A cabinet reshuffle refers to the change in ministerial positions within a given government administration. These changes may be motivated by various reasons. For example, a prime minister and coalition party leaders might aim to refresh their top teams by introducing new MPs into the cabinet or reassigning portfolios to reallocate priorities and competences. They might also seek to dismiss or demote ministers who have been associated with scandals or whose public image has been harmed by negative developments. A reshuffle can thus serve as a tool for the control of ministers’ political performance, as a means to enforce discipline in complicated departments or as a way to limit interparty conflicts and preserve general equilibria in the cabinet (Kam and Indridason 2008).
Reshuffles might also be used to impose policy choices on specific ministers in complex ministries by replacing them with others who share the principal’s views on specific issues. The scope of reshuffles – whether they are merely reactive or proactively driven – is therefore crucial in determining their overall effects.
Although previous research has offered valuable distinctions in terms of the timing and scope of reshuffles, other key features have so far largely escaped comparative scrutiny. This article offers a novel definition of reshuffles and develops a typology of them based on several criteria. It then shows the usefulness of these distinctions by presenting a comparative assessment of reshuffle landscapes in four major West European parliamentary democracies.