| Abstract [eng] |
This research aims to explain the phenomenon of growing Government stability in Lithuania. The main reason why it was chosen to analyze this phenomenon is the sudden positive shift in survival of The Lithuanian Government cabinets since 2008 – from this year, all of the cabinets (led by Kubilius, Butkevičius and Skvernelis) managed to stay in power for full 4-year parliamentary term, while until 2008 none of the cabinets that were in power were able to do so. These tendencies correlated quite well with the ones in other countries of the Central and Eastern Europe as Poland, Latvia and Estonia, where similar trends were also observed. The research was based on core executive theory which argues that in contemporary democracy it is easier to survive for those cabinets that have more power and instruments to govern. There was raised a hypothesis that in the context of Lithuania‘s accession to the EU in 2004, the formal institutional changes which de jure and de facto strengthened the powers of Lithuanian Government cabinets have led to the increased stability of the Lithuanian Governments. It was also assumed that the informal institutional changes (political practices and traditions which were implemented in Lithuania only de facto but not de jure) that Lithuania took over from the old democracies of Europe and implemented for it‘s governance have also made a positive impact for the political stability. For this research it was chosen to execute historical statistical analysis of Lithuanian Government cabinets‘ composition throughout the years starting from 1992 and by this way measuring if the political parties of Lithuania started to delegate more of their leaders to the cabinets after the accession to the EU (which in this case should be considered as a sign of growing Government power). Also, for this research we used 3 half-structured interviews with 3 former Lithuanian Prime Ministers to understand the inner institutional logic of how Lithuania‘s accesion to the EU shaped the powers of the Lithuanian Governments, how it affected their stability and also what kind of influence the informal institutional changes had for the increased stability of the Lithuanian Governments. The analysis of this research has showed that there was a statistically significant increase of Lithuanian cabinets‘ members who can be considered their party leaders, which can be understood as a sign of growing Government power. These results allow us to confirm the first part of our hypothesis. In addition to this, former Lithuanian Prime Ministers also stated that the informal institutional changes that were implemented in Lithuania throughout and after it‘s euroatlantic integration also had a substantial and possibly even more important impact for growing stability of the Lithuanian Governments. According to former Lithuanian Prime Ministers, informal practices that country‘s political elite took over and implemented from the Western countries, such as tradition to sign a detailed coalition agreement between parties before the Government cabinet starts working as well as the logic of how the cabinets should be formed (after the accession to the EU parties have changed their mindset and started to form more political rather than technocratic cabinets), were important aspects of why Lithuanian Government cabinets’ suddenly became more stable. The results of this study reflect well with the academic literature that already exists and confirms some of the existing influential political science theories (such as path-dependence theory). It also adds some external validity to some studies that have already analyzed the institution of the Lithuanian Government. Finally, even though this research is actually the first one that analyzes the phenomenon of growing Lithuanian government cabinets’ stability and reasons for that, it can be considered as a great starting point for future studies that aim to analyze this phenomenon further. |
