Political science has long been concerned about the relation between economic performance and government survival, whereas less attention has been paid at the survival of individual ministers. In this paper we follow Berlinski et al. (2010) and explore to what extent minister's survival is affected by individual and collective performance during times of economic crisis. We test the argument that PMs select and de-select their cabinet ministers on the basis of their performance. To evaluate such claims, we use a unique data-set on all ministerial appointments and exits made in the Swedish and German cabinets between 1950 and 2010, combined with several sources on ministerial performance during times of crisis, including the coding of so called "resignation calls" drawn from newspapers, and polls measuring the performance of individual ministers and cabinets. Using these data, proportional hazard models are estimated that condition on both individual and aggregate level attributes and their interaction.
