Claire Annesley Boeken

Historically, men have been more likely to be appointed to governing cabinets, but gendered patterns of appointment vary cross-nationally, and women's inclusion in cabinets has grown significantly over time. This book breaks new theoretical ground by conceiving of cabinet formation as a gendered, iterative process governed by rules that empower and constrain presidents and prime ministers in the criteria they use to make appointments. Political actors use their agency to interpret and exploit ambiguity in rules to deviate from past practices of appointing mostly men. When they do so, they create different opportunities for men and women to be selected, explaining why some democracies have appointed more women to cabinet than others. Importantly, this dynamic produces new rules about women's inclusion and, as this book explains, the emergence of a concrete floor, defined as a minimum number of women who must be appointed to a cabinet to ensure its legitimacy. Drawing on in-depth analyses of seven countries (Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and elite interviews, media data, and autobiographies of cabinet members, Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender offers a cross-time, cross-national study of the gendered process of cabinet formation.

This book is about the state of the German model of capitalism today. It is the first book to offer an integrated analysis of the political economy of unified Germany rather than dealing with east and west as separate entities. It challenges the standard view that Germany is lagging behind other capitalist states in the transition to a postindustrial economy, and looks in detail at the expansion of the service sector, the transformation of the industrial sector and the development of the knowledge economy in unified Germany. The book finds that Germany is indeed becoming postindustrial, but that it is not developing in any single direction. Rather, the research outlined in this book suggests that some regions perform well in services or the production of knowledge while others have successfully transformed industrial production. This variation, it is argued, is the consequence of unification as well as older economic traditions which pre-date the industrial revolution.