From Prime Ministerial Power to Core Executive

Abstract

Much work on the UK executive still focuses on long-running ‘chestnuts of the constitution’, especially the controversy about the relative power of the prime minister and the cabinet (Heclo and Wildaysky, 1974, pp.341–3). Mackintosh’s (1962, 1968) study crowned the debate with an impressive summary of the historical evolution of cabinet government, but over the last 30 years little systematic fieldwork-based research into the prime minister or cabinet government has been published (the major exceptions are Hennessy, 1986; James, 1992; but see also Herman and Alt, 1978; Headey, 1974). Although this topic lives on as a standard controversy much raked over by students and newspaper columnists, in political science it has been an inactive field.

This chapter incorporates material from Dunleavy and Rhodes (1990) and Rhodes (1993) which is re-used with permission.