Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Many cabinet departments were set up to link key sectors of the economy and other types of interest groups to government (e.g., Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Women’s Affairs). Yet that does not guarantee that key sector interest groups, or groups that speak for other sectors of society (such as women's groups), will have known links to the people who presidents appoint to head a ministry. Many factors influence presidents’ appointment calculus and some times presidents want to be insulated from a sector’s influence rather than to create a link to the sector. This paper uses data about the interest group links of cabinet ministers from presidential cabinets in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and the U.S. to examine which groups are likely to have a direct link to the policy-making process through the members of the presidents’ cabinets. We also explore whether appointees with interest group connections are appointed to head portfolios in which they have policy expertise, or if ministers with some types of group connections typically receive cabinet appointments outside their areas of policy expertise and thus are policy outsiders.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The restructuring of governments in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has not led to the emergence of uniform cabinet structures across the region. The paper addresses the issue of a persistent variation in cabinet ministerial organization and size across countries and over time. It advances a patronage-based theory of cabinet formation. The central claim is that the extent of clientelistic structuring of the party system, the parliamentary/semi-presidential constitutional divide, and the character of a governing coalition have a systematic effect on politicians’ willingness to proliferate cabinet ministerial positions or to maintain already oversized cabinets. To support this claim the paper specifies and tests a number of hypotheses about the effects of political, institutional, and structural variables on the evolution of cabinet organization in the region. The evidence suggests that constitutional design and party system clientelism have a significant impact on changes in cabinet organization and size.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper focuses on the impact of semi-presidential regimes on governance, delegation and accountability by examining under which conditions presidents take over from assemblies in these regimes, and form presidentially chosen technical cabinets. One interpretation is that these episodes of presidential governance illustrate the agency risks inherent in semi-presidentialism: delegation to two electoral agents creates tensions, which presidents may in the worst-case scenario resolve by marginalizing the assembly. A second interpretation is that these technical cabinets illustrate the flexibility of semi-presidential regimes in generating a wide variety of governance solutions, from president-led to fully assembly based cabinets. Alternatively, the formation of technical cabinets may reflect the staying power of initial historical choices, and the path dependence of politicians’ subsequent decisions. This paper offers the first empirical assessment of the conditions under which presidents take control over governments and the implications which this has for governance, delegation and accountability in what has recently become Europe’s most commonly chosen regime type.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Without question, the confirmation of presidential cabinet nominees today has become more of a trial by fire than a rubber stamping of the president's choices. What has caused what used to be an extension of the presidents' inauguration celebration to another arena for executive-legislative conflict? Some scholars have suggested that a more aggressive media and the increased propensity for scandals and conflicts of interest among the pool of available candidates are central to this change. That being said, the findings here suggest that procedural changes in the Senate itself have drastically affected the advise and consent power that the legislature wields as a check on the executive. Instead of focusing on the exogenous force of the media, advise and consent scholars should look at the confirmation process from an institutional perspective.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We examine variations in the party composition and size of governments across Spain’s seventeen autonomous communities from the early 1980s (the first regional elections in the new democracy) to 1999. We employ two main sets of independent variables: institutional differences, such as varying thresholds under PR rules; and variations in the structure of the party system, including in the partisan expression of regional conflicts. Thus, we assess the degree to which findings from cross-national studies can accommodate variations across Spain’s regional governments. We find overall that the forces that explain national-level government formation also help illuminate the composition of executives at the regional level. In particular, the existence of a core party tends to result in minority governments, which occur frequently in Spanish regions.