Acting on Three Arenas: A multi-dimensional approach to understanding ministerial turnover

Abstract

Understanding why cabinet ministers are terminated early is still underexplored. Most existing studies focus on performance on one arena. We argue that ministers operate in many different arenas and to fully understand the complex nature of ministerial termination we need to consider ministers' performance in several arenas and their relation to one another. We focus ministers' performance in three arenas; the public/electoral, the parliamentary and the cabinet. We test our argument on over 40 years of ministerial turnover in Denmark. Our results show that ministers' performance in all three arenas each have an effect on ministerial turnover (mostly the parliamentary). Moreover, adding interaction terms in our statistical models between ministers' performance in these different arenas affect the impact hereof on ministerial turnover. Our findings show the need to engage more with the competing arenas in which ministers perform to increase our understanding of ministerial turnover.