cabinet

/kab"euh nit/, n.

1. a piece of furniture with shelves, drawers, etc., for holding or displaying items: a curio cabinet; a file cabinet.

2. a wall cupboard used for storage, as of kitchen utensils or toilet articles: a kitchen cabinet; a medicine cabinet.

3. a piece of furniture containing a radio or television set, usually standing on the floor and often having a record player or a place for phonograph records.

4. (often cap.) a council advising a president, sovereign, etc., esp. the group of ministers or executives responsible for the government of a nation.

5. (often cap.) (in the U.S.) an advisory body to the president, consisting of the heads of the 13 executive departments of the federal government.

6. a small case with compartments for valuables or other small objects.

7. a small chamber or booth for special use, esp. a shower stall.

8. a private room.

9. a room set aside for the exhibition of small works of art or objets d'art.

10. Also called cabinet wine. a dry white wine produced in Germany from fully matured grapes without the addition of extra sugar.

11. New Eng. (chiefly Rhode Island and Southern Massachusetts). a milk shake made with ice cream.

12. Archaic. a small room.

13. Obs. a small cabin.

adj.

14. pertaining to a political cabinet: a cabinet meeting.

15. private; confidential; secret.

16. pertaining to a private room.

17. of suitable value, beauty, or size for a private room, small display case, etc.: a cabinet edition of Milton.

18. of, pertaining to, or used by a cabinetmaker or in cabinetmaking.

19. Drafting. designating a method of projection (cabinet projection) in which a three-dimensional object is represented by a drawing (cabinet drawing) having all vertical and horizontal lines drawn to exact scale, with oblique lines reduced to about half scale so as to offset the appearance of distortion. Cf. axonometric, isometric (def. 5), oblique (def. 13). See illus. under isometric.

[1540-50; < MF, equiv. to cabine hut, room on a ship (of uncert. orig., but frequently alleged to be alter. of cabane CABIN) + -et -ET]

Syn. 4. advisers, ministry, counselors.

* * *

Body of senior ministers or, in the U.S., advisers to a chief executive, whose members also serve as the heads of government departments.

The cabinet has become an integral part of parliamentary government in many countries, though its form varies. It developed from the British Privy Council, when King Charles II and Queen Anne regularly consulted the council's leading members to reach decisions before meeting with the unwieldy full council. The modern British cabinet consists of departmental ministers, drawn from the members of Parliament and appointed by the prime minister. In the U.S., the cabinet serves as an advisory group to the president without the sanction of law. Members' appointments are subject to Senate approval, and the U.S. Constitution sets cabinet members' order of succession to the presidency. The cabinet includes the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Education, Energy, and Veterans Affairs and the attorney general.

* * *

▪ furniture

      in furniture design, originally a small room for displaying precious objects and later a piece of furniture composed of a network of small drawers commonly enclosed by a pair of doors. Cabinets were first used in Italy during the late Renaissance. In many parts of Europe, cabinets became the most sumptuous pieces of furniture, with great displays of marquetry, carving, inlay, and gilding. Some cabinets were placed on stands, others on chests. Themselves objects of art, cabinets were popular for storing collections of china, coins, shells, and curiosities.

      By the early 16th century, cabinets were in use in France and England. The French style was based on architectural lines, often executed in walnut and sometimes elaborately decorated with bas–reliefs, ivory, or mosaics. The earliest English examples, small and mounted on stands, were plentiful among the wealthy by the 17th century. After the Restoration (1660), cabinets were used as decorative objects, and their embellishments included walnut veneers, floral marquetry, needlework, and japanning (oriental–style lacquerwork). A symmetrical arrangement of drawers surrounded a small, central cupboard, in which it was common to find a temple-like structure, with columns backed by mirrors that increased the apparent perspective. Many Chinese and Japanese lacquer cabinets were imported into England during Charles II's reign and were mounted on exuberantly carved stands that were gilded or silvered. In the 18th century and later, many cabinets were fitted with glass shelves to display china.

      Inlaid cabinets were a specialty of Antwerp and southern Germany in the mid-17th century. One of the most famous was the “Wrangelschrank,” taken as booty in the Thirty Years' War by the Swedish count Carl Gustav Wrangel. Made in Augsburg in 1566, it was decorated with boxwood carvings and outstanding pictorial marquetry.

▪ government

      in political systems, a body of advisers to a chief of state who also serve as the heads of government departments. The cabinet has become an important element of government wherever legislative powers have been vested in a parliament, but its form differs markedly in various countries, the two most striking examples being the United Kingdom and the United States.

      The cabinet system of government originated in Great Britain. The cabinet developed from the Privy Council in the 17th and early 18th centuries when that body grew too large to debate affairs of state effectively. The English monarchs Charles II (reigned 1660–85) and Anne (1702–14) began regularly consulting leading members of the Privy Council in order to reach decisions before meeting with the more unwieldy full council. By the reign of Anne, the weekly, and sometimes daily, meetings of this select committee of leading ministers had become the accepted machinery of executive government, and the Privy Council's power was in inexorable decline. After George I (1714–27), who spoke little English, ceased to attend meetings with the committee in 1717, the decision-making process within that body, or cabinet, as it was now known, gradually became centred on a chief, or prime (prime minister), minister. This office began to emerge during the long chief ministry (1721–42) of Sir Robert Walpole and was definitively established by Sir William Pitt later in the century.

