Ministries that We Want: Agendas and Signaling of Portfolio Salience

• In Event: Executive and Ministerial Leadership

Abstract

We develop a new measure of cabinet portfolio salience for multi-party governments that vary across years and parties. Our measurement strategy, based on a dynamic two latent variables model, recovers salience scores that are independent of individual parties' preferences, a quantity that reveal individual benefits that parties attach to portfolios. By exploiting legislative activity and speech data, we apply this framework to Brazil and provide new estimates of portfolio salience and parties' preferences from 2001 to 2020. Our measure reliably captures the salience of portfolios while incorporating uncertainty via credible intervals. Moreover, it handles time-dependence in salience better than the alternatives, which results in higher face validity in distinguishing episodes of rapid changes in salience, such as in the redesign of cabinet portfolios that are frequent in new democracies.

Authors

• Fernando Meireles, Federal University of Minas Gerais

• Magna Inácio, Federal University of Minas Gerais

• Rosiene Guerra de Andrade, Federal University of Minas Gerais