Coalitional Presidentialism, Gender, and Cabinet Appointments in Brazil

In recent decades scholars have developed a new synthetic model to address many of the challenges to governability common in multiparty presidential systems. Called coalitional presidentialism, this approach to studying presidential institutions provides an alternative to the literature focusing on the parallel legitimacies of interbranch conflict and instability that dominated the scholarly debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Arguably a more optimistic view of presidential institutions, coalitional presidentialism scholars have focused on the idiosyncrasies of executive-legislative relations in the mid 1990s and 2000s to explain how systems that were viewed with such negativity in the 1980s and 1990s managed to “work” in the new millennium. The approach has been particularly insightful for the Brazilian case, which has the world’s highest party fragmentation and minority governments as the norm. The distribution of cabinet offices to coalition members has been identified as one of the main tools of coalition formation and governability under coalitional presidentialism. The consequences of that strategy for women's representation in ministries, however, have received scant attention. The current institutional crisis engulfing Brazil, including the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (Brazil’s first female president), offers a propitious moment to introduce a gendered approach to understanding Brazilian executive-legislative relations. In this paper, we provide a gendered analysis of the Brazilian experience with coalitional presidentialism. We track the distribution of cabinets to assess the ways in which ways coalition management has affected the number and types of offices occupied by female ministers.