Title: Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top?
Abstract: AbstractAre holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial survival based on overall time in government, it is found that holders of important ministerial positions are more durable than their colleagues who hold less important ministerial positions. Age, prior government experience and the size of the party to which the minister belongs are also associated with consistently significant effects. Further, the study explores the determinants of survival for two types of risk – exiting government with one's party and exiting without it – showing that the effects of ministerial importance and other covariates are markedly different for these two types of exit. The findings have important implications for the understanding of ministerial and governmental stability. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.AcknowledgementsWe thank Lars Sonntag for providing the basis for the data set used in this study and also Sebastian Jäckle and Fabrizio Bernardi for their advice in the development of the paper. We thank the participants in the Friday Seminar at Trinity College Dublin's Department of Political Science for their comments on a draft. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and insight. The Economics Department of the Centre for Social Policy Research (ZeS) provided support for preparing the data, whilst University College Dublin's Geary Institute for Public Policy generously hosted one of the authors during the revision of this article. A previous version of the paper was presented at the European Political Science Association (EPSA) conference in 2014. All errors and omissions remain our own.Notes1. A 'ministerial position' is the office or collection of offices held by an individual at any one time. In the context of this article, 'ministerial importance' refers to the importance of the ministerial position held.2. In this discussion, we aim to identify a wide range of potential mechanisms. Empirically identifying all of these mechanisms is beyond the scope of this paper. However, we hope that this discussion might form a basis for their identification.3. The Home Office, for example, is one of the most important ministerial positions in the UK, but it is also regarded as a 'graveyard' for political careers, because of its responsibility for highly sensitive matters relating to crime and immigration, and the ease with which things can go wrong. Under the recent period of Labour government (1997–2010), no fewer than six different home secretaries were appointed. Likewise, Fischer et al. (Citation2012: 515) point to the reputation of defence portfolios in Germany and Australia as 'ministerial graveyards'.4. Their diversity further highlighted in the variation that we observe between countries in respect of the variables included in our analysis (see Table 2 and Appendix A1).5. For legibility the confidence intervals have been omitted.6. We use the 'Efron' method for handling tied data, which is appropriate when there are a large number of ties, as is the case in our model (see Box-Steffensmeier and Jones Citation2004: 54–58).7. Hansen et al. (Citation2013, 236), in response to this criticism, point out that these measures do (in conjunction with party's seat contribution) predict inter-party portfolio allocation over time.