Ministerial Resignations 1945–97

This article reports on data collected on ministerial resignations and non-resignations 1945–1997. It analyses the reasons why ministers resign and patterns that emerge in terms of the types of issues that are more likely to lead to resignation, and variances between different Prime Ministers, parties and over time. It provides the first fully quantified analysis of ministerial resignations in Britain in the post-war period to enhance the impressionistic analyses which have been offered before.     

DECISION-MAKING IN CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE ABSENCE OF POLITICAL MAJORITY

A possible outcome of the next general election is that no party will have a majority in the House of Commons, a situation experienced only briefly in recent central government. In local government, by contrast, more than half the county councils in England and Wales and many district councils have no overall political majority. Some have been so for many years. This paper examines the style of decision-making in one such local authority, Cheshire County Council, in terms of the roles of politicians and officials and the relationship between them. Recognizing the constitutional differences between central and local government, it goes on to discuss how much of this experience would be relevant to central government in the event of no overall parliamentary majority. The paper argues that many of the working practices developed in local authorities would be valid in a central government context, though they would not necessarily take the same form. To avoid value judgments, the absence of overall majority, whether in a local authority or in parliament, is referred to simply as 'no-majority'.     

Re-assessing the Role of Departmental Cabinet Ministers

The study of the core executive has been dominated by discussion of the Prime Ministers and Cabinet with only limited serious treatment paid to ministers. However, ministers and departments are crucial actors in the core executive. This article examines the multiple roles and varying impacts of ministers. More particularly, we initially develop a classification of ministerial roles, which builds upon, but develops, work by Headey, James and Norton. Subsequently, we use this classification to pose two key questions. Which roles do particular ministers stress? In what ways has the balance between these roles changed in the last twenty‐five years?     

THE LOGISTICS OF MINISTERIAL RESHUFFLES

Ministerial reshuffles are complex exercises requiring careful handling. A frequent occurrence in British government, their significance is usually seen in political terms. Prime Ministers attach great importance to maximizing the political advantages to be gained from them. This factor is the chief determinant of their logistics, the principal characteristics of which are secrecy in advance and the speed with which ministerial changes are executed. These features - as much as the frequency of ministerial changes per se - may disrupt the policy process and have serious implications for minister-civil servant power relations. Such problems could be alleviated by giving ministers advance notice of changes of post. The institution of a process of ministerial handovers would strengthen the position of incoming ministers by making them less dependent on their officials, upon whom they rely heavily for initial briefing at present.     

Burundi: des identités ethnico-politiques forgées dans la violence

Taking the recent political situation as background, the author examines the rhetoric of political propaganda in Burundi. By considering several texts, both written (newspaper articles, politicians’ statements, political leaflets) and oral (speeches and radio declarations), of which long excerpts are reproduced, the author is able to demonstrate that all parties call for violence in Burundi, regardless of political side. The Other, whoever he may be, is systematically denied the right to exist; meanwhile, the exercise of violence appears as a means of delimiting the space belonging to each group. This in turn legitimates and generalizes daily use of violence.     

THE CORE EXECUTIVE AND THE RESIGNATION OF MRS THATCHER

Margaret Thatcher was seen as one of the most dominant post-war Prime Ministers and yet she was forced to resign in November 1990. Most extant explanations of her fall concentrate on relatively short-term factors such as the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Community Charge and issues surrounding the European Community. This article argues that these accounts fail to explain Mrs Thatcher's fall because they do not place her resignation within the context of prime ministerial power. The article suggests that traditional notions of prime ministerial power are flawed because they are essentiallystatic and over-simplistic. The article develops an alternative model of prime ministerial power based on the notion of power dependence. The model is then used to demonstrate that Mrs Thatcher's fall was due to her failure to recognize her dependence on cabinet colleagues.     

From Patriotic Memories to ‘Patriotic History’ in Zimbabwe, 1990 – 2005

This article examines how military veterans and political veterans of Zimbabwe's nationalist movements competed for power and access to state resources, using their distinctive contributions to legitimate their claims and de-legitimate others' claims. Drawing on parliamentary debates over state assistance for war veterans and state pensions for heroes, the article seeks to highlight previously unexplored continuities between the political discourses within the ruling party in the 1990s and the ruling party's brand of nationalism after 2000. More generally, the essay suggests a much longer pattern of nationalists using struggle credentials to legitimate themselves and de-legitimate others in competition for power and resources.     

