The Gendered Consequences of Rules about Selection

Chapter 8 shows that formal and informal rules that empower or constrain presidents and prime ministers when selecting ministers affect women and men differently, thereby contributing to gendered outcomes. The chapter finds that rules that empower selectors can serve as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, empowered selectors can decide to appoint women in significant numbers, including the construction of gender parity cabinets. The chapter contrasts the cases of two highly empowered selectors (Justin Trudeau and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero) who formed gender parity cabinets with Tony Abbott’s formation of a cabinet with just one female minister. The chapter also contrasts the cases of two female selectors (Michelle Bachelet and Julia Gillard), finding that institutional context is more consequential than the selector’s sex in influencing the number of women in cabinet. Finally, the chapter finds that increasing the number of selectors does not necessarily disadvantage women.

How to Qualify for Cabinet

Chapter 7 shows that aspirant ministers can qualify for cabinet appointment by meeting representational criteria, defined as membership in a politically relevant political, territorial, or socio-demographic group deemed important for legitimizing the cabinet team. In all country cases, a subset of ministrables qualify for appointment to cabinet on the basis of representational criteria, and all countries in the book’s data set employ representational criteria in defining the ministerial eligibility pool, even as specific representational criteria vary in number and content across cases. The chapter shows that regional representation is a strong prescriptive criterion in five countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom), and that race and ethnicity are prescribed as representational categories in Canada and the United States. The chapter finds that gender is the only representational category that appears across all countries, yet the magnitude of women’s inclusion varies significantly.

How to Qualify for Cabinet

Chapter 5 focuses on experiential criteria as qualifications for inclusion in cabinet. The chapter shows that across all country cases, ministrables qualify by demonstrating their political experience and/or policy expertise, and in some cases, their educational background. There is no evidence that ministers in presidential systems are more likely to qualify through policy experience, or that ministers in parliamentary democracies are more likely to qualify through generalist political experience. The chapter shows that experiential criteria are strongly prescriptive rules, but they are non-specific and flexible rather than straightforward. The chapter concludes that experiential criteria are employed strategically by selectors to justify the choices of ministers and are post facto rationalizations. If all ministrables must meet some experiential criteria, additional qualifying criteria are necessary to determine the subset among them selected for cabinet.

Institutionalist Approaches to Cabinet Appointments

Chapter 2 sets out the book’s theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches for explaining gendered patterns and processes of cabinet formation. Employing a feminist institutionalist approach, the chapter explains how formal and informal rules create and maintain gendered hierarchies that have historically advantaged men in the cabinet appointment process. The chapter also shows how rules change over time, emphasizing the importance of agency, ambiguity, and ideas. The chapter offers a model of the relationship among sets of rules to produce cabinets that include women. The chapter provides justification of the case selection, methods of data collection and organization, and a description of each country case.

Concrete Floors and Cabinet Appointments

Chapter 11 answers the three research questions and summarizes the book’s findings in terms of the timing, magnitude, and persistence of women’s cabinet inclusion. It outlines the process for initiating, confirming, and sustaining “concrete floors” for women’s cabinet inclusion across each of the country cases. Concrete floors are the minimum number or proportion of women in cabinet for that ministerial team to be perceived as legitimate. The concept captures the process by which cabinets have been re-gendered to include ever greater numbers of women. The concrete floor helps to explain why presidents and prime ministers have not reverted to appointing all male-cabinets and, in most cases, have refrained from appointing fewer women to cabinet than their predecessors. The concrete floor also provides a strategic foothold for feminist activists who want to increase women’s presence in national politics, specifically in cabinets and shadow cabinets. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions and the practical implications of the book’s findings.

Explaining Gendered Patterns of Cabinet Formation

Chapter 1 introduces the three research questions guiding the book and outlines the patterns of timing, magnitude, and persistence of women’s cabinet inclusion in Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It identifies the year of appointment of the first woman to cabinet; the year of the last all-male cabinet; and addresses the questions of cross-country and cross-time variation in numbers of women in cabinet. The chapter identifies formal and informal rules as forces shaping women’s opportunities for cabinet appointment, and introduces the concept of the “concrete floor,” the minimum proportion or number of women for the cabinet team to be perceived as legitimate.

Who Selects Ministers?

Chapter 3 focuses on the political actors who are empowered to select ministers: predominantly presidents and prime ministers. It identifies all the rules, formal and informal, that determine whether selectors are empowered or constrained when constructing their cabinet. The chapter shows that, in most cases, presidents and prime ministers are strongly empowered to choose their minsters, although in some cases selectors are constrained by having to share powers with co-selectors from other parties (i.e. in coalition governments) and within their own party organization. The chapter categorizes the book’s seven country cases into three groups: one where formal and informal rules always empower a single selector, one where party rules have constrained selectors, and one where selectors are always constrained.

Gendered Representational Criteria

Chapter 10 addresses the gendered consequences of representational criteria. It shows that in all seven country cases, representational criteria have been gendered to include women, and these have in turn become a powerful predictor of women’s inclusion in cabinet. The presence of strong prescriptive rules requiring women’s inclusion shapes selectors’ choices of ministers, often reducing their capacity to appoint ministers on the basis of affiliational criteria. A key finding of the chapter is that all-male cabinets are clearly a thing of the past, having disappeared as early as 1957 in Germany but as late as 1993 in Australia. Among the book’s case studies, women’s inclusion in cabinet is required. The chapter finds, however, that the timing and strength of the institutionalization of gender as a representational criterion vary cross-nationally.

The Gendered Consequences of Qualifying Criteria

Chapter 9 analyzes the gendered consequences of rules about qualification and investigates whether there are differences in the types of experience that male and female ministrables bring to a cabinet team and whether deploying affiliational criteria when selecting ministers disadvantages women. The chapter finds that the type of experience men and women bring to cabinet does not differ substantially, but shows that there are barriers to women accumulating political experience, that women’s experience is often invisible to selectors, and that selectors exploit the flexibility inherent in experiential criteria to identify qualified men rather than women. The chapter also finds that the affiliational criteria that play a role in allocating ministerial opportunities are traditionally gendered to men’s advantage. Overall, the findings are that, where affiliation is a strong and consistent criterion for ministerial qualification, women’s presence in cabinet remains low for longer and does not reach high magnitudes.

How to Qualify for Cabinet

Chapter 6 reveals the importance of affiliational criteria, defined as membership in the selector’s personal networks of friendship, trust, and loyalty, as a historically strong and enduring set of qualifications for inclusion in cabinet. The chapter shows that in the absence of rules prohibiting presidents and prime ministers from choosing political friends and trusted allies, selectors will, when unconstrained by competing rules about selecting ministers, use affiliational criteria when assembling their cabinet. A key finding in the chapter, however, is that the use of affiliational criteria differs across the book’s cases, identifying three patterns: (1) countries with strong and consistent affiliational linkages, with more than half of cabinet appointees meeting at least one of the affiliational relationships; (2) countries with occasional affiliational linkages (between 20 and 50 percent); and (3) countries with rare affiliational links (fewer than a fifth of all appointees).