Accepted Preprint of the Edited Article Published As Fischer, Jörn, André Kaiser and Ingo Rohlfing
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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 https://doi.org/10.1080/01402380600842296 The author information on the title page below might be outdated.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. Who shall take on political responsibility if not the Minister?’1 ‘I do not have resignation in mind....I did not do or fail to do anything that was not in full accordance with the duties of my office.’2 After a special police forces mission against the terrorist Rote Armee Fraktion members Wolfgang Grams and Birgit Hogefeld in which Grams was killed under circumstances not fully explained and an officer died, the two officeholders of the ministries overseeing the agencies3 involved drew very different conclusions. This constellation nicely illustrates the starting point of our analysis. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility, as underlined in Article 65 of the German constitution, does not help to explain under what circumstances cabinet ministers4 are actually obliged to resign. The simple reason for this is that there are no formal rules on what this rather vague doctrine implies. Therefore it is a mixture of external pressure, internal interpretations of this doctrine by the minister concerned as well as by other actors in government, and political considerations by the Federal Chancellor which ultimately decide whether a minister has to go. At present there exists virtually no study that deals systematically with patterns and determinants of ministerial 1 resignations in Germany. It is thus unclear what drives ministerial resignations if it is not ministerial responsibility. Given the lack of research on this topic, our article has two aims. First, we will describe patterns of ministerial resignations in Germany with regard to the frequency of such events, the extent to which resignation issues are influenced by political constellations (competition between government and opposition, intra-government relations between coalition partners), and the issues that initiate resignation debates. Second, we will develop an explanatory model in order to shed some light on which factors are crucial for ministerial resignations. Our exploration is based on a data collection of 111 resignation events in the period from Willy Brandt’s first cabinet in October 1969 to the end of Gerhard Schröder’s second cabinet in October 2005. We define a resignation event as any call for resignation addressed to a cabinet minister that is reported on pages one or two of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading German national newspaper. By doing so we cover not only all resignations where ministers were pushed out of office (14 cases between 1969 and 2005), but can also be confident of including serious resignation debates resulting in the minister’s continuing to hold office (97 cases between 1969 and 2005). Considering these non-events alongside events is of utmost importance for our explanatory model. Only by catching non-events alongside events can we avoid a selection of cases on the dependent variable (Geddes 2003: 89–129). We begin with the argument that ministerial resignations neither follow unsystematic, event-specific patterns (null hypothesis) nor can they be explained solely by reference to the doctrine of ministerial responsibility (classical responsibility hypothesis), which states that ministers must resign when a personal or a serious departmental error occurs under their authority. Rather, they follow a systematic political logic. Here we test two arguments. In a simple model (Weller 1999: 62), ministers must resign whenever the government and, in particular, the Federal Chancellor perceives the political costs of a minister staying in office to be higher than the benefits of keeping the status quo (cost–benefit hypothesis). A compatible but more complex model assumes that ministers generally do not have to resign as a consequence of singular events that imply costs for the government but can accumulate resignation events, which reach a threshold at which the ministers’ power to resist is so much weakened, and political costs so much increased, that they are forced to leave office (threshold hypothesis). This explicitly political explanation of resignation events is modelled in decision-theoretic terms. We focus on the Federal Chancellor as the one actor who is equipped with the power to keep a tarnished minister in office, to ask him to resign ‘voluntarily’, or to simply dismiss him. All other action in the process of a resignation debate is interpreted as influencing the Federal Chancellor’s political calculation of costs and benefits. One could also model the process and the outcome of resignation debates in game- theoretic terms. This would more explicitly incorporate strategic interactions. However, so far the data for such a model are not available. 2 Based on statistical analysis, we find that the outcome of resignation debates, that is whether or not ministers must resign, is determined mainly by two factors: the specific resignation issue and the interplay between the position taken by the Federal Chancellor and the public concerning a demand for resignation. Resignations follow systematic patterns. However, these patterns are not compatible with the ministerial responsibility doctrine for two reasons. First, such errors account for only seven out of the 14 resignations in the period covered here. Second, and more interestingly, personal errors have only once led to an actual resignation, while departmental errors have done so in six cases. Hence, resignation events do not follow a managerial logic with the minister concerned losing office automatically after an error has been detected and publicised. We find that ‘extrapolitical’ resignation issues, having mainly to do with misdemeanours in favour of the minister or of third parties, are much more dangerous for a political future. Finally, our evidence rejects the threshold hypothesis and confirms a simple cost–benefit hypothesis. Our multicausal analysis puts the bivariate results partly into perspective. The results corroborate the finding that the Federal Chancellor and the minister’s party are central for the outcome of resignation debates. But the media and public do not seem to be directly relevant when considered in conjunction with other factors. We proceed as follows. In the following section we provide an overview of the concept of ministerial resignation and develop a classification of those events. In section three we present the data and methods being used, and in section four we report our findings. We first describe the patterns of ministerial resignation events we find in Germany and then employ statistical methods as well as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Ragin 1987) to detect the main explanatory factors for resignation outcomes. Finally, we recapitulate the main results and suggest avenues for future research. A Classification of Ministerial Resignations There are ‘fifty ways to leave your lover’,5 but only five ways to lose your office as a cabinet minister (see Figure 1). First, a minister may fall victim to a general cabinet reshuffle. Second, the minister may lose office as a consequence of his party leaving government. Third, the minister may step down because of some kind of pressure resulting from a resignation discussion in public. Fourth, a minister can be pulled out of office if he is offered a political post outside cabinet – for example a leading party position or an important job in an international organisation. Finally, the minister might disagree with government policy or have other, politically neutral, reasons for resigning.6 The first two types are ordinary discontinuations and of little interest to resignation research (Kam and Indridason 2005), whereas the other three types are extraordinary discontinuations and, therefore, relevant to the analysis of resignations of ministers. We define resignation as a premature and non-scheduled 3 discontinuation of a minister’s term in cabinet.7 Resignations can