Cabinet reshuffles, the promotion or demotion of ministers within a cabinet, are politically important events. They shape intra-governmental relations, intensifying or helping to resolve cabinet conflicts. They are an instrument of leadership for party leaders to reward or demote their representatives, and they can be used to increase government efficiency and trigger policy change. In an era of increasing personalization of politics, the public is incredibly interested in any ministerial personnel-related news, fuelling the rise of ‘cabinet gossip’ and turning cabinet reshuffles into events of undisputed political relevance.
Reshuffles are most common in parliamentary systems where cabinet members are drawn from the legislative branch of government. They are less common in systems with a more separated executive and legislative branch, because it is more difficult to move ministers between departments. Reshuffles can also be used to create, abolish and rename departments and to reshape the structure of cabinet portfolios to reflect new priorities or for reasons of administrative efficiency.
Reshuffles can be a powerful tool for exercising leadership in a cabinet but can also reveal weaknesses. Ministerial churn can damage the capacity for a minister to build up expertise about their department, and it makes it harder for parliament to hold them accountable for the policy they oversee. Excessive reshuffles can also backfire, as they can send critical rivals to the backbenches where they are free to criticise the government openly and undermine a prime minister’s authority. Nevertheless, despite the apparent resistance of cabinet reshuffles to comparison and identification of firmly established patterns, they are an important feature of governance and leader behaviour in most contemporary political systems and can be studied comparatively (for more on this, see Helms et al. 2022). The contributions in this special collection, ranging from feminist to rational choice institutionalism, aim to lay the foundation for a genuinely comparative study of cabinet reshuffles.