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Decision Arenas in Executive Decision Making: Cabinet Committees in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Thomas T. Mackie  and
Brian W. Hogwood
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Extract

Decision making in political executives is an oddly neglected subject in political science. The roles played by both formal institutions and less formal mechanisms in arriving at decisions in political executives are surprisingly understudied. There have been some important comparative studies of political executives but these have tended to focus on the role of the head of the political executive – the president or prime minister. The distinctive nature of cabinet systems as against presidential systems has been well brought out but a comparative framework for the analysis of variations among cabinet systems in the role of decision arenas other than the full cabinet has not been developed. Blondel in his wide-ranging survey of government structures gives only a passing mention to cabinet committees. Accordingly, in seeking to place the roles of cabinet committees in perspective, we have found it necessary to develop our own framework of decision arenas in cabinet systems.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 1984 , pp. 285 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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4 These countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and West Germany. Our original intention was simply to explore the extent to which these countries made information about cabinet committees easily available, and in particular whether Britain was unusually secretive. Our finding was that Britain is much more secretive than other countries, though the announcement of the names and chairmanship of four standing committees in 1979 marked a greater though still limited degree of openness; see House of Commons Debates, 24 05 1979Google Scholar. We asked the embassies or high commissions of the countries concerned whether they had cabinet committees and, if so, to provide us with a list of them. Almost all of them provided this information willingly, and in a number of cases provided us with considerable additional information. It was this which led us to tackle the more ambitious project of comparison of the composition and operation of cabinet committees. For fuller information on the composition of cabinet committees see the tables in Mackie, Thomas T. and Hogwood, Brian, ‘Cabinet Committees in Executive Decision-Making: a Comparative Perspective’ (Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, Centre for the Study of Public Policy, Studies in Public Policy, No. 111, 1983)Google Scholar. The data on which this article is based are patchy, with full information available on some aspects for one set of countries and information on other aspects for a different set of countries. In particular lack of information means that we do not attempt to cover the roles of cabinet committees consisting only of officiais or of a mixture of ministers and officials such as exist in the United Kingdom and Canada. Similarly the important roles of cabinet secretaries are not covered in this paper.

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