The Selection of Ministers in Europe

Keith Dowding, Patrick Dumont, Keith Dowding, Patrick Dumont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134085361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This volume discusses the formation of government cabinets within twenty European democracies, providing the institutional background to the selection and de-selection of ministers.

Exploring the historical and constitutional context to cabinet formation, this volume proceeds to provide vital data on the strategic issues that affect the selection of ministers. Covering states from all over Europe, the authors examine trends from the post-war period up to the present day, with specific focus on recent decades for the newer democracies in political transition. The volume includes:

• pioneering new research into the hiring and firing of government ministers

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• vital information on appointments, dismissals and resignations within government cabinets

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• succinct constitutional data relating to ministerial selections across a number of European states

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The book is the first output of the Selection and De-selection of Political Elites international network of scholars (SEDEPE) and will provide a major source of information for all scholars interested in the formation, maintenance and termination of cabinets and the nature of ministerial government. The Selection of Ministers in Europe. Hiring and Firing will also be of broader interest to students of European Government and Political Institutions.

1 Structural and strategic factors affecting the hiring and firing of ministers

Keith Dowding and Patrick Dumont

The centrepiece of representative democracy is the accountability of the government through the electoral process. However, if accountability was only composed of a chance to throw the rascals out every three to fc years or so, especially if one only has rascals with which to replace them, then representative democracy would not provide much accountability. In reality, there are many other ways in which governments can be, and are, held to account. Constitutions specify the limits of governmental power; courts ensure that legislation as written and as implemented conforms to constitutional and legal requirements; the press and mass media keep an eye on the actions of members of the government; and of course parliament even when controlled by a majority party, performs an oversight role. When accountability affects the whole government we can talk about collective responsibility; sometimes individual ministers are held to account for the policies and actions of their department, as well as for their own actions. Part of accountability is that ministers inform the public about what their departments are doing and explain when things go wrong, and to make changes when these are necessary. When a minister proves incapable of making amends then the rest of the cabinet might withdraw protection and here the minister is held to personal account. Underlying collective responsibility is the threat that the government might fall –through a vote of no confidence; through constitutional coup forcing an election or simply through losing a regular election. That threat is ever-present in the mind of government ministers, especially the prime minister who is herself accountable to her cabinet as well as parliament and the people.¹ For that reason politicians are constantly interested in opinion polls to see how the government is faring today; and in focus group or polling research suggesting how future policies might fare in the arena of public opinion.

Not that the fall of the government is always considered a disaster by all members of a government. Different parties within a coalition government may view its fall in a somewhat different light, and one coalition partner might choose to withdraw from government in order to hasten that fall. The eyes that politicians keep pinned to public opinion are directed not only at the popularity of the government but also at the relative popularity of the partner parties and factions that compose it; and the popularity of the prime minister and other leading ministers who might be challengers for that top position. Choosing when to be loyal to a given prime minister and when to withdraw will rely upon such strategic considerations as much as real policy concerns.

Democratic politicians may be driven by ideology, or principles, or the desire to promote equality and prosperity, in short to be policy-oriented. But they cannot ignore how those policies are viewed or how they work out in practice. Some prime ministers might try to control the whole of government output; others prefer to allow their ministers to take the lead on strategy and simply to manage conflicting departmental policy initiatives and facilitate coherent government. Either way round prime ministers want policies that fit with their guiding principles and can be practically implemented, and, at least relatively, popular, In that sense prime ministers can be viewed as the principal with ministers as the agent. However, the complex strategic relationship between ministers within a cabinet, and between ministers and the prime minister, ensure that this is not a simple principal-agent relationship. The agents do not simply have interests at variance with the principal, but have competing interests and allegiances with other agents involved in the government.²

Governments are formed of cabinets of ambitious politicians. Some of these politicians will see heading a department as the pinnacle of their career; others might hope for further preferment, either to a more important post or to the premiership (or presidency) itself. When forming a cabinet the chief executive ideally wants team members who will complement each other. She might want some ministers who will be dynamic and produce new policy initiatives. These she might choose for posts in areas where it is widely agreed that there has been government failure or where she herself believes a new agenda is required. She might want a department to be reorganized and needs a person prepared to fight and defeat a recalcitrant bureaucracy; or a person adept at handling a sceptical media. She will also want some safe hands, ministers who will be able to handle their department quietly and efficiently and not desire to make waves. It is likely that the latter are those who are content at their stage of the careers, with the former being ambitious and perhaps future rivals to the chief executive herself.

