begot (1867), Begot identifies that the Parliamentary democracy focuses on the dependencies between the executive and the parliament, he also defined parliamentarism as the form of constitutional democracy in which the executive authority comes out from and is responsible to legislative authority.

“The parliamentary system is distinguished by the  being dependent on the direct or indirect support of the , often expressed through a . Hence, there is no clear-cut  between the  and  branches of government. Parliamentary systems usually have a clear differentiation between the head of government and the .”In having a parliamentary system in a country, the government consists of parliament, cabinet, and the Head of this Government is the party which is elected and the leader of this party is the Prime Minister.

In a parliamentary system, such as the , the Prime Minister is the  while the  is largely a ceremonial position. In some  the prime minister exercises powers (known as the ) that are constitutionally vested in the monarch and which can be exercised without the approval of parliament. As well as being Head of Government, a prime minister may have other roles or titles—the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, for example, is also .

In other words, “A cabinet government system exists where responsibility for directing the policies of a country lies in the hands of a small group of senior politicians. Cabinet government originated in Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries, where the cabinet developed from the inner core of privy councillors on whom the monarchy relied for the advice.

Join now!

As the monarch lost power and the party government replaced personal authority, the cabinet came to be formed not from the monarchs most trusted advisors but from the most senior members of the dominant political party.” However, many countries in Western Europe have a political executives and each country has its own name of this group of senior ministers. The cabinet is known in many countries as the Council of Ministers e.g. in France

The basic purpose of the Cabinet is to advise the President and it is collectively responsible to Parliament for all Government policies and the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay