Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Managing the cabinet: principal–agent relations in government
- 3 The structure of British government
- 4 Who serves in government and how long do they last?
- 5 The prime minister and cabinet
- 6 Performance measures and forced exits
- 7 Ministerial performance and tenure
- 8 Conclusion
- References
- Index
Preface and acknowledgements
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Managing the cabinet: principal–agent relations in government
- 3 The structure of British government
- 4 Who serves in government and how long do they last?
- 5 The prime minister and cabinet
- 6 Performance measures and forced exits
- 7 Ministerial performance and tenure
- 8 Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
This book is the culmination of a research project that was initiated a long time ago. Keith Dowding started collecting data on ministers in the British cabinet as far back as the early 1990s. The collaboration of the three authors began in the early 2000s and has been enabled through funding by the Leverhulme Trust in 1991, a small Nuffield Foundation grant (SOC 100/302) in 1992, and the LSE STICERD in 1996–7. Collecting the data was extremely time-consuming, though it became considerably easier when newspapers and other sources of information went online. We should begin by thanking our coders over the years including Helen Cannon, Norman Cooke, Won-Taek Kang and Gita Subrahmanyam.
Our collaboration has resulted in earlier publications from which we have drawn for this book, though in all cases the chapters are original, not least in that our data in this book reach the end of the Blair government; previously we had not gone beyond Major. Those articles include:
Keith Dowding and Won-Taek Kang, ‘Ministerial Resignations 1945–97’, Public Administration, 76(3), 1998, pp. 411–29;
Torun Dewan and Keith Dowding, ‘The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations on Government Popularity’, American Journal of Political Science, 49(1), 2005, pp. 46–56;
Samuel Berlinski, Torun Dewan and Keith Dowding, ‘The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the UK, 1945–1997’, British Journal of Political Science, 37(2), 2007, pp. 245–62;
Samuel Berlinski, Torun Dewan and Keith Dowding, ‘The Impact of Individual and Collective Performance on Ministerial Tenure’, Journal of Politics 72(1), 2010, pp. 1–13.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Accounting for MinistersScandal and Survival in British Government 1945–2007, pp. ix - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012