A chief executive might have an ideal cabinet in mind, but the availability of personnel and party political and constitutional constraints might not allow this. In some countries the constitution specifies that specific demographic groups must be represented or balanced in cabinet. Party constraints also take several forms. Powerful people with the backing of sections of the party need to be found jobs. Different factions within a party must be satisfied. In coalition governments the process of putting a cabinet together sometimes requires long discussion with coalition partners about the shape of the cabinet, which party will get which posts and who will fill those posts. Putting together a cabinet can be a tortuous process Politicians invited to take on a government post must also consider their options carefully. Coalition negotiations often involve discussions over specific policy portfolios and the offer to a given politician for one of those portfolios might already have been bargained and refusal difficult. However, politicians do turn down posts in a number of circumstances: if they feel the post is too junior or unimportant, in policy areas that they do not feel is the right area of expertise for them, when they do not support the type of coalition formula or the government agreement arrived at during negotiations, or because they feel the post is a poisoned chalice.

A cabinet must work together for the collective good – that is the idea behind collective cabinet responsibility – and is required for the government to remain popular and be re-elected. But there are always tensions and rivalries amongst cabinet ministers. Even in single-party governments there are personal rivalries for the top jobs and ideological tension between wings and factions within the party. For coalition governments these tensions are exacerbated by cross-party conflict The games that are played across cabinets are complex and intense. Ministers may well brief against each other and the prime minister, if not openly then through friends and colleagues. In single-party governments perhaps no member wants the government to fail as a whole, though many cabinet ministers might enjoy seeing others including the prime minister in trouble. They must calculate how much they might be personally damaged by publicly speaking out against colleagues, and so how much support they must give at any one time. And then calculate when to pounce, when to speak and suggest a colleague needs to go.

The strategic issues are more complex in coalition governments. Here it cannot be assumed that all actors do not want the government to fail. Parties are more interested in the poll rating of the parties than the government as a whole, since new elections may strengthen their bargaining power. Coalition partners may get together for necessity rather than anything else, and each party in the coalition wants to get credit from the public for successful policies and may well desire their partners to fail in their own portfolios. Here the hiring and fring of ministers may well take a very different form from single-party governments. A chief executive might well enjoy seeing a rival party put an incompetent into an important portfolio and be reluctant to see that minister resign even after repeated failure. His failure might well be bad for the government as a whole, but such failure might well be accompanied by a rise in popularity of another party of the coalition.

It can be seen therefore that there is a large number of strategic issues that enter into decisions both to hire and fire ministers – and for ministers to decide to accept appointment and leave the government of their own accord – and these interact with constitutional and party political constraints. Until relatively recently there has not been a great deal of dedicated research into the selection mechanisms for cabinet ministers, or over the causes of their removal. In comparison, for example, there is a broad body of both theoretical and empirical work examining the formation and dissolution of governments (for example. Riker 1962; Schofield 1987; Laverand Schofield 1990; Laverand Shepsle 1996; Warwick 2005). Theoretically and empirically much of this work examines parties as single unitaiy actors although it is widely recognized that coalitions can be broken up by splits caused within parties (Cox 1997; Giannetti and Laver 2001; Mair 1990. 1997; Cotta 1996; Damgaard 2008).³ Of course, governments are made up of individuals and there is a great deal of literature on the representative role of political elites, especially examining the personal characteristics and background of ministers (Blondel and Thiébault 1991; de Almeida el al. 2003) and even more literature examining the policy differences that leaders (Blondel 1987. Kavanagh 1990. Elcock 2001. Elgie 1995) and ministers make (Headey 1974, Blondel and Müller-Rommel 1993; Chabal 2003). However these examine the impact on policy that personality and structure can have. There is less on personnel hiring and firing De Winter's (2002) 'state of the art' piece on parties and government states that of all aspects of government formation – party composition, portfolio allocation, policy definition and personnel selection – the last has received the least attention from scholars. In that he reiterates the claim of Blondel (1985, p. 8) that the study of ministers and ministerial careers is still in its infancy. And overall, as argued by Strom et al. (2008), what happens between government formation and collective termination is still poorly documented and understood.

