Do Female and Male Cabinet Ministers Do Their Job Differently?

• In Event: Executive Politics in the Comparative Context

Abstract

In established democracies, women are now often appointed to presidential cabinets in increasing numbers, even though parity is still rare. It has also become more common for women to be appointed to high-prestige posts, and to lead departments in stereotypically masculine policy areas. This increasing and more diverse appointment of women to cabinets makes it possible to study when and how increased diversity in descriptive representation is associated with increased diversity in substantive representation. Toward that end, this paper has two purposes. First, we develop a theory based on interests, incentives, and capacity to derive predictions about when cabinet secretaries could be expected to expand representation. This theory merges work from feminist institutionalism and from formal models of how heads of government avoid cabinet drift in order to generate new implications about when, why, and for whom members of the cabinet represent the interests of women and of other historically marginalized groups. “Interests” theorizes about how the backgrounds and beliefs of cabinet ministers (e.g., feminist v. traditional, occupation, socioeconomics, race/ethnicity) may provide incentives for representation of historically marginalized groups. “Incentives” refers to how institutions, parties, and future career opportunities (e.g., specialist v. generalist and political v. technical norms for ministers, party ideology, coalition government) enhance or limit rational actor incentives to represent diversity in government. “Capacity” examines how backing from key actors (e.g., the president, party factions, the finance minister, the minister’s group alliances or electoral base of supporters) expand or limit opportunities for a minister to deliver on substantive representation of women and other historically marginalized groups.

Second, we propose an empirical framework for systematically studying how cabinet ministers do their jobs, enabling comparison of decisions by men and women. A perennial challenge to studying cabinet ministers is that policy deliberations often take place “behind closed doors” in cabinet sessions or other private meetings among top government leadership. To circumvent this problem, we focus on observable actions by cabinet ministers that occur outside of those deliberations. This empirical framework focuses on (1) who ministers appoint to their leadership teams (e.g., deputies, advisers), (2) the legislative agendas of ministers, (3) regulations presented by the departments, and (4) budget allocations. We provide a preliminary test of this new theory based on interests, incentives and capacity, and empirical framework with data from presidential cabinets in the US and Costa Rica. Costa Rica offers an interesting pilot case due to the country’s relatively long history of extensive incorporation of women into government, while the US has experienced lower levels of incorporation of women.

Authors

• Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson, Texas A&M University

• Adrián Pignataro, University of Costa Rica/Universidad de Costa Rica