Ministerial turnover and ministerial career paths in contemporary democracies

Over the last decades, an extensive body of work has been consolidated on the topic of duration and/or termination of governments. On the contrary, the study of individual ministers is more limited, involving a small community of scholars. In comparison to the work on legislators’ political careers, the field on cabinet ministers’ careers is far less developed. Thus, the claim made by Jean Blondel in the 1980s still holds – the study of ministerial careers is ‘in its infancy’. This workshop focuses on several topics dealing with the analysis of ministerial turnover and ministerial careers, linking these phenomena to the topic of continuity of governmental action. More specifically, in this workshop we aim at collecting new pieces of comparative research on the transformation of ministerial backgrounds, ministerial careers, and cabinet reshuffles. The main goal is to connect such research topics to each other, and to enlarge the number of countries under analysis. Thus, the workshop will fill important gaps within the field of comparative politics, by providing a venue for discussing new research avenues on ministerial turnover and career paths, in the context of both parliamentary and presidential/semi-presidential democracies. The workshop intends to join different subgroups of scholars who aim at using consistent and comparative “appointment-based” data on ministerial elites, in order to explore different broad phenomena occurring in our democracies. More specifically, the study of career paths of cabinet ministers, the study of governmental crises and discontinuities, and the study of government formation and ministerial recruitment in multi-level contexts.