Literature on Ministerial Selection

The literature on ministerial selection takes its starting point in the “parliamentary chain of delegation,” which suggests that power relationships in a parliamentary democracy can be described as a chain, where citizens in a first step delegate power to representatives, who in turn delegate to a cabinet and a PM, who delegates power to line ministers (see, e.g., Strøm Reference Strøm2000). Applying principal-agent theory to ministerial selection, the principal faces a problem of adverse selection because, at the time of appointment, the principal does not have complete information about a minister's abilities and preferences to run a department in accordance with the wishes of the principal. Moral hazard problems can arise in this relationship because, as described by Indridason and Kam (Reference Indridason and Kam2008, 624), “All ministers have motive and opportunity to use their portfolios in a manner that runs against the principal's interests.”

To minimize agency problems, specifically, to ensure that line ministers act in a way that coincides with the wishes of the principal, the principal can appoint ministers whose interests do not clash with the principal's interest, which implies selecting ministers with policy positions close to the main principal (Bäck, Debus, and Müller Reference Bäck, Debus and Müller2016; Kam et al. Reference Kam, Bianco, Sened and Smyth2010). Kam et al. (Reference Kam, Bianco, Sened and Smyth2010) focus on the single-party governments formed in the United Kingdom and present two competing hypotheses. The first, the so-called “leadership hypothesis,” characterizes the party leadership as the main principal, and the second, the “party government hypothesis,” portrays the party backbenchers as a “collective” principal, suggesting that potential ministerial candidates should be ideologically close to these principals to get appointed. Bäck et al. (Reference Bäck, Debus and Müller2016) instead focus on coalition systems in Western Europe, and they suggest some additional potential principals in such systems; most importantly, the coalition as a whole may act as a principal in addition to the PM.

Following this literature, we let the institutional setting guide the choice of principal. Because Sweden, which is analyzed here, is characterized by relatively weak PMs, we do not focus on the PM as a main principal here (see, e.g., Bergman et al. Reference Bergman, Müller, Strøm, Blomgren, Strøm, Müller and Bergman2003). Instead, we have followed the work by Carey (Reference Carey2007), who suggests that, in representative democracies, ministers must always answer to their parties and face their own party as a principal. Therefore, we assume that the party is the main principal to whom ministers are accountable, and whose preferences ministerial candidates should be close to be appointed to the cabinet.

Literature on Gender and Political Appointments

An important empirical finding in the literature on the role of gender in political leadership is that women tend to be underrepresented in higher positions in the political hierarchy. Previous research shows that women are less likely to obtain a ministerial post, and when they do attain ministerial offices, they are likely to hold less prestigious posts (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson Reference Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson2005; Krook and O'Brien Reference Krook and O'Brien2012; Reynolds Reference Reynolds1999).

The literature on female representation, however, suggests not only a ‘vertical division of labor’ between women and men but also a ‘horizontal division of labor’ in which women are often seen in specific posts, dealing with policy issues that have been described as being ‘softer.’ For example, Reynolds (Reference Reynolds1999, 564) finds “a worldwide tendency to place women in the softer sociocultural ministerial positions rather than in the harder and politically more prestigious positions of economic planning, national security. … ”Footnote ¹ Krook and O'Brien (Reference Krook and O'Brien2012, 842) suggest that the relationship between women and more ‘feminine’ cabinet assignments, such as ministerial portfolios dealing with social welfare policy, may be due to a number of reasons, such as women's specific interests, or that certain ministries are perceived as being closer to women's concerns. Such gendered patterns may be “rooted in efforts to marginalize women or in the preferences of female cabinet appointees.”

However, Krook and O'Brien (Reference Krook and O'Brien2012, 853) also argue that these gendered patterns in ministerial selection are beginning to change, stressing that several leaders have appointed cabinets characterized by gender parity and that women are increasingly nominated to more ‘masculine’ and high-prestige portfolios. A striking finding in their analysis of cabinet appointments in 117 countries (in 2009) is that women's appointments are to a large extent explained by the presence of more women among political elites, which they stress can partly be promoted by concrete political strategies, such as gender quotas.

