Facing the Crisis: Expert and Non-partisan Ministers in Southern European Democracies

In the last decades,  a new trend of ministerial selection emerged in Southern Europe, with an increased number of appointees in party governments being recruited from outside the realm of politics. Also, the current financial crisis favoured the formation of a few technocratic cabinets. In this context, Southern European democracies are relevant cases for comparison, because expert and non-partisan ministers (usually described as the independents) are to be found in large numbers. This paper investigates the determinants of this pattern of ministerial recruitment, and in assessing the main hypothesis postulated in the literature, operationalises the analytical distinction between politicians and experts, establishing their number and evolution over time, and sketches a tentative profile of both ministerial types, highlighting a few significant differences and contrasts.