Corrective Effect of Ministerial Terminations on Presidential Approval

How do ministerial terminations affect presidential approval? Presidents face unexpected challenges related to stochastic events such as scandals, policy failures or economic crises. We argue that the termination of ministers who have received calls for resignation presents an opportunity for the president to reorganise the cabinet and send signals to the electorate expecting a corrective effect on popularity. The incentives to deploy this decision, however, depend on the party system and are greater where coalition governments allow presidents to optimise support and renew the talent in the cabinet to achieve a corrective effect on approval. We test this expectation using instrumental-variable regressions applied to novel data on ministerial terminations and resignation calls in 124 governments in 12 presidential democracies gathered by combining data mining and machine learning techniques and survey marginal time series based on a dyad-ratios algorithm for approval. Our main findings support our expectation: individual terminations of tainted ministers generate a corrective effect on presidential approval conditional on the type of government.