Social Psychological Literature on Role Congruity

One important theory in the field of gender and leadership is the so-called “role congruity theory of prejudice,” advanced by Eagly and Karau (Reference Eagly and Karau2002), which suggests that perceived incongruity between the female gender role and leadership roles leads to prejudice and bias against women in leadership positions. Eagly and Karau (Reference Eagly and Karau2002, 574) suggest that beliefs about gender roles refer to both descriptive and prescriptive expectations associated with men and women, that is, such gender role beliefs for example describe how we expect women to behave in a specific situation and what people believe women ought to do. Therefore, they are based both on stereotypes about women and men and on social norms. A key proposition of this approach focuses on what has been called ‘agentic’ and ‘communal’ attributes: men are valued for being ‘agentic’ and are expected to be more assertive, controlling, dominant, and “prone to act as a leader.” In contrast, women are expected to be more ‘communal,’ which entails that they are assumed to be more concerned with the welfare of other people and to be more helpful, nurturing, and sensitive (Eagly and Karau Reference Eagly and Karau2002, 574; Kite, Deaux, and Haines Reference Kite, Deaux, Haines, Denmark and Paludi2008; Rudman Reference Rudman1998; Rudman and Glick Reference Rudman and Glick2001).

Eagly and Karau's (Reference Eagly and Karau2002, 575–576) role congruity theory predicts prejudice toward women in leadership positions, resulting from a dissimilarity in the expectations that people have about women and the expectations that people have about leaders. They argue that prejudice toward female (potential) leaders takes two forms: “(a) less favorable evaluation of women's (than men's) potential for leadership because leadership ability is more stereotypical of men than women and (b) less favorable evaluation of the actual leadership behavior of women than men because such behavior is perceived as less desirable in women than men.” The latter proposition suggests that female leaders may be negatively evaluated even when they fulfill their leadership roles because being effective leaders may “violate standards for their gender” when women display such agentic attributes.

Empirical findings on gender and leadership also seem to support the theory of role congruity. For example, Brescoll, Dawson, and Uhlman (Reference Brescoll, Dawson and Uhlman2010) show, using an experimental design, that women who are in gender-incongruent positions (e.g., female police chiefs or college presidents) are more harshly judged when they make a mistake. Studies applying the role congruity theory of political leadership are still relatively scarce. However, in a large comparative study of party leadership selection, O'Brien (Reference O'Brien2015, 1) shows that men and women have “differential access to, and experiences in, party leadership.” She hypothesizes that female party leaders are more likely to be fired from their posts when the party performs badly in the polls, drawing on the work by Eagly, Makhijani, and Klonsky et al. (Reference Eagly, Makhijani and Klonsky1992), which shows that female leaders are likely to be devalued when they hold leadership roles that are traditionally male dominated. Hence, O'Brien (Reference O'Brien2015, 11) suggests that “female leaders are likely to be held to higher standards than their male counterparts,” and she finds support for this argument when analyzing party leadership selection and deselection in parliamentary democracies.

Hypotheses about the Role of Gender in Ministerial Selection

To specify our hypotheses, we have drawn on all the literature described in the previous section, and we also take the specific setting in Sweden into account. Cabinets in Sweden have been, to a large extent, characterized by gender parity. As Bäck et al. (Reference Bäck, Dumont, Meier, Persson and Vernby2009, 163) describe, Olof Palme was the first PM to acknowledge the gender dimension in the recruitment of ministers, and the following PM, Ingvar Carlsson, made an official promise in the 1994 election campaign, to appoint as many women as men to his new cabinet. Since then, female representation in Swedish cabinets has been high in comparison to many other contexts (approximately 50%). Hence, we do not expect that women are less likely to be appointed to cabinet when looking at the Swedish case. However, we aim to evaluate the argument from the existing literature on gender and political appointments, which has found that female candidates are more likely to be selected to posts in ‘feminine’ policy areas (Krook and O'Brien Reference Krook and O'Brien2012). Thus, we formulate the following hypothesis:

The underlying mechanism proposed in the previous literature is that gendered appointment patterns may be rooted in a marginalization of women or in the preferences of female candidates for cabinet (Krook and O'Brien Reference Krook and O'Brien2012: 842). However, this hypothesis can also be connected to role-congruity theory (Eagly and Karau Reference Eagly and Karau2002). This theory posits that prejudice is likely to arise against female potential candidates for ministerial posts, especially posts that deal with policy areas considered less feminine (e.g., defense, finance), since role incongruity would be even higher for such posts than for ministerial posts on average. According to this line of reasoning, we expect role incongruity to matter prospectively, that is, we expect that party leaders would not recruit female ministers to certain “masculine” ministerial portfolios to avoid situations of role incongruity during the lifespan of the government.

