1
Political parties are the primary agents of organized political representation in
democracies around the world, and are thus responsible for translating societal pressures and
interests into public policy. In parliamentary systems, voters decide the composition of the
legislature, and legislative parties then decide the composition of the executive. In presidential
systems, voters directly decide the identity of the chief executive and the composition of the
legislative branches. To what extent do these institutional differences affect the relationship
between parties and government? If party-government relationships differ in substantial ways
across different democratic regimes, we might also expect substantial and meaningful differences
across democratic regimes in terms of the policy process, government output, interest
representation and democratic accountability. Although a lively debate has explored the relative
merits of presidentialism and parliamentarism, little research has explored the ways in which the
relationship between parties and governments varies across constitutional formats.
In this paper, we highlight how institutional differences across democratic regimes shape
cabinet partisanship. Cabinets provide a critical link between the executive and legislative
branches in all democratic systems, and cabinet dynamics thus provide a window for scholars to
understand the nature of a country’s partisan dynamics. Scholars have long recognized this and
have thus endeavored to understand the distribution of cabinet portfolios and cabinet politics’
impact on government stability and output. The specific question we explore here is “who gets
ministries: party stalwarts, or independent technocrats or cronies?” Scholars of Western
European parliamentary governments provided an answer to this question over thirty years ago -
and the finding has proven to be among the strongest empirical social science relationships ever
discovered: because prime ministers depend entirely on the confidence of legislative parties for
their government’s survival, they almost always appoint wholly partisan cabinets. That is, given
Convention