
Patrick DunleavyLondon School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of Government
Patrick Dunleavy
D.Phil Political Science
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392
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Introduction
I am Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Public Policy in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences.
Additional affiliations
Education
October 1973 - April 1978
Publications
Publications (392)
Productivity is essentially the ratio of an organization’s outputs divided by its inputs. For many years it was treated as always being static in government agencies. In fact productivity in government services should be rising rapidly as a result of digital changes and new management approaches, and it has done so in some agencies. However, Dunlea...
I first define what the term ‘big data’ means and consider where it fits within the already established ‘tools of government’. Section two examines the varied and increasingly plentiful sources of big data, and considers how the phenomenon is linked with the digital revolution that is still working its way through many civil society institutions, e...
The evolution of digital era governance (DEG) has entered a third key phase, with significant changes in the previous quasi-paradigm. The development of big data, cheap storage on the cloud, super-fast comms, artificial intelligence (AI) and modern data science have combined to radically improve the scope for new information regimes in government b...
The UK’s Changing Democracy presents a uniquely democratic perspective on all aspects of UK politics, at the centre in Westminster and Whitehall, and in all the devolved nations.
The 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU marked a turning point in the UK’s political system. In the previous two decades, the country had undergone a series of democrati...
Originally published in 1985, "British Democracy at the Crossroads" was an important landmark text in the application of rational choice analysis to the analysis of UK elections. Using a specially commissioned survey at the 1983 general election and drawing on incisive and novel analyses of party competition, sectoral voting and ways of measuring v...
This blogpost was published by LSE British Politics and POlicy blog on 3 June 2024 and can also be downloaded free from
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-uk-needs-an-independent-commission-against-corruption/
Until 2010, Anglosphere digital governments struggled to modernize, dependent on large-scale contract relationships with global Systems Integrator firms (SIs) and elderly, custom-built legacy systems. Policymakers are now converted to the value of the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies for improving government. We trace the conversion...
Summary of Methodology for "The Political Economy of Digital Government: How Silicon Valley firms drove conversion to Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Public Management’" Public Money and Management, 2024, forthcoming.
- Summary of methodology
- Annex A Other materials drawing on the Australian ‘Connecting Government’ 2016 project co-...
An IFG report on ‘government at the centre’ recommends creating new, rationalist policy machinery (including an inner Cabinet) to manage UK government’s four-year policy programmes as a whole - faithfully following how the Cameron-Clegg coalition operated in 2010-15. That government’s disastrous example shows how politically naïve this plan would b...
This report presents the findings from a survey of thought leaders working at the heart of the digital change process in Australia’s Commonwealth, State and Territory governments. It tackles five key questions. What are the drivers of digital change? How is government responding? What are the main barriers being confronted? Where is government acti...
What the problem is and why it matters The public sector currently employs one in six people in paid work. That alone means that public sector productivity- how well the public sector produces outputs from inputs-matters hugely both to the overall economy and to the quality of individual public services. But even this understates its importance. In...
After spending years developing projects, collecting data and conducting analysis, many researchers often still spend comparatively little time thinking about how they can best present their results. A legacy belief is strongly shared by some older researchers and inculcated still in ‘elite’ universities - that academic ‘results should speak for th...
Forming an idea of the number of parties competing at elections or winning seats in legislatures is fundamental to disaggregated approaches to mapping party systems. We set out a method for systematically relating the behaviour of any ‘number of parties’ index to the size of the largest party's vote and the numbers of parties in competition. This a...
Hannah Boroudjou, and Helen Porter of LSE Library explain Data Management Plans
Writing a good data management plan is an integral part of successful open social science practice and a key factor in securing research funding. Yet many researchers have difficulty in fully engaging with writing and implementing their data management plan. This can b...
Alongside case studies and interviews, documentation analysis and review of varying kinds and levels of sophistication forms one of the top three parts of qualitative social science. In this session we focus on contemporary or fully publicly available document and text sources where access for replication purposes is feasible, and where a full set...
Case studies form an important part of qualitative social science and are undertaken in diverse ways to meet different goals. Relatively numerous but shallow cases are used as ‘apt illustrations’ at one end of the spectrum. At the other end, one or a few ‘deep’ cases in ‘diagnostic’ mode often seek to show the holistic and necessary nature of causa...
