Cabinet & Government

What is in scope

Senior appointed positions in the executive branch — Cabinet Secretaries, Attorneys General, Foreign Ministers in non-Westminster systems, and equivalent appointed roles. Distinct from electoral politics: these positions are nominated by the head of government and confirmed (in most systems) by a legislative body or cabinet vote.

Why this domain matters

The selection mechanism here is concentrated. A small number of people make the nomination decision, another small body confirms, and the public record of the selection — the announcement, the hearings, the vote — is fully visible. This is the cleanest place in the dataset to ask whether the selection process has shifted, because the inputs are identifiable and few.

The appointment record at the United States State Department is one of the dataset's clearest single-institution patterns: three consecutive women Secretaries of State from 1997 to 2013 (Albright, Rice, Clinton), spanning two parties and three administrations, with no male holder between them. The pattern existed in a domain where two presidential decisions and two Senate votes were the entire selection mechanism for those three appointments.

Cabinet positions also include domains created by reorganisation — the United States Department of Homeland Security, established in 2002, has had two of six Secretaries be women (Napolitano, Nielsen) within a single decade, against zero before its creation.