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We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in Britain from 1945 to 1997. We focus on three sets of attributes (i) personal characteristics of the minister; (ii) political characteristics of the minister; and (iii) characteristics pertaining to the government in which the minister serves. We find that educational background increases ministers' capacity to survive, that female ministers have lower hazard rates and older ministers have higher hazard rates. Experienced ministers have higher hazard rates than newly appointed ministers. Ministerial rank increases a minister's capacity to survive, with full cabinet members having the lowest hazard rates in our sample. We use different strategies to control for the characteristics of the government the minister serves in. Our results are robust to any of these controls.

Government ministers in Parliamentary democracies are career politicians for whom public service is an important source of motivation. The length of their tenure is controlled by the Prime Minister. We test a simple Principal-Agent model of parliamentary government in which the Prime Minister evaluates her ministers according to information available to her that is related to their performance. We study the effects of individual and collective ministerial performance on the length of time a minister serves in British government over the period 194597. We use the number of resignation calls for a minister as an individual performance indicator and the cumulative number of such calls as an indicator of government performance. A minister's hazard rate increases sharply after the first individual call for resignation and is decreasing in the cumulative number of resignation calls. These results are consistent with the Principal-Agent model and with the use of relative performance evaluation by the Prime Minister. Adapted from the source document.

The Editors and publishers apologize for the lack of distinction in Figures 2 and 3 printed on pages 255–6 of this volume of the Journal, and offer the following as replacements:

We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in Britain from 1945 to 1997. We focus on three sets of attributes (i) personal characteristics of the minister; (ii) political characteristics of the minister; and (iii) characteristics pertaining to the government in which the minister serves. We find that educational background increases ministers' capacity to survive, that female ministers have lower hazard rates and older ministers have higher hazard rates. Experienced ministers have higher hazard rates than newly appointed ministers. Ministerial rank increases a minister's capacity to survive, with full cabinet members having the lowest hazard rates in our sample.We use different strategies to control for the characteristics of the government the minister serves in. Our results are robust to any of these controls.

Using evidence from the Second Reform Act, introduced in the United Kingdom in 1867, we analyze the impact of extending the vote to the unskilled urban population on the composition of the Cabinet and the background characteristics of Members of Parliament. Exploiting the sharp change in the electorate caused by franchise extension, we separate the effect of reform from that of underlying constituency‐level traits correlated with the voting population. Our results are broadly supportive of a claim first made by Laski (1928): there is no causal effect of the reform on the political role played by the British aristocracy.

We model two aspects of executives in parliamentary democracies: Decision-making authority is assigned to individuals, and private information is aggregated through communication. When information is relevant to all policies and communication is private, all decisions should be centralized to a single politician. A government that holds cabinet meetings, where information is made available to all decision makers, outperforms one where communication is private: A multimember cabinet can be optimal; it need not be single peaked around the most moderate politician or ideologically connected. Centralization is nonmonotonic in the degree of ideological divergence. In a large cabinet, all power should be given to the most moderate politician. Even when uncertainty is policy specific and a single politician is informed on each policy, power should never be fully decentralized. Our model provides a justification for centralized authority and cabinet meetings that enhance the quality of policy. Adapted from the source document.