Similar to the finding that ministerial recruitment is gendered (Krook and O'Brien Reference Krook and O'Brien2012), recent literature has shown that legislature committee systems emphasize the same gender-typed roles, with female legislators specializing, for example, in social policies and education (see, e.g., Bolzendahl Reference Bolzendahl2014). Against the backdrop of role incongruity theory, we contend that gendered committee profiles may lead to “retrospective” role incongruity:

The argument for this second hypothesis is, as specified by role congruity theory, that women who hold role-incongruent positions are more harshly judged and are therefore less likely to advance in their careers (and to enter cabinet positions) when they are holding positions in parliament that are perceived as being highly incongruent with their gender.

In our third hypothesis, we draw on work that sees ministerial selection as a delegation problem where the aim of the principal is to mitigate problems of agency loss, more specifically moral hazard, by relying on ex ante screening mechanisms. How can the principal ensure that the line ministers act in accordance with his or her wishes? As Kam et al. (Reference Kam, Bianco, Sened and Smyth2010) argue, one answer is to select those individuals for cabinet membership whose policy preferences are as close as possible to the principal's own preferences. Another reason for appointing politicians who do not deviate from the party line could also be that the party leadership is interested in rewarding “loyalty.” Following the literature on so-called “mega seats” (see Carroll, Cox, and Pachón Reference Carroll, Cox and Pachón2006), MPs are more likely to toe the party line to be rewarded with prized postelectoral positions such as ministerial posts, the post as speaker of parliament, or in some systems, committee chairs (see, e.g., Bäck and Debus Reference Bäck and Debus2016; Martin Reference Martin2012). Rewarding loyalty would have a similar impact on ministerial selection as a mechanism relying on a principal-agent logic.

Hence, in general, it should be positive for a politician's career prospects to toe the party line. We are specifically interested in how gender interacts with deviations from the principal's preferences in ministerial selection processes; therefore, we specify a hypothesis focusing on gender:

To clarify the proposed mechanism underlying this effect, we again draw on gender-congruity theory, which suggests that women who hold gender-incongruent positions are more harshly judged. Women candidates for cabinet, who deviate from the party line, from this perspective, could induce a stereotyping behavior on the part of the principal in which women who deviate are considered too agentic, or conversely, not communal enough. The principal would be less accepting of female, compared to male, political mavericks and backbenchers in cabinet appointments. Here, we suggest that two alternative mechanisms related to gender roles may be at work: (a) female politicians may be in general more harshly evaluated and scrutinized, or (b) female politicians may be subject to other expectations about what traits they should exhibit. We expect that loyalty is a more communal trait, in line with traditional female gender roles. Both mechanisms suggest that female politicians are more likely to be sanctioned when they deviate from the party line and that they are less likely to become ministers if they do not toe the party line.

Ministerial Selection in Sweden

Evaluating our expectations require gathering information on portfolio allocation, ministerial recruitment, individual MP characteristics, their parliamentary behavior, and their intraparty positioning in a longitudinal research design. The country and period selected are theoretically interesting for several reasons. First, Sweden has had a stable party system since World War II in which parties have persisted due to their ability of maintaining a sense of collective identity (Gallagher, Laver, and Mair Reference Gallagher, Laver and Mair1995; Mair Reference Mair1997). This stability in the composition of partisan actors also held from 1996 to 2014. Nevertheless, elections have resulted in shifting parliamentary majorities, but without causing landslide victories that could have replaced large numbers of MPs. This stability in the make-up of parliament enables us to disentangle how individual MP behavior in previous periods affected an MP's chances for ministerial recruitment. Second, the selected period covers several governments from both sides of the ideological spectrum, and coalition and single-party governments as well as minority and majority governments (see, e.g., Bäck and Bergman Reference Bäck, Bergman and Pierre2016). In Table 1, we have described the cabinets that formed during the study period.

Table 1. Governments formed during the study period

Comment: From Bäck and Bergman (Reference Bäck, Bergman and Pierre2016), updated by the authors.

