Cabinet Reshuffles and Ministerial Drift

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 621-656

  Indridason, Indridi H ^a   Kam, Christopher ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69649107794     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000318     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Paul V. Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); G. Bingham Powell Jr, Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability and Violence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
2. See Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
3. See, e.g., Bruce Headey, British Cabinet Ministers: The Roles of Politicians in Executive Office (London: Routledge, 1974); Richard Rose, ‘The Making of Cabinet Ministers’, British Journal of Political Science, 1 (1971), 394-414; Richard Rose, Ministers and Ministries: A Functional Analysis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
4. For example, Christopher Kam and Indridi H. Indridason, ‘The Timing of Cabinet Reshuffles in Five Westminster Parliamentary Systems’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 30 (2005), 327-63, find that cabinets in Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand are reshuffled every eleven months on average.
5. As in Torun Dewan and Keith M. Dowding, ‘The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations on Government Popularity’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), 46-56, for example.
6. For example, Torun Dewan and Keith M. Dowding, ‘The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations on Government Popularity’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), 46-56; John D. Huber and Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo, ‘Cabinet Instability and the Accumulation of Experience: The French Fourth and Fifth Republics in Comparative Perspective’, British Journal of Political Science, 34 (2004), 27-48.
7. Kaare Strøm, ‘Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies’, European Journal of Political Research, 37 (2000), 261-89.
8. For example, Mathew D. McCubbins, Roger G. Noll and Barry R.Weingast, ‘Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control’, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 3 (1987), 243-77; John D. Huber and Arthur Lupia, ‘Cabinet Instability and Delegation in Parliamentary Democracies’, American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 18-32; Kathleen Bawn, ‘Political Control Versus Expertise: Congressional Choices about Administrative Procedures’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 62-73; Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole, ‘The Politics of Government Decision Making: A Theory of Regulatory Capture’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106 (1991), 1089-127.
9. John D. Huber and Arthur Lupia, ‘Delegation with Potentially Unstable Principals: How Coalition Termination Affects Bureaucratic Accountability in Parliamentary Democracy’, American Journal of Political Science, 45 (1999), 18-32.
10. For example, Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1967); Richard Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Vol. 1: Minister of Housing, 1964-66 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975); Jean Blondel and Nick Manning, ‘Do Ministers Do What They Say? Ministerial Unreliability, Collegiality and Hierarchical Government’, Political Studies, 50 (2002), 455-76.
11. Downs, Inside Bureaucracy; Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Vol. 1.
12. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Vol. 1, p. 31, 614.
13. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Vol. 1, p. 31.
14. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Vol. 1, p. 43. This perspective is most vividly depicted in the sitcom ‘Yes, Minister’, in which the civil servants train and socialize a newly appointed minister, often trying to advance their minister's career so as to improve their own professional standing.
15. There is a growing literature dealing with delegation problems in coalition government, e.g., Georg Vanberg and Lanny Martin, ‘Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny’, American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 13-27; Michael F. Thies, ‘Keeping Tabs on Partners: The Logic of Delegation in Coalition Governments’, American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 580-98.
16. E.g., Michael J. Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, eds, Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Blondel and Manning, ‘Do Ministers Do What They Say?’
17. Gregory Luebbert, Comparative Democracy: Policy Making and Governing Coalitions in Europe and Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Patrick Weller, ‘Party Rules and the Dismissal of Prime Ministers: Comparative Perspectives from Britain, Canada, and Australia’, Parliamentary Affairs, 47 (1994), 133-43.
18. E.g., John D. Huber and Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo, ‘Cabinet Turnover in Parliamentary Democracies’ (unpublished paper, 2003).
19. Torun Dewan and David P. Myatt, ‘Scandal, Protection, and Recovery in Political Cabinets’, American Political Science Review, 101 (2005), 63-77; Anil Arya and Brian Mittendorf, ‘Using Job Rotation to Extract Employee Information’, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 20 (2004), 400-14; Jean Tirole, ‘Hierarchies and Bureaucracies: On the Role of Collusion in Organizations’, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 2 (1986), 181-214.
20. James E. Alt, ‘Continuity, Turnover, and Experience in the British Cabinet, 1868-1970’, in Valentine Herman and James E. Alt, eds, Cabinet Studies: A Reader (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 33-54.
21. Anthony King, ‘Ministerial Autonomy in Britain’, in Laver and Shepsle, eds, Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Government, pp. 203-25.
22. Huber and Martinez-Gallardo, ‘Cabinet Turnover in Parliamentary Democracies’, p. 5 (emphasis added).
23. Torun Dewan and Keith M. Dowding, ‘The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), 46-56.
24. Kam and Indridason, ‘The Timing of Cabinet Reshuffles in Five Westminster Parliamentary Systems’.
25. Dean Jaensch, The Politics of Australia, 2nd edn (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 270-1.
26. Jaensch, The Politics of Australia, p. 306.
27. Jaensch, The Politics of Australia, p. 241. There is, of course, no reason to expect the preferences of these deputy leaders to coincide with the PM's.
28. We follow Dowding and Kang in identifying an administration as the continuous period of a given PM's leadership of the government, irrespective of intervening elections (see Keith Dowding and Won-Taek Kang, ‘Ministerial Resignations 1945-97’, Public Administration, 76 (1998), 411-29, p. 427).
29. We include in the analysis Fraser's caretaker government of 11 November-22 December 1975.
30. In Britain, there are two grades of senior ministers, full cabinet ministers and ministers of state. As in Indridason and Kam, we take account of the movement of both types of ministers in determining whether a reshuffle has occurred. In practice, there is very little ambiguity, as there are very few isolated ministerial personnel moves in Britain. Our data on cabinet reshuffles were collected from Butler and Butler, supplemented by appendices in Thatcher and Major; see Kam and Indridason, ‘The Timing of Cabinet Reshuffles in Five Westminster Parliamentary Systems'; David Butler and Gareth Butler, British Political Facts, 1900-2000, 8th edn (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000); Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993); Major, John Major.
31. We test the interaction as in Robert J. Friedrich, ‘In Defense of Multiplicative Terms in Multiple Regression Equations’, American Political Science Review, 26 (1982), 797-833.
32. Patrick Dunleavy et al., Government on the Web II (London: The Stationery Office, HC 764 Session 2001-2, National Audit Office ‘value for money’ study, 2002).
33. Michael J. Laver and W. Ben Hunt, Policy and Party Competition (New York: Routledge, 1992).
34. Dowding and Kang, ‘Ministerial Resignations 1945-97’.
35. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 123.
36. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 124.
37. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 124.
38. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 124.
39. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 130.
40. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 130.
41. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 130.
42. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 134-8.
43. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 148.
44. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 148.
45. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 150.
46. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 150.
47. Huber and Lupia, ‘Cabinet Instability and Delegation in Parliamentary Democracies’.
48. John Bendor, Amihai Glazer and Tom Hammond, ‘Theories of Delegation’, Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (2001), 235-69.