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Prime ministers (PMs) significantly contribute to making parliamentary democracy work, but cabinet reshuffles can undermine the PM's ability to perform successfully. New ministers may have less policy expertise, intensify intra-cabinet struggles and hamper the control of government bureaucracy. This article explores the relationship between cabinet reshuffles and prime-ministerial performance in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Building on a data set covering 131 cabinets in 11 CEE countries between 1990 and 2018, we find that frequent cabinet reshuffles decrease prime-ministerial performance. In particular, the reshuffling of ministers belonging to other coalition parties than the PM's unfolds a strong negative effect on prime-ministerial performance, while reshuffles in core portfolios and turnover of ministers from the PM party have less negative consequences. These results have important implications for understanding executive politics and government stability in the dynamic environments of CEE democracies and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes whether the personality traits of Members of Parliament (MPs) affect their attitudes toward the representation of gender equality issues. Based on the Big Five personality traits, we argue that Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness shape MPs' positions toward gender equality policies through two different pathways. The first pathway proposes a direct connection. While Openness is expected to positively affect MPs' support for gender equality, Conscientiousness is assumed to have a negative impact. The second pathway runs indirectly, linking Openness and Conscientiousness to preferences toward gender equality through the effect of these personality traits on MPs' general ideological positions. Using data from a survey of elite politicians in Germany and Switzerland, the results of a causal mediation analysis show a positive direct effect of Openness that holds independent of a mediating influence of political ideology. The analysis deepens our understanding of gender equality legislation and the MPs engaging in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Committee assignments continue to be gendered with men having higher chances than women to be appointed to the most visible, resourceful and influential committees. I contribute to a better understanding of this phenomenon by investigating to what extent women in parliamentary party groups push for gender parity in committee assignments. The empirical analyses build on original data from the 16 German states between 1990 and 2021. I find no indication that women as leaders of parliamentary party groups narrow sex gaps in appointment to the most prestigious committees, but higher shares of women representatives enhance women's access to these posts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the first to show that gender shapes the degree to which legislators use formal mechanisms to oversee government activities. Extensive scholarly work has analysed the use of oversight instruments, especially regarding who monitors whom. Whether, how, and why the conformity of men and women with institutional roles differs, has not yet received scholarly attention. We hypothesise that women become more active than men in overseeing the executive when in opposition while reducing their monitoring activities even more strongly than men when in government because of different social roles ascribed to men and women as well as differences in risk aversity between sexes. We analyse panel data for three oversight tools from the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2013 to test this proposition. Our findings imply that characteristics of political actors influence even a strongly institutionalised process as oversight and further clarify the gender bias in political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds light on the obstacles that women face as members of the government by answering the questions: How does the sex of ministers shape the way MPs' assess the quality of their work? And, how does this relationship differ depending on the political ideology of MPs? We argue that legislators assess the competencies of women ministers differently after the activation of gender stereotypes, but that the way they react depends on the ideological orientation of their party. We investigate this topic in a real-word context using a unique survey experiment with German and Austrian MPs. The evidence reveals that, while MPs belonging to right-wing parties perceive women in the executive as less competent than men ministers, their colleagues from left-wing parties actually assess them more favorably. These findings highlight the persistence of old myths about women's lacking political skills and the emergence of new ones about women's superior ability to govern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction of the legislative and executive is gendered in nature. Gender shapes what actors in these two institutions demand from each other. This pattern is visible, for instance, in the distinct policy priorities of women and men in parliament (e.g., Allen and Childs 2019; Bäck and Debus 2019; Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019) and in the ways that women engage and oversee related government initiatives. At the same time, gender influences the strengths and weaknesses that actors in the legislature and executive ascribe to each other and, hence, their mutual assessment. Members of parliament (MPs) and party gatekeepers, for instance, tend to favor men for the most influential and well-resourced portfolios, since they believe that masculine traits are necessary or suitable to succeed in governmental positions, and membership in men-dominated political networks remains an important route to qualify for ministerial office (see, e.g., Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet 2019; Krook and O'Brien 2012). Change in these dynamics is scarce or occurs only gradually, meaning that the ways in which executive-legislative interactions are gendered are usually stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive scholarly work engages with the growing number of women in legislatures around the world and highlights their role as advocates of women's interests during parliamentary decision-making processes. This article sheds light on the reactions of men MPs (members of parliament) to this trend by uncovering how women's numerical strength in party parliamentary groups shapes the issues that their men colleagues emphasize when speaking about women during plenary debates. I argue that, the higher the share of women in a party parliamentary group, the more will men representatives emphasize women's interests in the context of issues they can easily relate to—either because the issues lie in men's area of responsibility according to ideas about traditional role distributions in the society, for example, the financing of gender equality projects, or because they are part of broader patterns of societal inequality, such as poverty or health. I provide empirical evidence for this argument based on original time-series cross-sectional data from plenary debates in six German states between 2005 and 2021 using a structural topic model. These findings shed light on men's role as critical actors and have implications for gender equality and the functioning of representative democracy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ministerial portfolios that promise high status, broad public visibility, and extensive financial and personnel resources continue to be men's domains. In this article, we shed light on gender inequality in ministerial selection processes by studying the duration from a minister's original appointment as a member of cabinet until he or she receives responsibility for a highly prestigious portfolio. We argue that the time it takes for ambitious politicians to prove themselves suitable for this type of cabinet position depends on their sex and the degree to which the policy area for which they are responsible reinforces stereotypical expectations about their personality traits. Empirical evidence from event history analysis of original data including detailed information on all ministerial careers in 27 European countries between 1990 to 