HOW POWER CHANGES HANDS: TRANSITION AND SUCCESSION IN GOVERNMENT ‐ edited by Paul 't Hart and John Uhr
| Date | 01 March 2013 |
| Author | Andrew Massey |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2012.02079.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2013 |
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HOW POWER CHANGES HANDS: TRANSITION AND SUCCESSION
IN GOVERNMENT
Paul ’t Hart and John Uhr (eds)
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 272 pp., £ 60 (hb), ISBN: 9780230242968
How Power Changes Hands is concerned with exploring the way in which the executive
branch of government and key political parties manage the arrival and departure of
leaders, specifically those who hold and deploy power. The book is based upon the work
of a research team that examined the pathways and procedures for two kinds of change –
the replacement of individual leaders and also generational changes – when a new cohort
of leaders replaces their predecessors. All the countries analyzed are established common
law jurisdictions – the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – so the
lessons to be drawn are limited to a section of the English speaking world, the so-called
Anglo-Saxon countries.
The editors begin the book by noting the importance of the subject being discussed, in
that the ‘peaceful transition of power from one set of hands to another is one of the basic
features of a working democracy’. This is something the tumultuous events elsewhere in
the world underlines, where regime change is wrought through violence and revolution.
Those fortunate to live in democracies that have established principles for the orderly and
peaceful transfer of power need to be reminded that such a phenomenon is not something
achieved by luck or good fortune, but is the result of sustained political evolution and the
measured steps taken to protect the losers as well as the winners in the political process.
As such, this book is a useful contribution to the literature, a literature which is perhaps
thinner than one would expect in terms of serious studies of this nature. The book explores
how the periodic elections held in democratic countries allow for the transition of govern-
ment regimes and also trigger the replacement of individual office holders in the ranks
of government. It is this twin notion of transition and succession that lies at the core of
the book.
The contributors discuss the methodological and conceptual considerations. The
different institutional variables are explored, for example party systems and party
‘traditions’, electoral arrangements, and links to and relationships with other governance
actors. The editors argue there is little systematic research on the dynamics of ‘power
transitions associated with the arrivals and departures of new and old governments in
contemporary political systems’ (p. 9). Certainly there is a copious literature on election
studies, but this book seeks to deliver a comparative analysis of transitions in similar
constitutional liberal democracies.
Accordingly the collection is divided into two sections: ‘Understanding Transitions’ and
‘Understanding Successions’. The first of these begins with a constitutional perspective,
including a chapter by Higley and Pakulski (USA and Australia), while Uhr, Bach, and
Public Administration Vol. 91, No. 1, 2013 (232–250)
©2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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