Economic Crisis and Ministers with Union Background: Nixon goes to China revisited

A central normative issue in democratic politics is the link between social diversity and representation: the extent to which different social groups are represented in parliament and the executive. To further our understanding of this issue, we need to know more about the factors that influence selection into political office. In this paper, we will study when, and under what conditions, cabinets appoint ministers with union background. In so doing, we contribute to the literature on ministerial selection, which has so far put little emphasis on investigating the role of union background when predicting the allocation of ministerial portfolios factors. Our main argument in the paper is that cabinet ministers with union background are more likely to be selected in times of economic crisis, since ministers with union background can add legitimacy to unpopular reforms and help governments reduce the risk of falling support. We evaluate this conditionaltest this argument using a new dataset on ministers’ backgrounds in Sweden for the time period: 1945-2014.