2018 supports these propositions. These findings reveal that even highly qualified women politicians who are already members of the executive face additional barriers during their political careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we introduce a unique data set containing all written communication published by the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2017. Increasing numbers of scholars make use of protocols of parliamentary speeches, parliamentary questions or the texts of legislative drafts in various fields of comparative politics including representation, responsiveness, professionalization and political careers or parliamentary agenda studies. Since preparing parliamentary documents is rather resource intensive, these studies remain limited to single points in time, types of documents and/or policy areas. The long time horizon and various types of documents covered by our new comprehensive data set will enable scholars interested in parliaments, parties and representatives to answer various innovative research questions related to legislative studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Prime Ministers (PMs) are the central actors in parliamentary democracies, little comparative research explores what makes them perform successfully in office. This article investigates how the political careers of PMs affect their performance. For this purpose, we make use of a unique expert survey covering 131 cabinets in 11 Central and Eastern European countries between 1990 and 2018. Performance is defined as a two-dimensional set of tasks PMs ought to fulfill: first, managing the cabinet and directing domestic affairs as tasks delegated to their office, second, ensuring support of parliament and their own party, who constitute the direct principals. The findings indicate that a simple political insider career is not sufficient to enhance prime-ministerial performance. Rather, PMs who served as party leaders have the best preconditions to succeed in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which social characteristics of voters reduce the chances to waste a vote? Surprisingly, little is known about the commonalities and differences of citizens who do (not) make their vote count. In this article, we argue that levels of education and income, gender and age shape the likelihood to waste a vote through two channels: the voting motivation and the ability to correctly assess the viability of candidates. Drawing on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we analyse voting behaviour in six elections in Great Britain, Germany and France between 2005 and 2015. Our analyses demonstrate that holding a university degree is not related to effective voting. Differences in cognitive capacities as a consequence of formal education are hence not decisive for voters' ability to assess candidates' viability correctly. Instead, our results show that many of those wasting their ballots are male and young voters who tend to knowingly decide to support candidates unlikely to win. Overall, these findings shed light on wasted votes as one of the factors that might balance and reinforce existing social inequalities in the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the conditions under which states introduce powersharing and autonomy rights for minorities are well researched, the reasons why they do so to varying degrees are less known. This article introduces the argument that the level of certainty about a country's future democratic development explains variation in the extent of minority rights across states. Ethnic groups assess the chance for successful democratic transition and, if they are optimistic about the prospects, they are satisfied with limited minority governing rights. In contrast, groups that are uncertain about their future position in power relations and that fear an autocratic backlash, request extensive power-sharing and autonomy rights. Democratic prospects and the extend of minority governing rights are, thus, negatively correlated. This theoretical proposition finds support in the analysis of seven former Yugoslav countries, which shows that states with more pessimistic democratic prospects at independence, introduced more extensive minority governing rights afterwards. This innovative argument contributes to the literature focusing on the preferences of a country's elites by highlighting the role of citizens' interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there are considerably more men than women in most parliaments around the world, we know little about whether male-dominated legislatures neglect women’s policy preferences. Our article addresses this gap by analysing the congruence of policy preferences between women, men and their elected representatives. We endeavour to answer two questions. Are women’s policy preferences underrepresented in modern democracies? If so, which factors explain the size of the gender gaps in policy preference congruence? Comparing 21 European countries, we show that women’s preferences actually tend to be more accurately represented in parliaments than those of men. Moreover, our analyses reveal that this unanticipated finding is not driven by the share of female office-holders, but rather by levels of women’s turnout, which leads us to conclude that who votes is more important than who represents for policy preference congruence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's representation is highest in local assemblies in some countries, while others display the largest share of female office-holders at the national level. Drawing on a new data set mapping the representation of women at all four levels of government in Germany during the 2000s, we argue that differences in party system configurations across echelons explain these distinct patterns and provide evidence for this claim. We show that left-wing parties, the main source of female office-holders, perform better at higher echelons, while minor parties and independent representatives, which favour male candidacy, win more seats at the lowest levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides the necessary tools to advance comparative research studying the substantive representation of ethnic minorities and women. Firstly, I clarify how the various indicators for individual representatives’ and parliaments’ considerateness of the interests of traditionally excluded groups used in earlier (mostly single-country) studies relate to each other and discuss the advantages and drawbacks of different measures for quantitative comparative research. Secondly, the present article introduces new data comprising three indicators for the substantive representation of ethnic minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of electoral rules for reserved seats in parliaments on representatives' ability and motivation to represent minorities. While most previous studies treat reserved seats as a uniform mechanism, the author argues that we can distinguish varieties along two attributes: electorate and candidacy. Limiting electorate means that only minority members can vote for reserved seat candidates, which motivates representatives to defend minority interests with the objective of optimizing re-election chances. Limiting candidacy to minority members obliges being a group member to all candidates for reserved seats, which improves minority members' acceptance of the political system they live in. Evidence from the case of indigenous people in New Zealand, Venezuela and Taiwan supports the fruitfulness of electoral rules for reserved seats as a factor explaining the quality of minority representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Women's representation in elected assemblies across varying levels of government is often theorised to be shaped as a pyramid, with the highest proportion of women at the local level, where barriers to entry are minimal. Mapping women's representation in Germany, however, we find contradictory evidence, since the pyramid is spun on its head. Looking at the representation of women in legislatures across three levels of government reveals relatively few women in district assemblies, but sizably higher proportions at the Land and federal levels. This pattern presents a challenge to conventional explanations of descriptive representation at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]