A cabinet reshuffle is when the leader of a political party changes the membership of their top team of ministers. These ministers are responsible for specific departments in government such as education, health or transport and they usually meet about once a week to discuss how the country should be run. Reshuffles are often done when someone resigns or is dismissed or when the prime minister wants to refresh his top team with new faces or to change direction or priorities.
Reshuffles also offer the opportunity to create, abolish and rename ministerial posts and to reassign responsibilities among them. They can be proactive or reactive and the level of activism of the principal (either the prime minister or the parties/coalition) plays a large role in their effect. Ceteris paribus, proactive reshuffles tend to have a more positive impact on the principal than those which are triggered by exogenous developments and conducted against his will (e.g. a replacement for a minister whose resignation is forced because of controversial comments such as the recent example in Japan where the ministry for reconstruction had to replace its minister after he made remarks about the Fukushima disaster).
The importance of this phenomenon has led observers in Westminster-type democracies to treat cabinet reshuffles as a’special case’ and to pay little attention to them in other contexts. However, with suitable conceptual and analytical tools, most, if not all, of the elements which distinguish a reshuffle in Westminster systems can also be identified in other kinds of political regimes.