The Timing of Cabinet Reshuffles in Comparative Perspective: An Event History Approach.

Cabinet reshuffles have received little attention in the literature on parliamentary governance. Reshuffles regularly attract considerable coverage in the media, yet the extent of academic attention has been limited to complaints that reshuffles undermine the competence of the cabinet because the limit the ministers ability to specialize. These complaints have moreover rarely been subjected to theoretical or empirical scrutiny. In this paper we study the timing of cabinet reshuffles in Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Ireland, and Japan. We build on our previous formal work on cabinet reshuffles, which demonstrates that cabinet reshuffles can benefit both the prime minister and his party. While our previous work emphasized the role of cabinet reshuffles as a management tool to limit ministerial drift (i.e., the minister’s choice of a policy that deviates from the prime minister’s ideal policy or the party platform), we now turn our attention to the intra-party competition, and in particular, the vulnerability of the prime minister to challenges to his leadership. Our formal work indicated that the greater the incentive and/or opportunity for ministerial drift, the greater the incentive to use reshuffles was. In line with this reasoning we argue that the incentive to reshuffle is greater when the rules governing leadership selection render the prime minister vulnerable to challenges from within the ranks of his own party and when the prime ministers’ ability to manage the cabinet is weak. Our initial results support our hypotheses. We find that intra-party politics appear to have an impact on the frequency on reshuffles both directly, through institutional factors, such as those discussed above, as well as indirectly, through public opinion polls where the prime minister’s popularity has a greater impact on the likelihood of a reshuffle than his party’s popularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]