Ministerial selection in Sweden has been described by Bäck et al. (Reference Bäck, Persson, Vernby, Wockelberg, Dowding and Dumont2009, 159–160), who suggest that the PM candidate is relatively free to staff the cabinet as he or she wants, even though informal constraints from other parties’ leaders are likely to influence selection in coalition governments (see, e.g., Bäck et al. Reference Bäck, Debus and Müller2016). Notably, the number of female cabinet ministers is high; most cabinets formed during the study period are in fact characterized by gender parity (Table 1). Considering that gender representation in the Riksdag is in some cases actually lower than in cabinet, with female representation hovering around 45% during the period analyzed here (see, e.g., Bäck and Debus Reference Bäck and Debus2016), being a woman does not negatively affect a politicians’ chances of entering the cabinet. In sum, by choosing the Swedish case, we deliberately focus on a critical case for our theory: ministerial recruitment is less likely to be affected by gender biases in Sweden than in most other parliamentary democracies.

Dependent Variable and Modeling Strategy

The dependent variable in our analyses is a binary indicator for ministerial selection. Each MP in our data can, potentially, be selected to become a minister at each government reshuffle and in each policy area or ministry. Government reshuffles are defined along the formation of new cabinets. Our dependent variable thus covers the ministerial selection processes for 1996, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014.Footnote ² Ministries were coded along the policy areas, for which they assign responsibility to the respective minister. This enables abstracting from changes in the composition of ministries, which change over time. The coding for the ministerial policy areas allocated ministerial posts to 40 categories, of which 25 were used during our observation period. For each policy area in each cabinet formation, we coded the ministers selected with 1, and 0 otherwise. This creates a data structure with one observation for each potential candidate (MP) in each policy area and each cabinet formation. Since opposition MPs are (typically) not eligible to be appointed to the cabinet, we restricted our empirical models to MPs who are members of the governing parties. The MPs from the governing parties were thus our ‘pool of candidates.’Footnote ³

To evaluate our hypotheses, we follow and further develop the framework used by Bäck, Debus, and Dumont (Reference Bäck, Debus and Dumont2011), who model selection as a discrete choice where the unit is each post to be allocated in a formation opportunity and the parties are the alternatives, applying a conditional logit model. Our dependent variable reflects whether an MP was successful in being selected as a minister in one of the 25 policy fields in each cabinet formation process. We apply conditional logit models that use a combination of the cabinet formation and policy area as groups. The individual politicians are considered the pool of candidates for becoming ministers in each policy area; thus, they are the “alternatives” in this discrete choice model.

Predictors of Ministerial Selection

Our independent variables cover four broad fields of an MP's qualification for a ministerial appointment. First, we include information on an MP's intraparty positioning as an ideological outlier within the party or as one who follows the party line. Second, we use information on an MP's gender. Third, we expect female MPs to be assigned only to certain ministries; thus, we employ measures that capture the gender type (Krook and O'Brien Reference Krook and O'Brien2012) of a ministry, that is, whether a ministry can be characterized as feminine, masculine, or neutral. Lastly and related to our expectation of retrospective role congruity, we include variables that capture the gender-type of the committees an MP was a member of, that is, whether he/she was a member in committees that could be characterized as feminine, masculine, or neutral (see Table A1 in the Appendix for more detailed information).

The MP-related information in our data set is coded in a dynamic data arrangement. That is, the data combines static information on MPs that did not change throughout their time in parliament (e.g., occupation, gender, etc.) with information that did change during their time in parliament. For the latter set of variables (e.g., age or tenure), we coded specific observations that indicate the beginning and end of the observation to identify an MP's most recent position before a ministerial selection took place. We assume that parliamentary behavior is dependent on the role an MP played in parliament (e.g., chairing a committee), and for each MP in each ministerial selection process, we use the most recent observation that exceeded 90 days.Footnote ⁴ This approach has two advantages: First, it allows us to construct the variables reflecting parliamentary behavior (i.e., positioning in speeches) based on the most recent information on MPs and to abstract from previous, dated information.Footnote ⁵ Second, we are able to include information on ministers who had not been MPs directly before the recruitment process but had been previously during our observation period.

Individual intraparty positioning is operationalized through quantitatively analyzing MPs’ speaking behavior in plenary debates (before being appointed as ministers).Footnote ⁶ We therefore gathered all speeches held during our observation period. To estimate MPs’ ideological positions, we rely on computer-based quantitative content analysis and applied Wordscores models (Laver, Benoit, and Garry Reference Laver, Benoit and Garry2003). Wordscores is suitable for drawing inferences when studying the content of parliamentary speeches (e.g., Bäck and Debus Reference Bäck and Debus2016; Baumann, Debus, and Müller Reference Baumann, Markus and Müller2015; Bernauer and Bräuninger Reference Bernauer and Bräuninger2009; Giannetti and Laver Reference Giannetti, Laver, Giannetti and Benoit2009; Laver and Benoit Reference Laver and Benoit2002).

