The study of ministerial careers has developed rapidly in the past ten years. Although it is widely accepted that formal, national-level institutions shape the chain of delegation and accountability within which those careers are embedded, comparative cross-national research of the effects of institutions on career patterns since Blondel and Thiébault’s (1991) edited volume have been rare due to limited cross-national data on ministerial careers. Recent cross-national analyses have focused on a small number of cases (Bäck et al. 2016) or have analyzed a small range of institutional and quasi-institutional variables only as control variables (Huber and Martinez-Gallardo 2008, Hansen et al. 2013, Bright et al. 2015) without fully exploring the formal institutions that are widely expected to account for cross-national differences (e.g., Dowding and Dumont 2009, 2015). Building on theory and on observed differences between institutional contexts, this study examines the effects of formal institutions on ministerial stability, including the electoral system; prime ministerial powers, including dissolution powers; investiture requirements; the number of ministers in government; and the nature and size of the pool of ministrables. Using duration models, it aims to use new cross-national data on ministerial careers in more than 30 parliamentary democracies to provide an analysis of the effects of national institutions on ministerial survival in office. As its dependent variable, it employs a little-used yet intuitive measure of ministers’ survival in office: their continuous time in government. It differentiates between the competing risks of collective and individual exit from government, combining its analysis of ministerial survival with an analysis of party survival in government. It also explores interactions between institutional and individual attributes. The study feeds into the established literatures on governmental stability and ministerial careers. It has the potential to serve as a baseline reference on the institutional determinants of inter-country variation in ministerial stability.
