The Selection of Cabinet Ministers in the Australian Federal Parliament

Abstract

The two fundamental questions addressed in this thesis are 1) what are the characteristics that are associated with an Australian federal parliamentarian becoming a cabinet minister, and 2) how do these characteristics help a parliamentarian become a cabinet minister? I examine the standard representational and institutional explanations for cabinet appointment decisions such as geography, party/faction, gender and house (Senate vs House of Representatives) and find they do not account for more than 25% of cabinet appointments. I therefore turn to individual characteristics of cabinet ministers. I use education, linguistic/cognitive style, and biographical data to develop a classification model. Using data mining, I isolate three characteristics that explain a high proportion of the appointments to cabinet over the period under examination. These variables are: i) having a legal qualification: ii) entering parliament at an early age: and iii) using abstract language. These three variables explain approximately 78% of cabinet appointments over the period under investigation. I argue that these variables are associated with cabinet appointment because they tap into a particular set of cognitive and behavioural characteristics that are beneficial in demonstrating cabinet potential. An important insight from the analysis is that, in selecting parliamentarians to serve in cabinet, personal factors are more important than representational factors.