Researching the 'Inner Life' of the Executive: Gender, Minister and Institutions in Scotland

Women have historically been under-represented amongst government ministers. Despite increasing pressure to consider representational criteria in cabinet composition, gendered patterns in appointment and ministerial career trajectories persist worldwide. This paper asks how researchers can investigate the ‘inner life’ of the executive, moving beyond a focus on how women ministers get in, or on feminist ministers and gender equality policies, to explore the executive as a gendered institution in itself (cf. Chappell and Waylen 2013; see also Annesley and Gains 2010). Drawing on insights from feminist institutionalism, we focus on the interplay between actors, rules and outcomes, asking whether and how rules constrain and empower ministerial actors, and with what general and gendered effects. We explore these questions through a case study of post-devolution Scotland, drawing on qualitative documentary and interview data to investigate how men and women ministers navigate the complex rules and networks of central government. Scotland provides an important case study to the wider literature on the executive, focused on the sub-national tier of government and providing wider insights into the ways in which ‘new’ institutions are nested spatially, structurally and temporally within wider multi-level contexts and historical path dependencies, potentially either opening up or limiting possibilities for change. In doing so, we advance theory-building and provide important new empirical data on the gendered nature of the executive, synthesising feminist institutionalist and non-gendered approaches to answer wider questions around the relationship between institutions and actors, institutional power relations, and dynamics of continuity and change.