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Record W4412660314 · doi:10.1093/afraf/adaf017

Shuffled and Shortchanged? The Gender Gap in Cabinet Shuffles in Africa

2025· article· en· W4412660314 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueAfrican Affairs · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGender Diversity and Inequality
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Calgary
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsCabinet (room)Political scienceGender studiesGeographySociologyArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This article examines gendered patterns of cabinet appointments and shuffles by African heads of state. While a handful of previous studies have systematically analysed how regime type influences cabinet reshuffles in African autocracies, the gender dynamics of cabinet survival and replacement in the region remain underexplored. Using a cross-national dataset of 3,829 ministerial appointments from 1990 to 2021, I model the impact of individual-level factors on survival probabilities and cabinet shuffles. The findings reveal that women serve shorter tenures than men, even in high-prestige portfolios, but survival probabilities are not statistically related to gender when controlling for age, credentials, and political and socioeconomic factors. However, when cabinets are shuffled, women are significantly more likely than men to be succeeded by someone of the other gender. This study contributes to research on gender and cabinet politics by showing that, beyond political and socio-economic variables, individual-level factors significantly shape cabinet survival and shuffles in Africa.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.830
Threshold uncertainty score0.994

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.117
GPT teacher head0.300
Teacher spread0.183 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it