Modelling Cabinet Networks in Parliamentary Democracies

Parliamentary democracies represent a common type of governance structure in numerous countries. While details vary from one country to another, the structure of a parliamentary democracy entails having cabinet ministers who each have a specific portfolio of policy interests, such as healthcare, industry, or education. A set of ministers forms a government, and such governments can change due to elections, political scandals, or health problems. A great deal of work has already explored specific types of ministers, such as prime ministers and foreign ministers, including their survival rates and levels of experience. What is absent from this research, however, is analysis of the network structures surrounding cabinets, and how these structures vary over time. This research project focuses on building mathematical models that incorporate the network structure of ministerial cabinets in twelve parliamentary democracies, analyzing whether such network information can be used to build a comparative analysis of parliamentary democracies or help predict survival rates of cabinet ministers. Governmental and ministerial models are built to analyze cabinet evolution at the country and individual levels. The conclusions reached by both types of models show that network information is extremely useful in predicting both the countryand individual-level qualities of such democracies, including rates of incumbents in governments, as well as political survival rates of individual ministers.