      The passage of the Reform Bill in 1832 clarified two basic principles of cabinet government: that a cabinet should be composed of members drawn from the party or political faction that holds a majority in the House of Commons (Commons, House of) and that a cabinet's members are collectively responsible to the Commons for their conduct of the government. Henceforth no cabinet could maintain itself in power unless it had the support of a majority in the Commons. Unity in a political party proved the best way to organize support for a cabinet within the House of Commons, and the party system thus developed along with cabinet government in England.

      In Great Britain today, the cabinet consists of about 15 to 25 members, or ministers, appointed by the prime minister, who in turn has been appointed by the monarch on the basis of his ability to command a majority of votes in the Commons. Though formerly empowered to select the cabinet, the sovereign is now restricted to the mere formal act of inviting the head of Parliament's majority party to form a government. The prime minister must put together a cabinet that represents and balances the various factions within his own party (or within a coalition of parties). Cabinet members must all be members of Parliament, as must the prime minister himself. The members of a cabinet head the principal government departments, or ministries, such as Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and the Exchequer (treasury). Other ministers may serve without portfolio or hold sinecure offices and are included in the cabinet on account of the value of their counsel or debating skills. The cabinet does much of its work through committees headed by individual ministers, and its overall functioning is coordinated by the Secretariat, which consists of career civil servants. The cabinet usually meets in the prime minister's official residence at 10 Downing Street in London.

      Cabinet ministers are responsible for their departments, but the cabinet as a whole is accountable to Parliament for its actions, and its individual members must be willing and able to publicly defend the cabinet's policies. Cabinet members can freely disagree with each other within the secrecy of cabinet meetings, but once a decision has been reached, all are obligated to support the cabinet's policies, both in the Commons and before the general public. The loss of a vote of confidence or the defeat of a major legislative bill in the Commons can mean a cabinet's fall from power and the collective resignation of its members. Only rarely are individual ministers disavowed by their colleagues and forced to accept sole responsibility for their policy initiatives; such was the case with Sir Samuel Hoare's resignation in 1935 over his proposed appeasement of Fascist Italy. Despite the need for consensus and collective action within a cabinet, ultimate decision-making power rests in the prime minister as the leader of his party.

      Various other member countries of the Commonwealth, notably India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, maintain cabinet systems of government that are closely related to that developed in Great Britain.

      In Continental Europe the cabinet, or council of ministers, similarly became an intrinsic part of parliamentary systems of government, though with some differences from the British system. Modern cabinets first appeared in Europe during the 19th century with the gradual spread of constitutional government. Monarchs had previously used members of their court circles to carry out various administrative functions, but the establishment of constitutional rule endowed a king's ministers with a new status. This was largely due to the creation of elected parliaments whose approval was needed for budgetary matters and legislative acts. Ministers now came to share with the king responsibility for the processes of government, and it became their task to defend policy proposals in parliament. The power to choose these ministers gradually shifted from the king to elected prime ministers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

      Traditionally in many European countries, notably Italy and France, several parties competed for power and no one party proved able to command stable majorities in the parliament. Under these conditions, only coalition cabinets commanding the support of several minority parties could muster legislative majorities and hence form a government. The multiparty systems in France and Italy gave rise to unstable and disunited coalitions that rarely stayed in power for long, however. To remedy this, when France established the Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle (1958), it retained the parliamentary system but reinforced the power of the president, who is directly elected and appoints the premier (prime minister) and his cabinet. This reformed system is an example of the search for a form of executive power that can overcome the weaknesses often displayed by cabinets that are dependent on parliamentary approval. After World War II, West Germany found a different solution to the problem of frequent cabinet crises provoked by adverse parliamentary votes. A provision in the German Basic Law, or constitution, mandates that the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, can force a federal chancellor (prime minister) from office by a vote of no confidence only if at the same time it elects a successor by an absolute majority.

       Cabinets of the presidents of the United StatesThe U.S (United States). president (presidency of the United States of America)'s cabinet is entirely different from the British-style cabinet. It is composed of the heads of executive departments chosen by the president with the consent of the Senate, but the members do not hold seats in Congress, and their tenure, like that of the president himself, does not depend on favourable votes on administration measures in the national legislature. Cabinet meetings are not required under the U.S. Constitution, which in fact makes no mention of such a body. The existence of the cabinet and its operations are matters of custom rather than of law, and the cabinet as a collective body has no legal existence or power. The first American president, George Washington, began the custom of consulting regularly with his department heads as a group. The term cabinet was first used for the heads of the State, Treasury, and War departments by James Madison in 1793. Gradually, as administrative duties increased and different problems arose, new executive departments were created by Congress; by the early 21st century, the U.S. cabinet consisted of 15 department heads, or secretaries. (For list of U.S. cabinet officials by presidential administration, see Cabinets of the presidents of the United States.)

      Washington's habit of calling regular and frequent cabinet meetings began a tradition that has been followed by every succeeding president. But it is important to remember that the cabinet exists solely to help the president carry out his functions as the nation's chief executive. He is virtually free to use it or not to use it as he pleases. Presidents have thus varied greatly in their use of the cabinet. Ordinarily, all members of a cabinet are of the same political party. Attendance at U.S. cabinet meetings is not restricted exclusively to those department heads that are of cabinet rank. Cabinet appointments are for the duration of the administration, but the president may dismiss any member at his own pleasure, without approval of the Senate.

* * *