This research project examines patterns of turnover among cabinet ministers in parliamentary democracies. The project develops and tests a theory that explains how features of the institutional environment and the party system influence decisions to move individuals in and out of key cabinet posts. In so doing, it considers the incentives of individuals to accumulate both technocratic expertise, which is specific to particular portfolios, and political experience, which is useful in any portfolio. The project builds on the long tradition of studying government formation and cabinet instability, but it differs in several respects. First, the research examines turnover in the individuals that control portfolios rather than the terminal events that end each government. Second, the theoretical approach brings theories of delegation to bear on understanding how prime ministers and party leaders use turnover to discover the most talented individuals, and to put the best people in the most important jobs at a given moment. The analysis will therefore control for the effect of bargaining processes among parties with divergent preferences, which have been emphasized by others, and concentrate on developing and testing arguments about variables that facilitate or discourage the accumulation of particular types of experience. This approach directs attention toward explanatory variables that are absent from studies of cabinet instability, such as institutional prerogatives of prime ministers, decision-making rules within political parties, and organizational relationships between ministers and civil servants. Third, most studies of cabinet governance focus on advanced parliamentary democracies, whereas this research combines the study of advanced and developing democracies. Broader impact. The broader impact of the proposed research relate to its benefits to society, infrastructure improvements in political science, and unique educational collaborations. The benefits to society concern new insights into how to design institutional arrangements for effective democratic governance. Understanding how turnover affects policymaking requires knowledge of what causes turnover. To this end, the investigators take an explicitly "institutional" perspective, examining the effects of formal rules within the political system and within political parties. This makes it possible to explore how institutional arrangements affect democratic performance, allowing us to begin building more precise and useful arguments about which tradeoffs will be associated with the choice of different institutional forms. Developing such argument is crucial to aid in the creation of stable and successful democracy around the world. Regarding infrastructure, the project will make publicly available several data sets that will be useful to scholars who conduct research on parliamentary democracies. These include data on cabinet composition in 38 countries, as well as data on internal party organization, institutional arrangements for cabinet decision-making, and civil service organization. Importantly, these data are from both "advanced" and "developing" countries. Consequently, the project will make it easier for scholars to transcend the conventional "advanced" versus "developing" countries dichotomy that often exists in the scholarly community. Finally, regarding educational collaboration, the project addresses a disconnect that often exists between social scientific institutional research of the form described here (i.e., formal models and empirical tests) and education in policy schools. Students from policy schools often go on to become involved in shaping institutional reform processes, but their policy school curriculum typically does not given them a clear framework for thinking about these choices. In this research project, the PI will work with Masters students from developing democracies at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs to teach them how scholars in the rational choice tradition study institutional tradeoffs, and how research can be designed to permit empirical claims about these tradeoffs.
