“The President’s Prerogative”? The Cabinet Appointment Process in Ghana and the Implications for Gender Parity Gretchen Bauer University of Delaware Akosua K. Darkwah University of Ghana This article seeks to understand why Ghana, unlike several other African countries, has seen relatively few women appointed as ministers to the cabinet since the transition to democracy. We draw on Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet’s 2019 book Cabinets, Ministers and Gender, which provides an in-depth analysis of the cabinet appointment process in seven democracies (but no African cases) and demonstrates that the cabinet appointment process is gendered — that is, men and women have different (and unequal) opportunities to be appointed as cabinet ministers. This article covers Ghana’s Fourth Republic, during which women’s presence in cabinets has increased slowly but steadily. We rely on media reports from five recent presidential administrations and semistructured, in-depth interviews with selected informants, as well as other primary and secondary sources. We find that while Ghana has a fairly empowered president who could appoint a gender parity cabinet, the formal and informal rules governing the selection of cabinet ministers — for example, those related to regional balance and “minister MPs”— work against more women in the cabinet. Keywords: Women cabinet ministers, women in politics, Ghana, cabinet ministers in Africa We would like to acknowledge the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana, which hosted Gretchen Bauer for a Senior Fellowship in late 2019, during which time the research for this article was completed. We would like to thank Professor Abena Oduro and Dr. Hassan Wahab for assistance in arranging some interviews. We appreciate the helpful comments of anonymous reviewers of this article. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association doi:10.1017/S1743923X21000088 1743-923X Politics & Gender, (2021), page 1 of 28 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X21000088 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Delaware, on 20 Apr 2021 at 20:46:45, subject to the Cambridge Core terms