| When and why are cabinet ministers forced out of office? We argue that ministerial resignations cannot be understood as mechanistic consequences of serious personal or departmental errors as the classical responsibility hypothesis implies. Rather, they follow a systematic political logic. Cabinet ministers have to resign whenever the prime minister perceives the political costs of a minister staying in office to be higher than the benefits of keeping the status quo. We test this argument with resignation events in Germany in the period between 1969 and 2005. Based on a detailed data collection we find 111 resignation events, i.e. serious public discussions about a cabinet minister’s future, out of which 14 ended in resignation. These data are analysed employing statistical as well as Qualitative Comparative Analysis based on Boolean algebra to detect patterns of ministerial resignations. |
Fischer, Jörn
Kaiser, André
Rohlfing, Ingo
2006
in: West European Politics
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