Re-analysing secondary data (collected by other researchers) to address new questions is a well-established, economical and time-saving research practice in the social sciences, that fits well with open science goals. Key types of data include consortium research projects using cross-national surveys, standardized data from international organizati...
A key aspect of encouraging and developing ‘open science’ modes of research in the modern social sciences centres on being explicit about decision-making about all stages of the research process. STEM science laboratories have well-developed lab handbooks that ensure lab members will follow the same processes in many repeating situations and decisi...
Implementing open social science (OSS) innovations focuses in large part on showing more of the concrete evidence that underpins analysis of findings and researchers’ conclusions and arguments. Many commentators have cast doubt on how far OSS approaches can be applied in qualitative research, suggesting that only limited openness can be achieved, e...
The essential step involved in any organizational-level analysis of government sector productivity is to allow for the costs of different kinds of activities and services that a department or agency delivers. We use variations to ensure that the relative importance and the difficulties of producing different services can be taken account of when co...
This chapter introduces how the productivity of government agencies and public services has generally been neglected, and shows how some even recent research does not really crunch through from inputs or activities measurement to consider outputs.
Useful measures for measuring the productivity of national agencies must generate long run data (over 5 to 10 years) that is directly useful to managers within that department or agency in monitoring their progress over time. This chapter sets out how to do that at the level of individual agencies, and the methods used in Chapters 3 to 7.
Tax-raising departments and agencies fulfil a unique role in any national or federal government by generating the inflow of financial resources upon which the work of every other department and policy sector depends (Osborne, 2002). So, maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of tax-raising agencies has been a high priority for all liberal demo...
Government agencies can achieve very rapid progress and productivity growth as this chapter shows by analysing the UK Customs agency, which introduced timely IT for handling imports and exports transactions and was able to handle sharply increased trade volumes with constant staff levels as a result.
The shift to ‘open’ working across the social sciences as a discipline group entails a welcome but demanding
cultural change. Yet, Patrick Dunleavy argues that there have already been three false starts: focusing only on
isolated bits of the open agenda in ways that don’t connect and so are not meaningful; loading researchers with off- putting, ext...
The shift to ‘open’ working across the social sciences as a discipline group entails a welcome but demanding cultural change. Yet, Patrick Dunleavy argues that there have already been three false starts: focusing only on isolated bits of the open agenda in ways that don’t connect and so are not meaningful; loading researchers with off-putting, exte...
This is the slide set for my PSA 2022 Conference paper, along with a video commentary from me explaining the slides.
In all bureaucracies how information is acquired, stored, re-accessed and analysed creates an 'information regime' of crucial importance for the rational or efficient conduct of business. Government departments and agencies use a wide range of information practices that can seem simply heterogenous, highly specific or hard to characterize. Yet an e...
The paper has six parts. The first recaps what public sector productivity is and what is not. Section 2 considers how the specific functions characteristic of the regional and local public sector condition productivity, and the foundation expectations we can formulate about productivity differences across tiers of government. In the third section I...
Since the demise of the Royal Institute of Public Administration in 1992, the UK and its constituent nations have lacked a crucial venue for administrative and management practitioners to come together with academic and researchers to focus on enhancing robust knowledge of what works in public administration and public management. While universitie...
The unprecedented growth of public disquiet about sleaze in contemporary Britain can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Defenders of the status quo point to the relatively sudden and distinctive emergence of the sleaze issue as a concept in public debate, arguing that it is only (or primarily) a mass media creation, a spasm or temporary...
From Turnbull to Morrison: Understanding the Trust Divide is the thirteenth volume of Australia's longest running study of Australian Commonwealth Government, started in 1983.
Is trust between the government and Australians broken? The country's leading institutions have been ranked among the least trusted in the world at a time when the economy h...
This is the UK’s biggest European regional constituency, returning ten MEPs. So it is the area where the most proportional results are feasible, and where smaller parties (those that can reach 6-8 per cent support) have the best chance of gaining a seat. Traditionally a Conservative stronghold in all other elections, UKIP none the less came first h...
