# **1. Introduction**

The number of ministers appointed to the cabinet is a frequent concern in many developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2017, Ghana’s President, Nana Akufo-Addo, appointed the largest cabinet in a quarter of a century, prompting the opposition to condemn his “elephant size” government (Reuters 2017). Conversely, when in May 2019 South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa cut the number of cabinet ministers from 36 to 28, many observers interpreted this as an attempt to tackle government corruption (Reuters 2019). Beyond these anecdotes, is there a systematic relationship between the number of ministers in the cabinet, or cabinet size, and governance outcomes? We focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, where public and media concerns about an excessive number of ministers are common, and where prior scholarship links cabinet appointments with corruption and poor governance.

Existing theoretical and empirical work documents a negative relationship between cabinet size and fiscal performance, due to the “common pool resource” problem in budgeting. In this literature, more ministers are associated with higher spending and larger deficits. Empirical work covers mostly industrialized democracies (Perotti and Kontopoulos 2002, Volkerink and de Haan 2001) but also wider set of countries including some emerging market economies and developing countries (Wehner 2010, Woo 2003). A study by LeVan and Assenov (2016) looks at SubSaharan African countries and finds that more ministries are associated with higher expenditure but not with deficits. With some exceptions discussed in the following section, outcomes beyond fiscal policy are less frequently considered. Here, we take a step towards addressing this gap.

To do so, we commence with an overview of the link between cabinet size and governance, drawing on the literature concerned with elite clientelism and related work on African politics. We then present new data on cabinet size in Sub-Saharan African countries, building on prior work by Arriola (2009), and assess their association with a series of governance measures related to corruption and the quality of public policy. Analyzing cross-national patterns as well as within-country variation over time, we find a robust correlation between cabinet size and several measures of governance in this sample. The conclusion summarizes policy implications and explores possible avenues for further research.

# **2. From cabinets to governance**

Scholars of African politics have highlighted a link between clientelism and cabinet appointments. Van de Walle (2012) distinguishes mass clientelism and elite clientelism. Mass clientelism relies on the practice of using state resources, or patronage, to provide jobs and services for mass clienteles, and usually involves party organizations and electoral politics. This type of clientelism requires considerable resources and is therefore likely to take place in richer countries, also in mature Western democracies. For poorer countries, on the other hand, clientelism is more likely to be limited to a narrower clientele, so-called elite clientelism. In SubSaharan Africa, the characteristic of elite clientelism is _prebendalism_ , or the strategic political 2