ABSTRACT This article adds to studies of why ministers lose their posts due to political scandals while a government is still in office. It examines the ministerial resignation process in terms of accountability concepts, using the resignations of eight ministers in the Norwegian Støre government (2021–2025) as examples. The ministers in question were forced to resign because of financial scandals, impartiality issues, plagiarism, and “MeToo”. All the cases were revealed by the media, and most of the ministers left quickly after negative media coverage. Their strategies were reactive and mainly defensive. Their resignations were informed by multiple and conflictual accountability dimensions. There was an interplay between vertical political accountability to the PM and horizontal societal accountability in which the media played a central role. Felt accountability by the ministers themselves likewise influenced the resignation processes. Other features informing the resignation processes included inappropriateness, reputation management, blame avoidance, and the environmental context.
Christensen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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