“Collective consumption” involves people consuming (using up) services (and some goods) that are particularly subject to political and state influence because their costs are partly socialized through government subsidies; or their provision is specially regulated to foster social equality; or government agencies organize service provision. In the...
Within long-lived public sector bureaucracies the organizational cultures developed by administrative elites have strong filtering and focusing effects on the kinds of technological changes adopted, especially in the modern era. Normally seen as very slow-moving and hard to alter, senior officials’ attitudes towards digital changes have recently be...
The UK’s Changing Democracy presents a uniquely democratic perspective on all aspects of UK politics, at the centre in Westminster and Whitehall, and in all the devolved nations.
The 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU marked a turning point in the UK’s political system. In the previous two decades, the country had undergone a series of democrati...
This article briefly introduces the concept of ‘micro-institutions’ into political science and makes two claims (in an exploratory way):
1. Micro-institutions are important in political life, yet their roles are little recognized. They deserve a lot more systematic study - although that is difficult to do (e.g. even counting them reliably is a chal...
Rational choice theories of bureaucratic interests started simple and have become somewhat more sophisticated over time. Early, “classical” models stressed either budget maximization or rent seeking as dominant motivations and predicted chronically unbalanced or dysfunctional outcomes—respectively, bureaucratic oversupply or radical undersupply (to...
This is the Executive Summary for the open access textbook/ handbook "The UK's Changing Democracy: The Democratic Audit 2018". It gives a brief overview of the book's central findings across all topic areas in UK politics.
The full text of the book is open access, so it can be downloaded free (and permanently) from https://doi.org/10.31389/book1
Patrick Dunleavy examines a topic of foundational importance for any liberal democracy– how well does the electoral system (in this case the Westminster plurality rule, aka ‘first-past-the-post’) convert votes into seats? A sudden growth in two-party support in 2017 allowed the UK’s ancient voting system to work far more proportionately. But is thi...
Citizens and civil society have most contact with the administrative apparatus of the UK state, whose operations can powerfully condition life chances and experiences. Patrick Dunleavy considers the responsiveness of traditionally dominant civil service headquartered in Whitehall, and the wider administration of key public services, notably the NHS...
Patrick Dunleavy examines the proportional (PR) electoral system now used for smaller UK elections: the Northern Ireland Assembly, and Scottish and Northern Irish local councils. How has STV fared in converting votes into seats and fostering political legitimacy, under UK political conditions? An Annex also discusses the list PR system used to elec...
In addition to their floor debates, a crucial role of legislatures is to scrutinise government law-making and policy implementation. The House of Commons looks at legislation via bill committees, and its select committees cover each of the Whitehall departments to scrutinise implementation. Patrick Dunleavy and the Democratic Audit team consider ho...
Patrick Dunleavy looks at how well the dominant centre of power in the British state operates – spanning the Prime Minister, Cabinet, Cabinet committees, ministers and critical central departments. How accountable and responsive to Parliament and the public is this ‘core executive’? And how effective are these key centres of decision-making and the...
Patrick Dunleavy and Sean Kippin examine how democratic the UK’s party system and political parties are. Parties often attract criticism from those outside their ranks, but they have multiple, complex roles to play in any liberal democratic society. The UK’s system has many strengths, but also key weaknesses, where meaningful reform could realistic...
Devolution encompasses a range of quite different solutions in three countries (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), plus markedly smaller delegations of powers to London and some English cities and regions. There remain important issues around the stability and effectiveness of these arrangements, which were designed to meet specific demands for...
Patrick Dunleavy and the democratic audit team examine how well citizens are represented by the two main reformed electoral systems used in the UK – the ‘additional members system’ (AMS) and the ‘supplementary vote’ (SV). How successful have they been in showing the way for more modern electoral systems to work well under British political conditio...
Patrick Dunleavy establishes the wider context for liberal democracy globally, where prospects have generally been deteriorating in recent times. The factors that are currently going wrong for democratic advance across the world mostly have their counterparts in modernisation changes within Britain itself. This introduction then sets out how the Au...
Between elections, the interest group process (along with media and social media coverage) is a key way in which citizens can seek to communicate with their MPs and other representatives, and to influence government policy-makers. Patrick Dunleavy considers how far different social groups can gain access and influence decision-makers. How democrati...
