What the Rules Cannot Show: Cabinet Governance in 34 Parliamentary Democracies, 2005–2021

In the world of politics, there is a constant question about who really holds the steering wheel when a country is being run. In parliamentary democracies, where a group of elected officials forms a government, power can be organized in three distinct ways. Sometimes, the head of government, like a prime minister, holds most of the authority and makes the big decisions alone. Other times, the power is spread out among the individual ministers who run specific departments, such as health or defense, allowing them to act almost independently. A third way involves the entire cabinet working together as a team, where decisions are made collectively through negotiation and compromise. For decades, political scientists have tried to map which countries use which style. However, most of these maps were drawn by looking at the written rules: the constitution, the formal agreements between political parties, and the official procedures for how a government is supposed to work. These rules change very rarely, so the maps they produced showed governments as static, unchanging structures.

But rules on paper are not always the same as how things actually happen in the real world. A leader might have the legal right to make a decision but choose not to use it to keep a coalition of parties happy. A minister might have a department that operates with total freedom even if the rules say they should report to the center. To understand how a government truly functions, one must look at what the leaders actually do, not just what they are allowed to do. This is the gap that a new study by Detlef Jahn from the University of Greifswald aims to fill. By examining the daily behavior of governments rather than just their rulebooks, the research reveals that the center of power in many democracies has been shifting in ways that no one noticed before.

Jahn's study covers thirty-four parliamentary democracies across the globe, from Australia and Canada to nations in Central and Eastern Europe, tracking them from 2005 to 2021. Instead of reading laws, the researchers relied on the assessments of local experts who watched these governments in action. These experts answered specific questions about the reality of governance: Did the prime minister's office actually have the staff and knowledge to check the work of other ministers? Did the ministers involve the central office when they were preparing new policies? Did the various departments coordinate their messages to speak with one voice, or did they each go their own way? By gathering these observations year by year, the study created a moving picture of executive power, showing how the balance of authority changes over time within the same country.

The results show that the way governments operate is far more fluid than the old maps suggested. In the period studied, twenty-four distinct shifts occurred where a country moved from one style of governance to another. For instance, Sweden moved from a prime minister-led style to a collective team style in 2007, while the United Kingdom shifted from a collective style to a prime minister-led one in 2008. These changes were not random fluctuations; once a country shifted, it tended to stay in that new mode for the rest of the period. This finding challenges the idea that a country's style of government is a fixed national trait. Instead, it behaves more like a living system that adapts to political circumstances, even when the written constitution remains exactly the same.

One of the most striking patterns emerged in the post-communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. In these eleven nations, the study found a near-total absence of the collective, team-based style of governance. Instead, power was almost always concentrated either in the hands of the prime minister or, more commonly, scattered among the individual ministers who ran their departments like independent fiefdoms. This stands in sharp contrast to the older Western democracies, where the collective style was the most common arrangement. The researchers noted that this difference was so consistent that it appeared to be a defining feature of the region, though the study stopped short of explaining why this pattern exists, focusing instead on documenting that it is there.

Perhaps the most subtle and significant discovery was a slow drift happening inside countries that were officially classified as collective systems. Even in nations where the government was supposed to be a team effort, the individual ministers were gradually gaining more power and autonomy over the sixteen-year period. This happened quietly, without any change to the formal rules or the structure of the cabinet. It was as if the team was still sitting around the same table, but the individuals were slowly taking more control of their own chairs. This trend, which the researchers call "ministerial drift," suggests that the collective style of governance is eroding from within. The ministers are becoming more independent, which changes how responsibility is shared, even if the country still looks like a collective government on paper.

The study also highlighted how different the real world is from the official descriptions. In countries like Germany, the constitution gives the chancellor the power to set binding policy guidelines, a feature that usually marks a system as prime minister-led. However, in practice, this power is rarely used because it would signal a breakdown of agreement among the coalition partners. As a result, the daily work of governing is actually done by the individual ministries, making the system behave more like a ministerial model than the rules suggest. Similarly, in Spain, the constitution describes the cabinet as a collective body led by a prime minister, a phrasing that allows for two different interpretations. The data showed that both interpretations were active at the same time, with the prime minister holding significant influence while the cabinet also acted as a collective unit. These cases prove that looking only at the rules can lead to a misunderstanding of how power is actually exercised.

The research concludes that the landscape of executive power is changing in two parallel ways that have been overlooked. One trend is the rise of the prime minister, a shift often discussed in political science as the "presidentialization" of government, where power concentrates at the top. The study confirms this trend is real, but it also uncovers a second, equally important movement: the rise of the individual minister. In many places, power is not just moving to the top; it is also spreading out to the departments, making the government less of a unified team and more of a collection of independent actors. This shift has profound implications for accountability. When power is concentrated in a prime minister, it is clear who is responsible when things go wrong. When power is scattered among ministers, responsibility is divided, and it becomes harder to pin down who is to blame for specific policies.

By tracking the actual behavior of governments rather than just their written rules, this study offers a clearer view of how democracies function in the twenty-first century. It shows that the center of gravity in executive decision-making is not a fixed point but a moving target that can shift within a single country over time. The findings suggest that the collective style of governance, once thought to be a stable feature of many European democracies, is slowly losing ground to both stronger prime ministers and more autonomous ministers. This erosion is happening beneath the surface, invisible to those who only look at the rulebooks, but clearly visible to those who watch how the government actually works. The study provides a new tool for understanding these shifts, offering a way to see the real dynamics of power that shape the lives of citizens in these thirty-four democracies.