by Torun Dewan and David P Myatt.
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American Political Science Review, 101(1), pp. 63-77, February 2007.
Abstract: Empirical evidence suggests that a prime minister benefits from firing ministers who are involved in political scandals. We explore a model in which scandals are positively related to policy activism, so that a prime minister may wish to protect a minister from resignation calls. We find that protection can sometimes discourage activism: it enhances the value of a minister’s career and hence encourages him to “sit tight” by moderating his activities. On the other hand, an exogenous increase in exposure to scandals may lead a minister to “live for today” by pursuing controversial policies. The prime minister’s ability to protect ministers is limited by her short-term incentive to fire. She may, however, enhance her credibility by building a collective reputation with the cabinet; the heterogeneity of cabinet membership plays an important role.
In his Notes from the Editor section of the Feburary 2007 issue of the APSR, Editor Lee Sigelman summarized the paper:
If offered the opportunity to purchase an improved public image for a small price, rational politicians presumably would get in line to buy. Yet in “Scandal, Protection, and Recovery in the Cabinet,” Torun Dewan and David P. Myatt argue that prime ministers face a dilemma when they are considering firing cabinet members who are involved in scandals. The dilemma arises in the prime minister’s choice between protecting or sacrificing cabinet members, for scandal might erupt from personal misbehavior or from the pursuit of policy initiatives that the prime minister favors. In the age of the negative campaign, the line between policy and personal considerations is not clearly demarcated. Importantly, Dewan and Myatt are interested not just in whether a prime minister should fire a cabinet member, though that tactical issue is interesting in itself. Rather, they probe the conditions under which governments can successfully implement a policy agenda. Thus, beyond the important insights that it offers into both parliamentary and presidential cabinet governance, this analysis offers some important and nonobvious lessons for broader considerations of governmental effectiveness.
