Abstract
This short article reports the findings of a collaborative class project involving final-year undergraduate students enroled at Royal Holloway, University of London. It adapts Patrick Dunleavy's measures of ‘positional power’ to explore the distribution of influence within the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government. It examines both prime minister David Cameron's and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg's share of power inside the cabinet committee system, as well as the two coalition parties’ overall share of power, and further compares the distribution of power among ministers in the coalition with the distribution of power in Tony Blair's third-term government and Gordon Brown's government. The results suggest, first, that the Liberal Democrats were in a position to wield greater influence across government policy than implied by their initial allocation of government posts; and, second, that prime ministers have become increasingly reluctant direct participants in the cabinet committee system.
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Notes
The students and staff included Hayder Allawi, Nicholas Allen, Emily Bentley-Leek, James Hickson, James Lewis, Vishal Makol, Simon Marlow, Miguel Nance, Asad Naqvi, Meera Parmar, Nathan Parsad, Thomas Pratt, Dylan Pritchard, Rachael Squire, Laura Scanlan, Tiana Tandberg and Louie Woodall.
Between them, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could establish a minimal winning coalition, empirically speaking the most durable type of government after single-party majority governments (Laver and Schofield, 1990, pp. 150–155).
The Scotland Office, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
Four other departments lacked Liberal Democrat ministers: the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; the Department for International Development; the Wales Office; and the Northern Ireland Office. However, as Akash Paun (2011, p. 256) notes, these departments were in areas of ‘limited policy controversy’.
Together, these changes have a very small marginal effect: comparisons with Dunleavy’s findings are meaningful if not exact.
A number of deputy chairs were also appointed to cabinet committees in 2005.
The number of committees in 2010 excludes the Coalition Operation and Strategic Planning Group, an informal working group and not a cabinet committee intended to help manage inter-party relations (Hazell and Yong, 2011, p. 4). Within just over a year, when an updated list of committees was published in December 2011, the total number of committees and subcommittees had grown to 25.
In calculating these personal shares of the weighted score, the Contingency Committee, which has only one member, was excluded. Including it artificially increased the Home Secretary’s share of the score, as he or she was the only member and accrued 100 points by virtue of this fact.
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Royal Holloway Group PR3710. A partnership of unequals: Positional power in the coalition government. Br Polit 7, 418–442 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.18