How women in the executive influence government stability

ABSTRACT

Does the gender of prime ministers and cabinet ministers influence cabinet duration? We argue that the risk for early termination of cabinets decreases with women’s presence in the executive. As scholars of social psychology indicate, women apply more consensual and compromise-oriented conflict resolution strategies. Disputes between or within governing parties, which ultimately lead to early termination, should therefore be less likely to emerge and escalate if the government is led by a woman or includes numerous female members. To test this rationale, we analyse a newly compiled, comprehensive dataset covering 676 governments in 27 European countries between 1945 and 2018 by relying on event history analysis. The results suggest that cabinets with a higher proportion of female cabinet members experience a lower risk of early cabinet termination. This article contributes to the study of women as political leaders through additional evidence for the gendered nature of leadership styles.

KEYWORDS:

• cabinet stability
• gender
• governance
• leadership style
• women

Acknowledgments

Authors are listed in alphabetically. Both authors contributed equally to all work. We are grateful to Joanna Hüffelmann for her student assistance in gathering data for this project. Moreover, we would like to thank Heike Klüver, Despina Alexiadou, Luca Verzichelli, the participants of the MZES colloquium, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Figures include all EU member countries plus Iceland and Norway except for Croatia, Malta, and Cyprus.

2 We assume that women’s presence in cabinets is endogenous to the degree of còmpromise-orientation in the executive. While women tend to have lower political ambition (Lawless & Fox, 2013) and a higher aversion to competitive environments than men (Preece & Stoddard, 2015), these patterns are less likely to persist for the highest political positions. Previous research indicates that, when it comes to posts in the executive, women’s presence is mostly limited by institutional barriers and biased selection criteria of party gate keepers (see e,g, Barnes & Taylor-Robinson, 2018).

3 Not all prime ministers and cabinets have the power to dissolve parliament (Goplerud & Schleiter, 2016).

4 The countries are the following: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.

5 This measurement approach allows for running a survival analysis, which is the established method in cabinet stability research.

6 All terminations that are non-discretionary such as termination due to the end of the legislative term.

7 In some countries, such as Denmark, cabinets sometimes call for voluntary early elections because they want additional approval for major policy reforms.

8 For that purpose, we made use of the website http://www.kolumbus.fi/taglarsson/.

9 Descriptive statistics for all variables can be found in Table A.1 in the Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Svenja Krauss

Svenja Krauss is DAAD lecturer at the University of Essex, United Kingdom.

Corinna Kroeber

Corinna Kroeber is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Greifswald, Germany.