The change column shows whether each individual minister’s position in the cabinet was subject to change.
Table 3.1 – ACPED Variable Details
Change Category Explanation
Start This category is applied to the first cabinet for each country in the data. For all countries except South Sudan, the starting ministers are those who were in the cabinet in December 1996.
Remains Refers to a cabinet minister retaining his or her position for that particular month. The vast majority of observations, 93.7%, consist of ministers retaining their position.
Reshuffle Refers to a cabinet minister being shifted from heading one ministry to another. This category can also apply to a minister retaining their previous post but being assigned additional responsibility, either through the merging of ministries or through becoming the acting minister of an additional ministry.
New Refers to a new appointment to the executive arm of government. If someone is appointed from a lower level of government (e.g. deputy minister, MP, etc.) this is still a new appointment. If a minister resigns, is dismissed or dropped from the cabinet, upon his or her return, s/he is always coded as New, no matter how brief the interim period has been.
Dismissed Refers to a minister being dropped from the cabinet during a reshuffle, reappointed to a non-ministerial position or overtly fired from office.
Dismissed (Arrested) Applied when a minister’s dismissal is accompanied by his or her arrest.
Resigns Refers to a minister voluntarily leaving their position of their own volition.
Deceased Refers to a minister leaving government due to death, both natural and unnatural causes.
Suspended Refers to a minister being temporarily removed from his or her duties without an overt statement that this state of affairs is permanent. If the government later decides to turn the suspension into a permanent dismissal, then the minister in question is later coded as dismissed.
Returns Refers to a minister who has been suspended (not dismissed) resuming his or her position.
Removed This category only applies to leaders or co-leaders (Presidents, Commanders in Chief, de facto rulers, Vice-Presidents, Prime Ministers, etc.) who are removed from their position by force (e.g. military coup, foreign intervention, insurgency or popular
3.2 Collection Process
The data collection is divided into two phases. The first phase creates a monthly catalogue of the ministerial appointments, reshuffles and dismissals. The three primary resources for this data were Francois, Rainer and Trebbi cabinet data, the Africa South of the Sahara Yearbook, and the monthly periodical Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural series. The Africa South of the Sahara Yearbook was used to construct an annual list of ministers from 2005 onwards. Researchers read through each issue of the Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural series, which provides a list of government appointments at the formation of each new cabinet, to identify when changes in the cabinet occurred exactly. The annual list is used to deduce which ministers were dismissed at the creation of a new cabinet, and to double-check that Africa Research Bulletin has not missed any appointments or dismissals. If the annual list indicates a change in the cabinet that was not covered in the Africa Research Bulletin, Lexis Nexis database searches were used to find when the change occurred.
The second phase involved gaining information on each minister’s ethno-linguistic, regional and political affiliations. This process is still ongoing for several countries First a session of secondary research was carried out, using a number of different sources including Wikileaks, the Historical Dictionary series, electoral records, Google books, and Google scholar. Wikipedia was also consulted, but any information gained from Wikipedia was checked against other sources for corroboration. After all secondary resources were exhausted, academics or local researchers with specialist knowledge of the respective countries were consulted. This often involved local researchers relying on personal knowledge, interviewing personal connections and accessing documents not available outside of the country (e.g. such as parliamentary records). To test for accuracy, researchers were also assigned to find information that was already confirmed through secondary research.
3.3 Created Metrics
Below is a brief overview of some of the metrics which will be used in the remainder of this chapter and in subsequent chapters of the research project. This list is not exhaustive and different chapters will include different and unique metrics.
3.3.1 Cabinet Size
This metric measures the number of individual ministers that make up the cabinet/inner circle/outer circle.
3.3.2 Ethnic/Regional Representation
This metric determines how many relevant groups there are in cabinet. Relevant groups are defined as either all politically relevant ethnic categories (for ethnic representation), or all primary administrative divisions (for regional representation). The number of groups that have at least one representative in cabinet is divided by the total number of groups and multiplied by 100.
If country x has a total of 15 politically relevant ethnic categories, and 12 of these groups have at least one representative in cabinet, then the representation score would be 80 percent. This measure can be applied to the inner circle and outer circle.
3.3.3 Ethnic/Regional Disproportion
This metric determines how equitably posts are divided among the different groups within cabinet. The measure is adapted from Samuels and Snyder’s (2001) measurement of vote/constituency malapportionment.
Disproportion = (1/2)∑ ￨𝑥𝑖 − 𝑦𝑖￨ 𝑛
𝑖=1
Where sigma indicates the summation over all relevant groups, 𝑥𝑖 is the percentage of all cabinet positions allocated to group i, and 𝑦𝑖 is the percentage of population belonging to group i. Groups not included in cabinet are not considered in the calculation.
For example, if country x had four relevant groups (all included in the cabinet) and the posts are allocated as below:
Group
A B C D
Share of population (%) 40 30 20 10
Share of cabinet (%) 30 10 10 50
Here the disproportion score would be, Disproportion = (1/2)(￨30-40￨+￨10-30￨+￨10-20￨+￨50-10￨) = 40 percent. This score means that 40 percent of the cabinet posts are allocated to groups that would not receive those positions if posts were allocated in a completely proportional manner.