Gamson going global? Cabinet proportionality in comparative perspective

Journal article

Abstract:: We conduct a global, large-N analysis of proportionality in the partisan distribution of cabinet portfolios. Formulated in the context of postwar Western European parliamentary democracy, Gamson’s Law predicts that parties joining a coalition government will receive cabinet ministries in direct proportion to the seats they are contributing to the coalition on the floor of the legislature. Using a sample of 1551 country-years of coalitional government in 97 countries from 1966 to 2019, and comparing all main constitutional formats (parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential), we find that Gamson’s Law does not travel well outside its context of origin. Among the constitutional predictors of cabinet proportionality, we find that pure presidentialism is a major outlier, with an exaggerated form of formateur advantage. Introducing party-system and assembly-level predictors to the debate, we find that party institutionalization tends to increase fairness in portfolio allocation within parliamentary systems only.

Files:: Chaisty_and_Power_2024_Gamson_going_global.pdf

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Language:: English
Keywords:: presidentialism

semipresidentialism

parties

cabinets

parliamentarism

portfolios

Gamson’s Law
Pubs id:: 1607972
Local pid:: pubs:1607972
Deposit date:: 2024-01-29

Copyright holder:: Chaisty and Power
Rights statement:: © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

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