Objectivity and falsehood: Assessing measures of positional influence with members of David Cameron’s cabinets

Abstract

This paper analyses the distribution of power among ministers during David Cameron’s premiership. More specifically, it reports both the application of Dunleavy’s measures of positional influence to successive lists of cabinet committees and our efforts to validate them by drawing on insider feedback. It charts how the cabinet-committee system changed between 2010 and 2016, and interprets successive rankings of ministerial influence. It further investigates the nature of power in Cameron’s governments by engaging with a number of former ministers’ responses to our measures. Those we spoke to were generally sceptical of the importance of cabinet committees and especially of our attempts to derive measures of ministerial influence from them. Overall, our findings emphasise the dangers of attributing too much importance to formal structures and instead draw attention to how contemporary core-executive politics are shaped by informal networks and structures.

From Gender Equity to Gendered Assignments? Women and Cabinet Committees in Canada and the United Kingdom

“…1 In Canada, details of cabinet committees are available on the prime minister's website (see Ie 2019). In the UK, these lists are posted on the government website (see Allen and Siklodi 2020). 2 The categorization of prestige has since been incorporated into the WhoGov dataset (Nyrup and Bramwell 2020).…”

Fiscality, Regulation, and Policy Choice: Evidence from Declassified British Cabinet Minutes 1981–1997

“…Beyond studying the motivations offered for policy adoption, this article also makes a contribution to the emerging empirical literature examining the internal mechanics of parliamentary executives. Empirical literature has recently analyzed the selection and survival of members of the British cabinet (Berlinsky et al 2007, 2010, Dewan and Dowding 2005; the ideological positioning of Irish cabinet members using parliamentary speeches (Herzog and Mikhaylov, 2020); the relative power of British cabinet members using subcommittee membership (Allen and Siklodi 2020); the comparative organization of cabinets in a large number of democracies (Barbieri and Vercesi, 2013); the published agenda topics of Portuguese cabinet meetings (Borghetto and Belchior 2020); the increasing power of political special advisors (Shaw and Eichbaum 2014); or the rise of independent agencies (Dommett and Flinders 2014). This literature has not so far analyzed direct quantitative evidence on the decision-making process itself, which is understandable given the opaque nature of this process.…”

The limits of state-led norm entrepreneurship: The United Kingdom and the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI)

“…Hague’s leadership experience as a core state-based agent on the PSVI is important for the PSVI because a fundamental part of the creation and promotion of a new norm is persuading other states and actors to support it in order to reach the tipping point and cascade (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). Hague had been leader of the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2001 prior to his experience of foreign affairs as Shadow Foreign Secretary from 2005 until his official appointment as Foreign Secretary in 2010, a role which was ranked fourth for ministerial influence in 2012 when the PSVI was co-founded (Allen and Siklodi, 2020: 227).…”