Will personal votes matter for ministers? Electoral causes and consequences of cabinet committee membership

Martin (2016) found "holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes." In so, parties are not entirely unitary actors. To advance this point, I propose that cabinets should not be considered unitary either. Rather, cabinets are hierarchical, and cabinet committees mark a clear demarcation line of this hierarchy. In this paper, I propose and investigate two claims. First, personal votes will increase ministers’ probability of being appointed to central cabinet committees. Second, cabinet committee members enjoy an electoral advantage compared to non-members. A dataset on Danish ministers‘ personal votes from 16 elections from 1977 to 2022 is studied to explore these claims. The results only partly support these claims. A higher number of total personal votes will increase probability of appointment to the Coordination Committee. On the contrary, membership of the Economic Committee appears to be an electoral disadvantage.