Cabinets

Historical Origin and Functions

The notion of a cabinet derives from the designation “Cabinet Council,” first given in Britain by the king in 1622. The monarch counted on this inner core of privy counselors to legitimize his or her political decisions and thereby his or her duration in office. With the emergence of the modern state in the 19th century, monarchs lost power, and newly developed political parties subsequently replaced their authority. As stressed by John Mackintosh (1968), after these mass parties had come into existence in the 1860s and 1870s, the contemporary structure of the modern cabinet system became visible. Today, a cabinet is a small group of politicians (mostly ministers) responsible for political decision making in countries that have a form of government known as cabinet government (i.e., in Western and Central Eastern Europe and much of the Balkans; in many Commonwealth countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia, and Singapore; in most ex-British Caribbean and Pacific Islands; in Japan; and in Israel).

Cabinets may also exist in constitutional presidential systems (typically in the Americas), in authoritarian presidential systems (e.g., in Africa and in parts of Asia, including the Middle East), or in traditional monarchical systems (e.g., in the Middle East). In these political systems, however, members of the cabinet serve purely as advisors to the president or the monarch. They are not—as in cabinet government systems—dependent on the majority support of parliament for their duration in office or for getting legislative proposals approved.

In cabinet governments, individual members hold a collective responsibility, which stipulates that all cabinet members are bound to cabinet decisions. They may disagree with these decisions in private but must agree in public. As chairman of the cabinet, the prime minister wields a power that is generally seen as superior to the other cabinet members (“first among equals”). The cabinet members, at least its chair, are responsible to parliament and are expected to control the executive and the legislative branches.

Such cabinets can function satisfactorily only if an equilibrium is found between two opposite requirements—those of representativeness and of efficiency. As Jeffrey Cohen (1988) notes, the [Page 184]requirement of representativeness means that decision making is in the hands of the whole cabinet and not, as, for instance, in the presidential system, in the hands of the leader of the government alone. A cabinet government has therefore to be “collective”: Decisions are taken “together.” This requirement of “togetherness” is regarded as central to the cabinet system because such a mode of operation is felt to be a more liberal, more democratic, and therefore a superior form of decision making.

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