Accepted preprint of the edited article published as Fischer, Jörn, André Kaiser and Ingo Rohlfing (2006): The Push and Pull of Ministerial Resignations in Germany, 1969 – 2005. West European Politics 29 (4): 709-735. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402380600842296 The author information on the title page below might be outdated. Check for current information on Ingo Rohfing: ORCID: 0000-0001-8715-4771 This file is licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). 0 The Push and Pull of Ministerial Resignations in Germany, 1969–2005 Jörn Fischer (University of Cologne) André Kaiser (University of Cologne, correspondence:
[email protected]) Ingo Rohlfing (University of Cologne) When and why are cabinet ministers forced out of office? We argue that ministerial resignations cannot be understood as mechanistic consequences of serious personal or departmental errors as the classical responsibility hypothesis implies. Rather, they follow a systematic political logic. Cabinet ministers have to resign whenever the prime minister perceives the political costs of a minister staying in office to be higher than the benefits of keeping the status quo. We test this argument with resignation events in Germany in the period 1969 to 2005. Based on detailed data collection, we find 111 resignation events, i.e. serious public discussions about a cabinet minister’s future, 14 of which ended in resignation. These data are analysed employing statistical as well as Qualitative Comparative Analysis based on Boolean algebra to detect patterns of ministerial resignations. ‘I resign today from my office as Home Secretary....Quite rightly there exists in Germany the concept of political responsibility.