The government we deserve: do ministerial appointments respond to individualization and party decline?

Abstract

This thesis performs a descriptive analysis of all ministerial appointments in Dutch cabinets between 1977-2017 in order to understand find out whether societal macro-developments such as individualization, party decline and party system fragmentation influence the preference of political parties and prime ministers for the type of experience of their ministers during government formation. Although it finds no support for this theorem, this thesis does contribute to the literature by expanding previous work into the type of ministers that take seat in Dutch government. As such, it finds that while political experience dominated up to 2002, it seems to be on its retour. This thesis attempted to find causal relationships between ministerial expertise and individualization and party decline. This analysis did not provide any usable results due to multicollinearity between the predictor-variables, but may provide some avenues for further research.