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The Politics of Agency Death: Ministers and the Survival of Government Agencies in a Parliamentary System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2015

Oliver James ,
Nicolai Petrovsky ,
Alice Moseley  and
George A. Boyne
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Abstract

This article extends the theory of government agency survival from separation of powers to parliamentary government systems. It evaluates expectations of increased risk to agencies following transitions in government, prime minister or departmental minister, and from incongruence between the originally establishing and currently overseeing political executive. Using survival models for UK executive agencies between 1989 and 2012, the study finds that politics trumps performance. Ministers seek to make their mark by terminating agencies created by previous ministers, which is reinforced by high media attention to the agency. Performance against agency targets is not associated with higher termination risk, and replacement agencies do not perform any better than those that were terminated. Financial autonomy provides some protection for agencies that are less dependent on budgetary appropriations.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , October 2016 , pp. 763 - 784
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Politics, University of Exeter (email: [email protected]); Martin School of Public Policy & Administration, University of Kentucky (email: [email protected]); Department of Politics, University of Exeter (email: [email protected]); Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University (email: [email protected]). Support for this research was provided by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Chief Executive Succession and the Performance of Central Government Agencies, grant no RES-062-23-2471). We would like to thank J.S. Butler and Ken Meier for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Replication data and code will be available by June 2015 at http://dx.doi.org/doi: 10.1017/S0007123414000477 and also at http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/politics/research/projects/executiveagencies/ and http://www.petrovsky.ws/.

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