Gender and institutional strengthening: the World Bank's policy record in Latin America

This article examines the gendered nature of institutional strengthening policies at the World Bank, as part of an attempt to analyse what role gender plays in the institutionalist turn within development policy. It focuses on three snapshots of Bank action wherein debates about gender and institutional strengthening are particularly pertinent: Washington, DC policy texts and Presidential speeches; gender policy enacted in the Latin American and Caribbean region; and an Argentine project loan on social capital promotion and family strengthening. Two themes emerge from these sites: (1) that couplehood between men and women has been identified as a key informal institution necessary for development; and (2) that gender reform has been positioned as an institutional change issue requiring attention to issues such as social marketing. New norms about gender interaction thus emerge as an explicit part of the Bank's reform agenda, and are shaping project experiences across Latin America.     

Maybe Wilson Was Right: Espoused Values and Their Relationship to Enacted Values

Public administration scholars have little understanding of the operation of values within public sector organizations. Because the institutional values literature suggests that behavior consistent with American values by public organizations and officials can make a difference in successful policy outcomes, this research focuses on identifying the espoused and enacted value perspectives for two sets of U. S. government officials, presidents and senior executives. Through a content analysis of agency mission statements and speeches of Presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush, a subject matter analysis of executive orders, and a survey of senior executives, the following information is identified: The three presidents espouse the same set of values (i.e., ethics, performance, and support) in their speeches, but enact only one common value (i.e., commitment) in their executive orders. Although not statistically significant, two (i.e., performance and ethics) of the three top values in the agency mission statements are consistent with the values of the presidents. Senior executive perceptions of the most important values (i.e., authority, reward, and support) differ from the presidents. This unexpected difference lends support to Woodrow Wilson’s politics/administration dichotomy in that senior executives focus on values that address policy implementation while presidents focus on values related to politics.     

REVIEWS

Mark R. Rutgers (ed.), Retracing Public Administration
Lester Salamon (ed.), The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New Governance
Michael Moran, The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation
Maura Adshead and Michelle Millar (eds), Public Administration and Public Policy in Ireland: Theory and Methods
Colin Seymour-Ure, Prime Ministers and the Media: Issues of Power and Control
Karen Duke, Drugs, Prisons and Policy-Making
Bronwen Morgan, Social Citizenship in the Shadow of Competition: The Bureaucratic Politics of Regulatory Justification
Penny Leonard, Promoting Welfare: Government Information Policy and Social Citizenship
Nikolaos Zahariadis, Ambiguity and Choice in Public Policy: Political Decision Making in Modern Democracies
Bruce Bimber, Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power     

Duopoly,court politics and the Danish core executive

This article applies the ideas of the core executive and court politics to Danish coalition and minority governments. It asks two questions. Do these ideas travel beyond their Westminster origins? What are the dilemmas confronting the Danish executive and its court politics? The analysis is based on documentary sources and 22 elite interviews with cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries. It identifies a duopoly of Prime Minister and Minister of Finance as a distinctive variety of court politics. It identifies the key dilemmas confronted by the Danish executive; namely trust, political support and politicization. It concludes that court politics provides unique insights into the workings of Danish government. The article is a contribution to the comparative analysis of the court politics of governing elites. It shows that the focus on court politics is not only useful for majoritarian Westminster systems but also for the analysis of consensual parliamentary democracies.     

The 2004 general election in India and its aftermath

In early 2004 India confirmed that coalition governments are the staple for sometime to come. This article examines the events leading to the general election and thereafter. It contends that there are several forces that will tax the new United Progressive Alliance led by the Congress Party which itself is ridden with many internal squabbles. Among the coalition partners, the Communist Party of India, which tends to be ideological in making its presence felt without accepting any responsibility by being a part of the government, can possibly be the worst threat to stability. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which does not seem to have come to terms with its defeat, seems to be obstructionist rather than being a “loyal opposition”. There are also several major issues of governance such as corruption and “tainted” Ministers which the new government has to deal with. Thus, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wears the mantle of government rather precariously, and with an uncertain future.     

Women’s Islamic activism in Burkina Faso: toward renegotiated social norms?

Abstract

Recent studies have described the active participation of women in local associations as well as in public and national debates about secularism, the Family code, and women’s rights within Islam. In this article, I explore how female preachers have claimed a new role for women within Islam through a better knowledge and understanding of Islamic texts. In doing so, these women drew on modernist speeches made by men, used the media and aligned themselves with international movements with the aim of claiming a new social identity for their sisters in Islam, establishing greater equality between men and women in the religion, and finding a way of being a good mother and woman while maintaining an independent social position. In fact, these female preachers sought to spark a quiet yet real social revolution in religion by casting a critical and modernist eye on local cultural traditions and Islamic identity.     