In the concluding part of the book, Patrick Dunleavy first gives an overall assessment of the UK’s changing liberal democracy, looking across all the areas covered in the preceding chapters. The second section involves standing back and drawing some wider-out implications – around the loss of a previously influential ‘Europeanisation’ narrative, th...
How well does the House of Commons work via floor debates, questions to ministers and as a general means of scrutinising and passing legislation, and monitoring policy implementation? Has the return of a hung parliament since 2017 changed how the House of Commons functions as a legislature? Artemis Photiadou and Patrick Dunleavy consider if the tra...
Devolved government in London – focusing on the executive mayor and London Assembly – started as a radical innovation in 2000. Its generally successful development has sparked a slow, ‘organic’ spread of executive mayors to other English cities and conurbations. Andrew Blick and Patrick Dunleavy explore how democratically and effectively the two Lo...
I begin by briefly characterizing the precursor views of public administration that prevailed before public choice models were developed until the 1970s. Next I examine seven main public choice explanations of the bureaucracy as an interest group, beginning with the classical models that long-defined the field; moving on to revisionist models from...
Populist surges, movements and parties often center around radically simplifying policy proposals, sometimes anti-statist in intent (e.g. fix a limit to state borrowing in cash terms), and at other times pushing naïve statist solutions (e.g. build a giant wall to keep out migrants; or tax companies activities in a given shed, not their profits). Mo...
Many current academic citation and referencing practices are out of date and dysfunctional, especially in leading only to closed-access and paywall sources, or in providing only details of ‘legacy’ print formats.
The central principles of this Digital Style Guide are that:
1 All citations/ references should lead wherever possible to a digital te...
Improving productivity at the organisational level offers the greatest immediate dividends and could successfully cover the largest departments and agencies at the central or national level. For many decades the measurement of government outputs in national statistics and economic accounts used inputs, which assumes that government productivity nei...
Improving productivity at the organisational level offers the greatest immediate dividends and could successfully cover the largest departments and agencies at the central or national level. For many decades the measurement of government outputs in national statistics and economic accounts used inputs, which assumes that government productivity nei...
From the late nineteenth century onwards, public bureaucracies rapidly differentiated in how they operated - yet they all handled information in essentially the same way, via ‘bureaucratic reductionism’. Digital changes now pose an existential threat to this fundamental organizational paradigm. Digital changes have unprecedented salience for all pu...
Powerpoint Presentation at the book launch for Adam Oliver’s book, ’The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy’ (CUP, 2017), held at LSE, 31 May 2017
This chapter applies Dowding’s analysis of power to the community power debate. It demonstrates the importance of the collective action problem to our understanding of power in society, showing that both pluralists and their radical critics misinterpret power in society by ignoring collective action problems. It demonstrates the nature of luck and...
A convention has persisted for some eight decades now of measuring government outputs in national statistics and economic accounts using inputs. This is equivalent to assuming that government productivity neither grows nor falls over time. However, modern solutions now exist for cost-weighting outputs so as to generate empirically useful metrics of...
This valuable book offers a distinct and critical showcase of emerging forms of discovery for policy-making, drawing on the insights of some of the world’s leading authorities in public policy analysis.
It is now beyond any doubt that the age of states is not over, as some predicted. Nor are states marginalized from key international decision-making, as the least restrained globalization enthusiasts once argued. Instead the global financial crisis of 2008 and after has ushered in a period when how states operate has proved more crucial than ever b...
Governments and citizens operate in a digital environment, leaving digital trails whatever they do and wherever they go. These trails generate huge quantities of information about themselves, each other and any interactions they have. In this context, the most important elements of an organization that deals with people are the information it can a...
The contemporary state has been the focus of considerable controversy – about whether it exists and has ontological status (or not); about how it may be delineated; and about the sense in which it operates as a unity or some form of integrated agency in relation to civil society, and viz a viz other states. I argue that the modern state in liberal...
There are no unequivocally 'natural' systems left on Earth, barring perhaps geo-physical systems. All other autonomous natural systems are off-planet. Earthbound systems are either human dominated (think cities, markets, technology, societies, terraformed landscapes) or at the least human-influenced (think climate change, the Anthropcene, remaining...
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