Abstract
Policy-makers have long been concerned with the quality of local political leadership and have often resorted to institutional reform to try to improve political leadership. This paper looks at a specific and neglected facet of the political management reforms that have been implemented in English local government over the last decade: the tenure and turnover of cabinet members. The tenure of top politicians may be an important influence on the performance of local government particularly when political management is designed to favour individualised leadership. On the one hand, excessively short tenures for top politicians may damage the ability of governments to develop strategic plans and ensure they are implemented while on the other hand the risk of loss of office is central to political accountability and excessively long tenures may be indicative of an insulated and unresponsive elite. While some research attention has been paid to the tenures of leaders of councils in England there is little systematic information about the tenure of cabinet members. This paper discusses the relevance of cabinet stability and provides an overview of recent experience in England.
Highlights
Policy-makers have long been concerned with the quality of local political leadership and have often resorted to institutional reform to try to improve political leadership
The pattern of tenures of cabinet members will partly reflect the trade off between political accountability and political capacity, there are a number of other factors that may influence the survival of local cabinet members and can muddy the issue
This paper focuses on the operation of political cabinets introduced by the Local Government Act 2000
Summary
The key question is whether the factors that are relevant for explaining patterns of change and stability in national cabinets are relevant to local governments. Length of cabinet tenure will have some relation to politics and performance and so can still play a role in accountability Another significant difference between national and local governments is that the smaller size of local councils gives leaders less freedom to shuffle or remove cabinet members ( this may be a problem nationally, Dewan and Myatt, 2010). Greasley and John (2011) presents some evidence that where leaders have powers related to the management of cabinets (selection and portfolio allocation) the relative performance of their council as judged by citizens is improved This finding is consistent with, hardly proof of, the proposition that selection, management and removal of executive members plays an important role in achieving political accountability. Looking only at those cases where there had been no change in political control, the correlation is not as strong, there is still evidence of a moderate relationship between change in leader and percentage of cabinet leavers (Kendall’s tau b =. 25; p.=.000)
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