Ministers and Partisan Affiliation. Methodological proposal applied to the Argentine case

Partisan affiliation of ministers is a key analytical dimension in the study of government, cabinets being an integral aspect of the most basic categorizations of the literature. Here we argue that the most widespread operational criterion for dealing with the phenomenon, valid for a large part of consolidated parliamentary democracies, may prove inefficient and inadequate for systems with strong heads of government and fluid political organizations like the Latin American presidential regimes. The article identifies four operational challenges associated with the standard modality of codifying partisan ministers; proposes a methodological strategy to account for them, and discusses their practical application with an exploratory analysis of the Argentine case.