Ministerial Advisers as Power Resources: Exploring Expansion, Stability and Contraction in Westminster Ministers’ Offices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, we argue that the entourage of ministerial advisers available to prime ministers and other ministers is an institutional power resource that can serve as a useful indicator to measure the changing nature of the political executive. Two novel contributions are made utilising four new datasets on ministerial advisers coupled with a comparative analysis of 21 governments in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, in varying dates between 1997 and 2020. First, by using ministerial advisers as a proxy indicator, we chart how the offices of executive politicians can either expand, remain stable or contract. As a corrective to the general long-term narrative that ministers’ offices continually expand, our evidence shows this expansion has in some cases been interrupted and more generally manifests in different patterns from one government to the next. Second, we interrogate these patterns against the background of four typical assumptions from the party family, government tenure, parliamentary control and leadership stability literature. The new datasets, typology and analysis provide fresh comparative insights to advance our understanding about the evolving nature of the political executive in the four classic Westminster family countries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".