Under Attack: A Quantitative Analysis of German Chancellors’ Personnel Decisions in Political Scandals

The past few years saw a number of political scandals involving high-ranking politicians in Germany. Accusations of plagiarism and pornography in particular sparked a heated debate over the moral standards to which politicians should be held. Some ministers resigned, others did not. Yet to the average citizen, the process of a government’s decision-making during a political scandal is a mystery. This paper asks: In which cases do chancellors excuse the blunders of their ministers, and in which cases do they ask, encourage or urge them to resign? It compiled a data set comprising all calls for ministerial resignations on pages one or two of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major German newspaper, in the period of 1949 to 2014. Using logistic regression analyses, it found that resignation debates that resulted from perceived moral misconduct or blunders in a ministry were particularly dangerous. In contrast, general policy disagreements – the most common reason to call upon a minister to resign – rarely led to resignations. As expected, circumstances mattered: negative media coverage and a clear stance of the opposition parties in favour of a resignation were associated with lower odds of survival. A surprising finding was that government approval ratings made a difference: the higher a government’s gain in popularity in the year leading up to the respective scandal, the higher the likelihood that a chancellor asked a minister to resign.