Recently however there has been a flowering of articles examining precisely the issues of ministerial selection and de-selection using dedicated datasets (see Dowding and Kang 1998; Dumoritet at. 2001; Huber and Martinez-Gallardo 2004; Dewan and Dowding 2005, O'Malley 2006; Fischer et al. 2006; Berlinski et al. 2007a; 2007b; Indridason and Kam 2008). Most of these studies are single-country as complete cross-country comparative work on features common across the selection and de-selection of ministers has still to be done. Examination across these single-country studies for common features is possible, though researchers must be aware of institutional differences in the hiring and firing process that make comparison problematic. This book is a contribution towards the examination of the strategic issues involved in the hiring and firing of ministers in a comparative context. It emerged from an ECPR Workshop held in Granada, Spain, in 2005, though none of the papers included here was presented in this form at that conference. One of the conclusions of that workshop was the formation of a network of scholars dedicated to collecting data on the hiring and firing of ministers and other political elites. This book constitutes the first output of the Selection and De-selection of Political Elites (SEDEPE) network. The chapters in this book all examine institutional features of the respective European countries that affect the hiring and firing of ministers. Any comparative analysis of ministerial selection and de-selection must take into account specific structural factors, which we have broken down further into constitutional and party political issues. Both these structural factors impact upon the strategies that actors might adopt. Our third category is thus strategy as impacted by structure and the events which agents use for strategic advantage. Rather than introducing the chapters individually in the rest of this introduction we will examine these structural and strategic factors in a broad brushstroke under the two headings of 'Hiring' and 'Firing'. Constitutions directly affect the hiring and firing of ministers in terms of what is allowed or required in the construction of a cabinet. The organizational rules and conventions within parties also enable and constrain the construction of cabinets in ways which vary across countries, and across parties within countries. The third element concerns the strategies that might be adopted by prime ministers or presidents in constructing cabinets. Different constitutional and party rules, and the nature of the specific bargaining process across factions or parties in coalition governments, affect how prime ministers might go about trying to construct their preferred cabinet. Comparative analysis across countries can reveal the structural factors (both formal in terms of constitutions and rules, and informal in terms of expectations and conventions) which cause variation in the strategies available.

Hiring

Theoretically we can consider a government formed by a chief executive – a prime minister (in most cases in Europe) or a president – who can be considered the principal who hires agents – her ministers – to devise and oversee implementation of policies. How much discretion is given to ministers to devise policy and how much they are directed by the chief executive (who we will often assume is a prime minister) will depend in part upon her particular personality type. Some prime ministers will be more ideologically or policy-driven than others and want to get involved in the policy detail, becoming occupied and associated with specific policies. Others may also want to take the lead in some policy areas if they expect it to be rewarded in terms of personal popularity and votes. Yet others still are much happier to delegate, either because they are less policy-driven or because they simply believe that governing involves consensus and teamwork. A large part of the type of leadership chief executives bring might well depend on whether they occupy the median position in their cabinet or whether they are cabinet or party outliers needing to force others into their way of thinking. Of course, how successful chief executives can be in this process depends upon the constitutional, party and practical or strategic environment within which they operate. It is easier in some countries than others for a prime minister to become more 'presidential' (indeed easier than it is for some presidents) than it is in others (see Foley 1993. 2000; Poguntke and Webb 2005).

Taking the amount of delegation a prime minister gives to ministers as a given, what would a chief executive want from his ministers? We might consider what the ideal minister might look like. Those on the inside proclaim that a good minister must be able to make decisions; he should be able to handle his civil servants and manage his department, read briefs quickly and take advice (Kaufman 1997). He must be able to deal with questions in parliament and politicians generally; and deal with the media, coming across well on television – this latter aspect especially in the most important posts. He ought to have some policy ideas of his own. and be able to develop them without pushing impractical policies against civil service advice. He would do well to have a stable and supportive family, and keep well away from financial, social and sexual scandals. A serious mind and ready wit would also do him well, and for some more technical portfolios a certain degree of expertise (either acquired outside the realm of politics or in parliamentary committees or even in similar executive positions at other government levels) may be regarded as an asset, though the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt allegedly once pretended that 'with a little more than average intelligence anyone can do that' (in Balir 1996: 463. cited by Fischer and Kaiser in Chapter 2 below). In any case, not all ministers can fit the ideal, and. indeed, a Prime Minister might not want them all to live up to such an ideal, unless she is ready to face so many potential rivals. In fact she will probably also want (or will be forced by constitutional or party constraints ...