We use all speeches given by an MP during our observation periods, but we calculate individual positions based on MPs’ changing roles. For instance, if an MP became a committee chair during the term, we calculate positions for the period prior to this change and for the period following the chair appointment. Furthermore, our positions are specific to the policy area that corresponded to a ministry: for each MP we derive separately a position based on the speeches given in this policy area. With this approach, we can determine whether an MP deviated from her parliamentary colleagues in the policy areas that are relevant to the post to be filled. Because policy-specific reference scores are difficult to obtain from manifesto data or expert surveys, we assigned all policy fields to either the gal–tan (green–alternative–libertarian vs. traditional–authoritarian–nationalist) or the left–right dimension (economic left vs. economic right), as used by the Chapel Hill expert surveys (Polk et al. Reference Jonathan, Rovny, Bakker, Edwards, Hooghe, Jolly, Koedam, Kostelka, Marks, Schumacher, Steenbergen, Vachudova and Zilovic2017). As reference texts for our scaling models, we relied on the manifestos of the respective party in the previous campaign. Based on these scores, we identify the position an MP occupied within the party in a policy field. We operationalize this position by calculating the difference between an MP's position and her parliamentary party group’s mean position in each policy field (see also Baumann, Debus and Klingelhöfer Reference Baumann, Debus and Klingelhöfer2017).

In investigating the effects of an MP's gender and intraparty positioning in ministerial recruitment, we control for several (individual-level) factors identified in the literature. Most importantly, we need to control for MPs who are part of the party leadership or who are otherwise prominent because these parliamentarians are most likely to secure a ministerial appointment. Thus, we include a binary measure indicating whether an MP was a member of the party leadership (party leader) and the share of speeches that MP gave relative to all speeches given by her party group (prominence). Similarly, we expect MPs who have specialized in a certain policy field to be recruited more frequently. We measure this by calculating the share of speeches an MP devoted to the respective issue areas relative to all the speeches she gave in parliament (specialization). In addition, we include several variables that have been identified to be influential by the previous literature on ministerial careers (Blondel and Thiébault Reference Blondel and Thiébault1991; De Winter Reference De Winter, Blondel and Thiébault1991). This includes an MP's age and tenure, along with a binary indicator for MPs with university degrees or similar higher education (high education). Lastly, we include the standard errors of our Wordscores estimates as a technical control variable.Footnote ⁷

The (Incomplete) Pool of Ministerial Candidates

This approach to analyze ministerial selection, that is, analyzing speeches made in parliament before appointment, comes with one significant limitation. In a context where ministers are sometimes appointed from outside parliament, that is, where many ministers are appointed without having any political background, we can not fully capture the entire pool of ministerial candidates. In an important study of ministerial selection, which we have drawn on here, Kam et al. (Reference Kam, Bianco, Sened and Smyth2010) analyze the British case, which has the advantage that ministers should be drawn from parliament, so a fixed set of politicians are candidates for cabinet offices.Footnote ⁸ In most other parliamentary democracies, this is not the case; for example, Cotta (Reference Cotta, Pinto, Cotta and de Almeida2018) shows, on the basis of a study of 14 European countries, that the share of nonpartisan ministers varies between 16% and 58%. As described by Bäck and Persson (Reference Bäck, Persson, Pinto, Cotta and de Almeida2018), the Swedish case does not stand out in this regard, with approximately 25% nonpolitical ministers during the postwar period.

Nonetheless, we are dealing with an incomplete pool of potential ministerial candidates here, which may result in some bias if ministers from outside cabinet are selected on a different basis than ministers drawn from parliament. Looking at descriptive information about the politicians appointed in Swedish cabinets (see Table A3 in the Appendix), there is no clear structure in the gender-balance of ministers that were MPs at their appointment, were MPs previously, or had never been an MP at the time of appointment. Despite the lack of a clear gender bias and the differences between cabinets, the nuanced differences may suggest that fewer women are able to make it to cabinet through a political career.Footnote ⁹ Hence, we must use caution when interpreting the results of this study because we cannot be certain that our results about the role of gender in ministerial selection would hold if applied to an ‘outsider’ sample. We discuss this aspect further in the conclusions.

