Collegiality and Collectivity: Cabinets, Cabinet Committees, and Cabinet Ministers

Abstract

As cabinet government is sometimes depicted as the answer to the quest for coherence and control, as a ‘government against sub-governments’ (Rose, 1980b), it is deplorable that it is such an ill-defined topic. The problem does not seem to be that scholars and practitioners of cabinet government have put forth conflicting or widely diverging definitions of the concept, but rather that we lack a definition of cabinet government that is both reasonably precise and suitable for comparisons across political systems.