Designing Cabinets: Presidential Politics and Ministerial Instability

Abstract

This article proposes a set of arguments about the strategic use of cabinet appointments by executives in presidential systems. Although recent work has greatly improved our understanding of government formation in presidential countries, most changes to presidential cabinets happen throughout the lifetime of a government and remain poorly understood. I argue that presidents use cabinet changes in response to unexpected shocks and to adjust their governments to changing political and policy circumstances. Weak presidents are more likely to use this strategic resource, which means that ministerial turnover should be higher when a president's formal authority is weak and he or she has low political support and popularity. To test these claims, I have assembled an original dataset that records individual cabinet changes in 12 Latin American countries between 1982 and 2012. The data provides strong support for the theory.

Making Brazil Work

“…Finally, we found that the social and economic variables, GDP per capita, education, and wealth concentration, had surprisingly little explanatory power. 13 The results lend strong support to the importance of political and institutional determinants of policies.…”

“…11 Some of the alleged important differences still hold: All else being equal, (a) government coalitions should occur more frequently in parliamentarism than in presidentialism 12 and; (b) parliamentary governments should be more successful legislatively than presidential ones. 13 However, three key findings contradict earlier views. First, minority governments are not associated with less success for governments to approve the agenda in parliament in both systems.…”

“…Thus, we expect that the greater the GDP per capita, the less inclined and constrained the governor will be to follow the national executive's preferences. 13 …”

“…13 We argue that both factors play important roles in explaining the performance of the state audit institutions in the Brazilian states and show how these two factors are causally intertwined.…”

“…This newer research has addressed topics such as coalition voting discipline, the relationship between coalition type and legislative success, the flexibility that executive appointment powers provide presidents, 13 the impact of cabinet formation on presidential survival in times of crisis, and the relationship between presidential policy-making strategies and cabinet formation, 14 the 'presidentialization' of political parties, and the exacerbation of coordination and delegation problems as a consequence of the constitutional structure that separates executive and legislative origin and survival. 15 However, none of this research has analyzed how or why coalition-based multiparty presidential regimes may lead to sustainable democracy, much less which political and institutional conditions are necessary to achieve this outcome.…”