Descriptive Analyses: The Policy Deviations of Swedish Politicians

Our Wordscores models allow us to identify individual positions for each MP. This position is derived from the most recent observation before a cabinet recruitment we have for an MP. Table 2 provides descriptive statistics for this deviation and for our dependent and independent variables.

Table 2. Descriptive statistics

Comment: Observations are combinations of policy fields and MPs who were considered candidates in the six cabinet formation processes. The total number of MPs coded is 812.

Figure 1 graphically illustrates MPs’ policy-field–specific deviation across the six cabinet formation processes that we study. The deviations are grouped along a politicians’ status as either ministers or MPs and along gender lines. The figure indicates that on average MPs who have been appointed a cabinet post (labeled “Minister”) had lower deviations prior to their recruitment than their unsuccessful colleagues. This finding supports our baseline expectation that MPs who deviate from their parties’ policy position in a certain policy field are less likely to be recruited to ministerial posts in the respective field.

Figure 1. Deviation from the party position for female and male ministers and MPs across cabinet formation processes.

When comparing deviations across politicians’ gender, we detect no striking differences, neither between female and male ministers, nor between female and male (nonminister) MPs. However, we expect the effect of gender on ministerial recruitment to be a complex process which is—above all—conditional to the policy field to which the respective ministry pertains. Thus, we use a multivariate analysis to test our hypotheses.

A Multivariate Analysis of Ministerial Selection

To systematically test our hypotheses, we estimate conditional logit models as described above. Table 3 presents the results for these models. Our hypotheses build on an established strand of literature which have already identified several factors related to MPs’ chances of being appointed to ministerial posts. Our argument—that intraparty positioning, gender-typed committee affiliation, and the gender-type of the respective ministry matter in addition to these established variables, requires that overall, MPs are sanctioned for their deviating behavior. This expectation is evaluated in model 1 (Table 3).

Table 3. Determinants of ministerial selection

Note: Results from conditional logistic regression models. z statistics are shown in parentheses. The dependent variable indicates whether an MP attained a ministerial portfolio. Groups are combinations of the government formation process and policy fields. The base categories for variables indicating female/male committee memberships or ministries are neutral ministries or committees, respectively. All models are restricted to MPs from the governing parties. Significance levels: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.

The effect of our variable capturing how far away the position adapted by an MP in a policy field is located compared to the mean position of her partisan colleagues (deviation in policy field) has a highly significant negative effect, thus indicating that deviation from the party line decreases an MP's chances of being recruited for a ministerial post. Model 1 also shows a positive and significant effect for female MPs, which indicates that, on a general level, female MPs were more likely to be recruited as ministers. This finding relates directly to the informal rules of gender parity in Swedish cabinets described in the previous section, that is, while cabinets exhibited (nearly) full gender parity, the share of female MPs in the Riksdag remained somewhat lower (approximately 44%) during our observation period. This translates to the higher odds for female MPs of obtaining a ministerial post in our model.

Beyond these two main findings, the model also indicates that the control variables work in an expected manner: The negative effect of age indicates that an MP's age decreases her chances of being selected as minister. However, the effect for parliamentary tenure is positive, which indicates that MPs’ chances of being recruited for a ministerial post increase with the time they spent in parliament. Taken together, MPs who started their (parliamentary) careers early were the most likely candidates for ministerial recruitment, since they combined comparatively longer career durations with lower age.Footnote ¹⁰

The variable measuring an academic education degree shows a positive significant effect for MPs who have completed tertiary education: ministers are selected from this group more frequently than from those who have less education. This finding is in line with previous ministerial selection studies in Sweden (Bäck et al. Reference Bäck, Persson, Vernby, Wockelberg, Dowding and Dumont2009).

Our measures for prominence indicate that an MP's status is an important aspect in ministerial selection. MPs occupying a party leadership position, that is, party leaders or parliamentary party group leaders, are roughly 3.5 times more likely to be recruited. The same applies for MPs who spoke frequently in plenary debates (prominence in plenary debates), which indicates that such MPs are key figures in their parties and are likely to secure ministerial posts if their parliamentary groups are involved in forming a government. Our final control variable, specialization in policy field, also indicates a significant and positive relationship. MPs who focus on a certain policy field in their plenary speeches, and are seen as “policy experts,” are more likely to be appointed to ministerial offices in this particular policy area.

