It’s the government, stupid: how governments blame citizens for their own policies

Governments have developed a convenient habit of blaming social problems on their citizens, placing too much emphasis on personal responsibility and pursuing policies to ‘nudge’ their citizens to better behaviour. Keith Dowding argues that responsibility for many of our biggest social crises should be laid at the feet of politicians

The length of ministerial tenure in the UK 1945-1997

We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in the UK from 1945-1997. We focus on three sets of attributes i) personal characteristics of the minister; ii) political characteristics of the minister and iii) characteristics pertaining to the government in which the minister serves. We find that educational background increases ministers’ capacity to survive, that female ministers have lower hazard rates and older ministers have higher hazard rates. Experienced ministers have higher hazard than newly appointed ministers. Ministerial rank increases a ministers’ capacity to survive, with full cabinet members having the lowest hazard rates in our sample. We use different strategies to controls for the characteristics of the government the ministers serve in. Our results are robust to any of these controls

Individual and Collective Performance and the Tenureof British Ministers 1945-1997

We study the effects of individual and collective ministerial performance on the length oftime a minister serves in British government from 1945-97, using the number ofresignation calls for a minister as an individual performance indicator and the cumulativenumber of such calls as an indicator of government performance. Our analysis lendssupport to a 'two-strike rule': ministers facing a second call for their resignation have asignificantly higher hazard than those facing their first, irrespective of the performance ofthe government. A minister's hazard rate is decreasing in the cumulative number ofresignation calls; but conditional on receiving a first resignation call, the hazard rateincreases with the number of calls that all government ministers have faced in the past.Our message is that collective ministerial performance is a key determinant of whether aminister survives his first resignation call.

Ambiguity and vagueness in political terminology: on coding and referential imprecision

Analytic political philosophy tries to make our political language more precise. But in doing so it risks departing from our natural language and intuitions. This article examines this tension. We argue that the ambiguity and vagueness of our political language can be overcome with coding decisions. While vagueness is a deeper philosophical problem than ambiguity, there are important conceptual similarities. Gareth Evans has formally proved that there can be conflicting yet equally valid precisifications of vague terms. We show that this is the case for complex terms in political philosophy, where each precisification captures part of the sense of the complex term. Vagueness can be overcome by eliminating the terms in certain contexts of analysis. Versions of the subscript gambit can be used to resolve both ambiguity and vagueness

The Three Exit, Three Voice and Loyalty Framework: A Test with Survey Data on Local Services

The article presents a modified Hirschman framework with three types of exit: moving location; moving from the public to a private sector provider; and moving between public sector providers; and three types of voice: private voice (complaining about private goods); voting; and collective action. Seven hypotheses are generated from this framework. The article then presents evidence from the first round of an online survey examining citizen satisfaction with public services and the relationship between exit and voice opportunities. We find dissatisfied people are more likely to complain privately, vote and engage in other forms of collective participation; but only a weak relationship exists between dissatisfaction and geographical exit. We find some evidence that the exit-voice trade-off might exist as more alert consumers are more likely to move from the public to the private sector and those 'locked in' are more likely to complain than those who have outside options. Overall the results tend to corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the modified Hirschman framework

Australian politics shows why the de-separation of political and administrative careers matters for democracy

One cornerstone of executive politics in established liberal democracies has long been a system for controlling government corruption and malfeasance that separates out clear roles for the changing elite of elected politicians and their advisers, and the permanent administrators running the civil service. Yet in Australia Keith Dowding and Marija Taflaga find that the growing role of special advisers, plus increased mobility from adviser roles into career public-service pathways, is now an integral factor in the re-emergence of substantial ministerial scandals

Presidential power effects on government and ministerial durability: evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

In this article, we examine the variation in the institutional powers granted to president to terminate cabinets (by dismissing prime ministers), and appointing ministers to show how variations affect both cabinet durability (and the mode of cabinet termination) and ministerial durability (i.e., the overall time a minister remains in cabinet). Using the most extensive survival data set on ministers in 14 Central and Eastern European countries available to date alongside data on government survival, our Cox regression models demonstrate that the institutional rules granting extensive powers to the presidents are powerful determinants of ministerial durability. We show that the effect of presidential powers reduces cabinet durability but increases ministerial durability. These results demonstrate that the specific powers given to chief executives are essential for issues surrounding implications for ministerial and cabinet durability, institutional choice, policy stability, and governmental accountability

Counterfactual success again: response to Carter and Kramer

We would like to thank Ian Carter and Matthew Kramer for their challenging reply to our recent article. Dowding and van Hees (2007) is one of a series of articles in which we try to address measurement issues with regard to individual freedom. Our aim is to provide a conception of freedom that will eventually yield a way of measuring the relative freedom of groups of people within a society and a relative measure of freedom across societies. In doing so, we draw upon the important work of Carter (1999) and Kramer (2003), but as should be clear, we also depart from it in several respects