Assessing Political Leadership: Women Cabinet Ministers

This paper is a first attempt to use qualitative data about individual leaders, women cabinet ministers, for assessing aspects of leadership. These aspects are: proficiency in terms of pre-ministerial experience, prestige of the portfolio, performance and dealing with the press. Cabinet ministers perform different roles such as head of a department, member of the cabinet, prominent party leader and political communicator and they interact on a daily basis with top civil servants, colleague ministers, members of parliament, party leadership, media and – less often - with citizens, all of which have their own ideas and expectations of how a political leader should act. Cabinet ministers are constantly assessed whether they are ‘good political leaders’, but the evaluation criteria vary with the role they perform and with the principals they are dealing with as well as with their gender. The aim is to come to an assessment of this type of political leadership entirely based on qualitative research. I use data of all 33 Dutch women cabinet ministers who served between 1956 and 2016. The data is collected through in-depth interviews with 27 of the 33 women supplemented with information from newspaper clippings and from (auto) biographies. This paper focuses on two main questions: - Can different types of leadership be distinguished among the women? Does time-period play a role? Does it make a difference whether the women are specialists, generalists or all-rounders? - In which respect does gender stereotyping play a role? How does the fact that they have been selected initially as women as well as the media practice to approach them as women, mothers and spouses instead of cabinet ministers, influence their leadership style?