Analyses of Ministerial Selection, Gender and Feminine Policy Fields

Model 2 in Table 3 extends this baseline model for an evaluation of hypotheses 1 and 2. The models therefore include binary variables and interactions for the gender types (feminine, masculine, and neutral) of the respective ministries and for the committees in which MPs served. To reiterate, our expectation from hypothesis 1 is that female MPs are more likely to be recruited for ministries that fall into a female domain of policies, that is, those of a “feminine” gender type (Krook and O'Brien Reference Krook and O'Brien2012). To evaluate this expectation, we include an interaction term between a group-level variable, the gender type of the relevant respective policy field, and an MP's gender. The effect for the interaction terms (female MP × feminine ministry and female MP × masculine ministry) both fail to attain statistical significance.Footnote ¹¹ The model thus indicates that female MPs are not generally more frequently recruited to ministries that can be considered as “feminine” policy domains and that they were also not less likely candidates for “masculine” ministries.

Turning to our second hypothesis, which states that female MPs with role-incongruent committee affiliations are less likely to succeed in securing a ministerial post, we find a positive effect for female MPs who were members of a feminine committee to be assigned a ministerial post and a negative effect for female MPs who were in masculine committees.Footnote ¹²Figure 2 graphically shows this relationship: for male MPs, the confidence intervals of the estimated effects for members of feminine, masculine, and neutral committees overlap, thus indicating that the gender type of their committees did not affect male MPs’ chances to be selected as ministers. For female MPs, in contrast, those who were members of masculine committees are less likely to become ministers than their (female) colleagues in feminine or gender-neutral committees. This finding directly corresponds to the idea of role incongruity in the sense that female MPs with role-incongruent (i.e., masculine) committee memberships are less likely to attain ministerial posts, and this finding supports our second hypothesis.

Comment: Whiskers indicate 90% confidence intervals.

Figure 2. The effect of gender and committee gender types on ministerial selection.

Analyses of Ministerial Selection, Gender, and Policy Positions

The final model (model 3) includes an interaction effect to evaluate hypothesis 3, which says that we expect the effect of deviation from the party line to be conditional on an MP's gender. More precisely, we expect that when deviating, female MPs decrease their chances of being appointed to a ministerial position more strongly than male MPs decrease their chances. Interacting our deviation variable with the gender dummy captures this relationship. As indicated by model 3, the interaction effect (female MP × deviation) is negative and significant, which supports our hypothesis. Notably, when we include our interactions between gender and deviation, the interpretation for the noninteracted deviation variable changed. Whereas in models 1 and 2 deviations indicate an effect for both genders, the effect in model 3 is for male MPs only. Thus, model 3 indicates that male MPs who deviate from the party line in their speeches do not damage their chances of being recruited as ministers in these fields in a statistically significant way. Figure 3 presents the predictive margins for this relationship.Footnote ¹³

Comment: Lighter lines indicate 90% confidence intervals.

Figure 3. The effect of gender and deviations from the party line on ministerial selection.

As Figure 3 shows, deviation negatively affects the chances of female ministers, whereas for male MPs the negative effect is too small and the uncertainty too high to argue for a negative slope at any level of deviation. In contrast, female MPs’ chances to attain ministerial posts quickly decline at low levels of deviation (i.e., below .2). At higher levels of deviation, our model even indicates a statistically significant difference between female and male MPs. Considering that most MPs did not deviate strongly (the point where our confidence intervals diverge is located roughly at the 90th percentile), this group- (or gender-) separating effect appears to be limited. Yet the slope for female MPs in Figure 2 indicates that deviation had a clear negative effect for female MPs, even when considering the small and medium levels of deviation where most observations are situated, whereas this effect is not present for male MPs. For nondeviating female MPs, chances of ministerial recruitment are, in fact, higher than for nondeviating male MPs. This situation reverses with increasing deviation so that deviating female MPs are less likely to be recruited than their deviating male colleagues.

This impression is also supported by a descriptive account: When focusing on the deviation of those MPs who were in fact recruited to ministerial posts, ministers who deviated more than the median MP were male by majority (58%), whereas ministers who deviated below the median deviation were by majority female (51%). Taken together, these data support our third hypothesis. Female MPs’ chances of becoming ministers suffer more from deviation from the party line than do their male colleagues’ chances. This finding suggests that female MPs are judged more harshly than their male counterparts, which is in line with the prediction drawn from role-congruity theory.