Abstract
<p>In political science, government change is typically understood as a shift in who holds power, even though new cabinets may formally include many members of the previous governing elite. In this study, I differentiate institutional turnover from personnel turnover by reconstructing transitions between successive governments using the WhoGov dataset. I introduce an Executive Personnel Continuity Index (EPCI) that measures the similarity between outgoing and incoming ministerial rosters. I argue that leader succession functions as an executive reset: new leaders have incentives to establish control, reward loyalists, and signal political change. Party organizations, however, can insulate incumbent ministers from replacement. I test these expectations using descriptive evidence, country and transition-year fixed effects, equal-country weighting, entropy balancing and a transition-centered comparison with the outgoing government's own pre-transition continuity. Across the principal specifications, leader replacement is associated with a decline of approximately one-third in executive personnel continuity. The decline is limited under same-party succession, substantially larger across party boundaries and greatest under complete partisan alternation. The findings therefore indicate that a change in government translates into a substantive transformation of the elite mainly when it also unsettles the leadership and party bases of executive power, and this has significant consequences for political systems worldwide.</p>