that are closely linked to the predictions generated in the previous section. These include the measures that relate to the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies (Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality) and the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them (Rule of Law, Control of Corruption). The prior discussion of elite clientelism suggests that cabinet size should be negatively associated with all four of these measures.

There is an extensive debate around the validity and methodology of the WGI (Anheier et al. 2018, Apaza 2009). Whether these measures capture distinct concepts is disputed, and Langbein and Knack (2010) conclude that they appear to measure the same broad concept. For robustness, we also use a novel corruption index from the Varieties of Democracy ( _V-Dem_ ) project that captures executive corruption and is based on expert scoring (see also Bäck et al. 2019).<sup>8</sup> Finally, we include the well-known Corruption Perceptions Index produced by Transparency International.<sup>9</sup> It would be ideal to have objective measures of corruption and governance. However, most objective measures are country specific – such as audit outcomes indicating corruption (Ferraz and Finan 2008) or amounts of funding diverted from authorized purposes (Olken 2007). Hence, perception-based measures remain important. To ensure comparability and to aid interpretation, we rescale these measures to a theoretical range from zero to 100.<sup>10</sup> We draw on the World Bank/Inter-American Development Bank’s _Database of Political Institutions_ to control for a number of underlying pressures on cabinet size identified in the preceding section. We include the partisan fractionalization of the executive, as multi-party coalitions may lead to increased cabinet size to accommodate politicians from across the different parties that participate in the government. Next, we use indicators of whether the chief executive or defense minister are military officers. A strong presence of military officers may suggest threats to the stability of the government, which presidents might attempt to manage by enlarging the number of ministers to accommodate important allies and potential rivals. In addition, we use the coding by Cruz and Keefer (2015) to account for the presence of programmatic parties, which can limit clientelism and promote cohesive policies.

In addition, we measure the number of years the chief executive has been in office. A long tenure may suggest that elite clientelism is particularly entrenched and highly personalized. At the time of writing, the longest-serving president in the world is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, who took office in 1979. Equatorial Guinea is also among the worst countries in the world on several governance indicators – in 2014, for instance, it had the worst score of all countries in our sample on the Control of Corruption measure. Next, to account for the possibility that corruption responds to electoral pressures, we control for the number of years before the end of the current electoral term. Further, it is possible that close links between the

> 8 We also used a second index that captures wider public sector corruption and obtained very similar results. In our sample, the correlation between the _V-Dem_ executive and public sector corruption indices is .82.

> 9 In addition, we worked with the more recent Ibrahim Index of African Governance. The results obtained are very similar to the ones we report, but we do not include them here as the data only start in 2008.

> 10 The units of the WGI are those of a standard normal random variable, with zero mean, unit standard deviation, and ranging approximately from ‐2.5 to 2.5 (Kaufmann et al. 2010: 9). Some extreme scores are outside this range. In our sample, five scores are slightly below zero on our rescaled Regulatory Quality and Rule of Law indicators (see appendix 1). All five of these are for Somalia and fall between 2006 and 2009, a period of civil war.

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