Prime Ministers in Europe. Changing Career Experiences and Profiles

This dataset contains career and sociodemographic data on prime ministers in Europe starting with 1945 or the respective democratization years of European countries (prime minister Winston Churchill was also included despite his earlier investiture). The data includes one observation for each prime minister and tracks career data until their first time of investiture into office. Additional variables track prime ministers governance of different types of government, interruptions and overall time in office. This data has been tracked past their first investiture into office until the last year of observation (2019). It includes data used in the Monograph: "Prime Ministers in Europe. Changing Career Experiences and Profiles."

For country selection, we used the sample of the European Representative Democracy Data Archive (ERDDA) (Andersson, S., Bergman, T., & Ersson, S. [2014]. The European Representative Democracy Data Archive, Release 3. Main sponsor: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (In2007-0149:1-E). [www.erdda.se].), adding Croatia as the only missing member state of the European Union as of 2019.
We slimmed down the resulting list according to three criteria: (1) having a parliamentary or a semi-presidential system of government; (2) being democratic – operationalized as scoring 5 or more on the Polity V scale – without interruptions; and (3) having more than one million inhabitants in 2019.