Cabinets and Decision-Making Processes: Re-Assessing the Literature

When it comes to illustrate how cabinets work and to classify them, one very promising way is to look at their internal decision-making processes. In this paper, I give a comprehensive picture of cabinets in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems on this basis. In particular, in the first part, I review what the literature has proposed in this respect. Secondly, after illustrating some shortcomings of the works at issue, I revise a famous Andeweg’s proposal, providing an amended typology of cabinets based on two dimensions. For each of the eight ideal-types stemming from it, some empirical examples are illustrated.