Objectivity and falsehood: Assessing measures of positional influence with members of David Cameron’s cabinets
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120908531 |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Author | Nora Siklodi,Nicholas Allen |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120908531
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(2) 220 –237
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1369148120908531
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Objectivity and falsehood:
Assessing measures of
positional influence with
members of David Cameron’s
cabinets
Nicholas Allen1 and Nora Siklodi2
Abstract
This paper analyses the distribution of power among ministers during David Cameron’s premiership.
More specifically, it reports both the application of Dunleavy’s measures of positional influence
to successive lists of cabinet committees and our efforts to validate them by drawing on insider
feedback. It charts how the cabinet-committee system changed between 2010 and 2016, and
interprets successive rankings of ministerial influence. It further investigates the nature of power
in Cameron’s governments by engaging with a number of former ministers’ responses to our
measures. Those we spoke to were generally sceptical of the importance of cabinet committees
and especially of our attempts to derive measures of ministerial influence from them. Overall,
our findings emphasise the dangers of attributing too much importance to formal structures and
instead draw attention to how contemporary core-executive politics are shaped by informal
networks and structures.
Keywords
British government, cabinet committees, core executive, David Cameron, positional influence,
prime ministers, realistic interviews
Introduction
Empirical research rarely goes according to plan. Evidence is often only partly consistent
with expectations, and sometimes it entirely contradicts them. This paper reports findings
that fall into the second category. We set out hoping to validate Dunleavy’s (1995,
2003) ‘positional-influence’ measures, a way of scoring ministers’ intra-executive power
on the basis of cabinet-committee memberships, by speaking to former ministers and
1Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London,
Egham, UK
2School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
Corresponding author:
Nicholas Allen, Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of
London, Egham TW20 0EX, UK.
Email: nicholas.allen@royalholloway.ac.uk
908531BPI0010.1177/1369148120908531The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsAllen and Siklodi
research-article2020
Original Article
Allen and Siklodi 221
officials. But instead of confirming the measures’ validity, the feedback we received
strongly cautioned against them. In the words of one former minister, there was ‘a charm-
ing naivety to this idea [but] at some point, the gain in transparency and objectivity is
outweighed by falsehood’ (interviewee, 2).
Our engagement with Dunleavy’s measures was prompted by their relevance to our
immediate interest in the formal structures and informal dynamics of power in David
Cameron’s governments. Cameron’s premiership was remarkable by any account. He led
the first peace-time coalition since the 1930s and the first single-party Tory government
since 1997 (see Bennister and Heffernan, 2014; Byrne et al., 2016; d’Ancona, 2013;
Dorey and Garnett, 2016; Hazell and Yong, 2012; Seldon and Snowdon, 2015; Riddell,
2015). He was also the first British prime minister to leave office as a result of calling and
then losing a referendum (Smith, 2018). With early accounts of his premiership suggest-
ing a revival of cabinet committees as decision-making arenas (d’Ancona, 2013: 37;
Dorey and Garnett, 2016: 37–38; Hazell and Yong, 2012: 53–55), there was a clear ration-
ale for using the measures to examine changing power relations among his ministers.
At the same time, our engagement with Dunleavy’s measures was also driven by their
potential broader utility. The relative standing of prime ministers and other senior minis-
ters can have an enormous effect on government cohesion and unity, on policy decisions,
and on a government’s broader political fortunes. But if we are to relate power dynamics
to such outcomes, we first need accurately to describe or measure them. Unfortunately,
there are few options available for political scientists wishing to do this. Most indices of
governmental power or authority tend to focus on single actors in the core executive, usu-
ally prime ministers (Bennister et al., 2015; O’Malley, 2007). Dunleavy’s approach, by
contrast, offers a way to measure influence consistently and systematically among all
ministers. Over two decades since they were first proposed, his ‘wonderfully innovative’
measures remain a rare example of ‘rigorous positivism’ in core-executive studies (Elgie,
2011: 74). They deserve to be taken seriously.
This paper makes several contributions to the existing literature. Its principal contribu-
tion is as a methodological case-study of using insiders as ‘co-researchers’ (James, 2018)
to validate measures, in this instance positional-influence scores derived from cabinet
committees. To this end, we first applied Dunleavy’s measures to successive lists of com-
mittees covering the entirety of Cameron’s premiership, relating our findings, where
appropriate, to a range of other sources, including memoirs, newspaper reports and other
insider accounts. We then elicited direct feedback on the results from former ministers
and officials in Cameron’s governments, either in the form of face-to-face interviews or
via correspondence. The paper’s secondary contribution, which stems from its first, is to
shed light on how Cameron organised and used the institutions of collective decision-
making. Existing accounts have tended to focus on the early years of the Conservative-
Liberal Democrat coalition (Dorey and Garnett, 2016; Hazell and Yong, 2012), but this
paper covers the whole of Cameron’s premiership. In the process, it further contributes to
our knowledge and understanding of cabinet committees in contemporary British
government.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The next section reviews Dunleavy’s
measures, while the third section reports our application of them to Cameron’s govern-
ments. The fourth section reflects on issues of validity and our use of insiders as co-
researchers. The fifth section summarises the feedback we received and our respondents’
general scepticism towards the measures. It also reports respondents’ wider views about
cabinet committees and the nature of power in British central government. The final
To continue reading
Request your trial