Intra-Party Diversity and Cabinet Appointment. An Analysis of Speech Making and Ministerial Selection in Four European Countries

The literature on cabinet governance differentiates between various models of decision-making in cabinets. This is not only for the reason that the interests of several political actors from parties and parliaments play a role in the political process, but also due to different constitutionally provided institutional settings. In this paper, we focus on the appointment of politicians to cabinet offices in various settings. On the basis of the principal agent-approach, we argue that cabinet ministers are appointed with the aim of minimizing the policy distance to the most important principal, which could be the Prime Minister, the coalition or the individual parties that form the government. We analyse four political systems where the power of the Prime Minister varies considerably across countries: Austria, Belgium, Germany and Sweden. In some of these countries, the head of government has strong agenda-setting power, and we here hypothesize that the appointment of cabinet members should be more in line with the policy preferences of the PM. In those systems where the PM has only weak legal means to exercise influence on the ministers, we would expect other principals to influence ministerial selection, either the party leadership or the coalition as a whole, which suggests that the parties focus on the policy positions formulated in the party manifestos or in the coalition agreement when deciding which politician should be appointed to cabinet. We evaluate our hypotheses by estimating the policy positions of Austrian, Belgian, German and Swedish MPs and cabinet members on the basis of a computerized content analysis of their speeches given in parliament. The results, derived from a logit model predicting cabinet membership, support our argument, and show that even when controlling for several important variables, the policy distance towards the most important principal is crucial for becoming a cabinet member.