Printmedia poll reporting in Poland: Poll as news in Polish parliamentary campaigns, 1991–2007

Information about the support given by the public opinion to political actors has become a constant element of the public debate in Poland after the fall of Communism. Very soon polls became an argument in debates, a premise, or a way to justify decisions. At the same time they were criticized both by politicians and journalists convinced that polls can significantly influence the election results. But the fact was not noticed in Poland that all debates about the influence of polls on election outcomes should be preceded by a discussion of the way they are presented in the media. The present article joins this debate by subjecting to analysis the polls published in the Polish press during parliamentary campaigns in the dimensions of the role they played during the recent several years, the quality of methodological information, and of the way the polls were used in the media.As opposed to European and American analyses, no improvement in the conformity to standards of minimal disclosure in newspapers’ reporting of public opinion polls was noticed, although—like in other countries—a dramatic increase in the number of polls reported was observed.     

Managing the Core Executive

In the build up to general elections there is invariably a wealth of discourse on constitutional and transitional issues and even on the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the civil service, but rarely is there any debate on the manner in which politicians manage the government machine. This article seeks to address this deficiency. It examines the operational factors common to the core executive, assesses the problems usually associated with the government as an organization and reviews alternative solutions. Finally, it offers managerially oriented advice, reasoning that it is the role of policy analysts to prescribe and that it is irresponsible to ignore this function. it is clearly emphasized that management solutions are not synonymous with business solutions. The article draws on universal principles of management, seeking to avoid normative suggestions and concentrating instead on practical considerations. Those considerations include personnel selection, collective responsibility, leadership style, organizational structure and team mentality. The conclusion is that strong managerially based leadership should not be dismissed as incompatible with the political constraints placed upon Prime Ministers but rather it should e the predominant impulse.     

The muzzling of the liberal press in Iran

One of the major and tangible achievements of President Khatami's reform movement was the freedom that the press enjoyed in Iran in recent years. Not since the 1940s had the press been so free and so diverse in its coverage of sociopolitical topics. However, when the conservatives lost the parliamentary elections of February 2000 to the reform candidates, they blamed, to a degree correctly, the press for their crushing defeat. The hard-line conservatives then decided to strike back by punishing the press. In May Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, accused the liberal press of acting as bases of the nation's enemies, ie the USA. His attack on the press served as a green light to the conservative-dominated judiciary to ban the pro-reform newspapers and to jail journalists and editors. This article will examine and analyse the reasons behind the press crackdown, and the inability of the president and the reform-dominated parliament either to prevent the closure of the newspapers or to revive the banned ones.     

Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank

This article explores the ways in which discussions of social capital have emerged within the World Bank, and how they interacted both with project practices and with larger debates in the institution. These debates are understood as a ‘battlefield of knowledge’, whose form and outcomes are structured but not determined by the political economy of the Bank. Understanding the debates this way has implications for research on the ways in which development discourses are produced and enacted, as well as for more specific discussions of the place of social capital in development studies. The article concludes with a reflection on implications of these debates for future research, policy, and practice.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
The Dynamics of Administrative Reform Richard A. Chapman and J.R. Greenaway.
Managing the Civil Service John Garrett.
Policy and Practice: The Experience of Government Royal Institute of Public Administration.
Presidents and Prime Ministers Richard Rose and Ezra Suleiman (eds.).
The Machinery of Change in Local Government 1888–1974: A Study of Central Involvement Clifford J. Pearce.
The Reorganization of Secondary Education P. R. James.
Social Need: Policy, Practice and Research Gilbert Smith.
Social Work in Conflict Bryan Glastonbury, David M. Cooper and Pearl Hawkins (eds.).
The International Civil Service: Changing Role and Concepts Norman A. Graham and Robert S. Jordan (eds.).
Foreign Affairs for New States P. Boyce.
The Parliamentary Agents: A History D. L. Rydz.
Scottish County Government in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Ann E. Whetstone.     

Towards a new past: Some reflections on nationalism in post-socialist Slovakia

By analysing two commemorative events organized shortly before and after the 2010 parliamentary elections in Slovakia, this article demonstrates how the Prime Minister Robert Fico and his collaborators exploited these ceremonies to promote a more inclusive definition of political community than their right-wing counterparts. Although commentators have interpreted the continuous political success of the political party Smer-SD in terms of negatively connotated nationalism and national populism, Fico's discursive framework allows him to address those who have been stigmatized by post-1989 neoliberalism, especially former communists and people unable or unwilling to adapt to the rapid changes brought about by post-socialist social, economic, political as well as cultural transition(s). Instead of backwardness, Fico's anti-elitist and anti-capitalist rhetoric opened a new symbolic universe to these groups. The history narratives that formed an important part of this universe were not used to exclude the Other, but rather to create a meaningful future for those who have been ignored by (neo-)liberal ideals. This paper argues for an interpretation of post-socialist populist parties that would take into account culturally relevant symbolic structures advanced by these parties.