A model of policy implementation in a parliamentary democracy as delegation between the prime minister and her cabinet ministers is introduced. Cabinet reshuffles can be pursued as a strategy to reduce the agency loss which occurs due to the different preferences of the actors. This work thus explains why prime ministers resort to reshuffles: cabinet reshuffles reduce the moral hazard facing ministers. This answer both augments and distinguishes this work from traditional perspectives on reshuffles that have emphasized the deleterious effects of reshuffles on ministerial capacity, and also from recent work that casts reshuffles as solutions to the adverse-selection problems inherent in cabinet government. The conclusion offers a preliminary test of some of the hypotheses generated by this theory.

Despite their political prominence, cabinet reshuffles have not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. We provide a theory of cabinet reshuffles that emphasizes both systematic and time-varying causes. In particular, we argue that prime ministers employ cabinet reshuffles to retain power in the face of both intraparty and electoral challenges to their leadership. We use repeated-events duration models to examine the timing of cabinet reshuffles in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in the period 1960-2001, and find support for several of our hypotheses.Christopher Kam and Indriði Indriðason Q: Why does the PM not simply change one underperformer at a time rather than making these broader midterm changes? There is organizational stability to think about, after all.A: Well, let me give you an example. In our first Parliament, David Collenette gets into trouble-he called a judge or something about a case-and our tradition here is that when something like that happens, the minister resigns, and David did. Now, at the time, he held the defense portfolio, a major portfolio. So, now this creates two problems. First, do you pull a rookie up from the backbench and put them into a major portfolio? Or do you move a veteran into the defense portfolio and give the rookie a minor portfolio? And don't forget that the PM has to deal with all sorts of restrictions: he has to make sure that all provinces have a minister, and then there's the relative importance of a particular portfolio to certain regions.

Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherlands, the authors find that a substantial proportion of the voters desert their most preferred candidate or party and that patterns of strategic voting across FPTP and PR bear striking similarities. In every election, smaller parties tend to lose votes to major parties. Because there tend to be more small parties in PR systems, tactical voting is actually more common under PR than under FPTP. The findings suggest that whatever the electoral system, voters focus on the policy consequences of their behavior and which parties are likely to influence policy outcomes following the election.

In September 1864, the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales met in Amsterdam to examine the system of proportional representation (PR) which had just been proposed by Thomas Hare. The meeting signalled a growing interest in systems of PR across the more democratic nations of the world – some of which had already begun experimenting with it. Sixty years later, the majority of existing democracies, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, had adopted PR for the election of their national legislatures.Why did so many countries decide to shift to PR? Why did the shift occur at a given point in time, not earlier or later? Why did some countries never move to PR? These are the questions that we address in this Note.We are interested in exploring the factors that influenced the decision to adopt PR at the turn of the twentieth century. We argue that two factors of considerable theoretical relevance were particularly important in facilitating the shift to PR: the spread of democratic ideas and the presence of a majority (usually two-round) system and, as a consequence, a multi-party system.Carstairs's classic history of electoral systems shows that at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong demand for PR, which was linked to a more general demand for democratization. As Carstairs notes,there was a general movement in the direction of more democratic political institutions which took several different forms … There was a movement for the establishment or strengthening of parliamentary institutions … Extensions of the franchise for parliamentary elections enabled an increasingly large proportion of the population to gain representation in parliament … With these developments it became a matter of increasing concern that the elected members of parliament and the parties they supported should fairly represent the various interests and opinions of the electorate.

The cabinet is a central actor in policy making in parliamentary systems. Yet, relatively little is known about how coalition cabinets operate. The delegation of decision‐making authority to ministers invites policy drift, which threatens the cohesiveness of the cabinet's policy programme. Cabinets employ a variety of methods to contain policy drift. The writing of coalition agreements is among the major tools, but there are others, including limiting ministerial autonomy and the use of junior ministers to shadow ministers. The present study demonstrates that coalition agreements are written to contain policy drift and that it is directly related to the degree of hierarchy in the cabinet. It studies the factors that affect the likelihood of a coalition agreement being written and how extensive they are, if written. Among these are the ideological diversity found in the cabinet, the use of alternative methods for controlling ministers and the complexity of the bargaining situation.