17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Janina Beiser-McGrath
Discussant/s:
Torun Dewan
Meeting Room F

Christine Sylvester, Julia Maynard
The Spurious Relationship between Party Leader Resignations and their Votes

Janina Beiser-McGrath, Anja Osei
Can I stay or must I go? Cabinet replacement in Africa

Despina Alexiadou
Cabinet reshuffles: how bad are they for expertise and policy?

Ebru Ece Özbey
Populist Contagion in the House of Commons: A Comparative Study of PMQs from Blair to May

Maria Thürk, Heike Klüver
The electoral implications of minority cabinets
Can I stay or must I go? Cabinet replacement in Africa
Janina Beiser-McGrath 1, Anja Osei 2
1 Royal Holloway, University of London
2 University of Konstanz

In African states, there is a lot of fluctuation in cabinets. Large structural changes such as leader changes or changes in ethnic representation only explain a fraction of those. Why do leaders decide to replace ministers so frequently? The literature on authoritarian regimes assumes that autocratic leaders need to strategically balance their ruling coalitions. African leaders use cabinet placement to co-opt potential rivals. We argue that once new threats emerge, leaders need to decide which of the current ministers are least important for regime survival and can be replaced. We test whether ministers from overrepresented ethnic groups, ministers that serve only since a short time and women are most likely to be considered replaceable to make space for the co-optation of new potential rivals. To do so, we use monthly data on cabinet composition in 23 African countries between 1996 and 2017.