Debates about the operation and power of the British core executive are long-standing. Scholars differ over whether it exemplifies a collegial, prime ministerial, segmented, or bureaucratic model and whether it monopolizes policymaking and implementation or has lost control to a multiplicity of external governmental and nongovernmental authorities. In their Accounting for Ministers, Samuel Berlinski, Torun Dewan, and Keith Dowding advance the prime ministerial model of the Westminster system. In this system, the premier has the unilateral power to shape cabinets, their committee structures, their agenda, and all supporting rules and units. Focusing in particular on the British prime minister’s power to appoint and dismiss cabinet ministers, the authors explore the career patterns of ministers. Their use of an extensive collection of micro-level data results in a sophisticated study of cabinet composition and survival, enriching the literature on British cabinet government.

The book examines in detail the social background of cabinet ministers, the effects of prime ministerial management styles, and the way that the prime ministers’ use of information on ministers’ behavior influences the length of time that the latter retain their posts. As the principle delegating responsibility, the prime minister exercises unencumbered authority to constitute the cabinet, in accord with cabinet government’s tiered notion of democratic accountability in which the prime minister him- or herself is the agent of his or her party and it, in turn, the agent of the electorate. After describing the British executive in detail, the authors show that background traits affect the selection of those who serve and the duration of that service. Using quantitative data for all governments from 1945 to the end of Tony Blair’s premiership in 2007, they find that ministers average 27 (Labour) to 28 (Conservatives) months in office, tend to be male, and benefit from having attended Oxford or Cambridge or being nobles. How long ministers stay in office corresponds to having an elite higher education, being female, or having a higher political rank. There is little effect on tenure from public schooling, though a reduced chance from having previously served. Then, using conventional qualitative sources, the authors analyze the impact of the managerial styles of prime ministers (e.g., collegial, micromanaging, delegating) on periods of service, confirming patterns consistent with their individual reputations and particular historical contexts. Finally, to understand a prime minister’s response to information about ministerial performance, they analyze patterns of resignation. Of 665 resignations, 574 were nonforced removals due to reshuffles or retirements and 91were cases of forced resignations, with 46 of these due to issues of collective responsibility (policy disagreement) and 45 due to individual responsibility (personal or departmental error). Interestingly, evidence shows that the chances of a minister’s survival depend upon how his or her performance is seen in the context of the behavior of the whole cabinet and that a minister facing one resignation call is more than twice as likely to be sacked as one with no resignation call.

The study provides a valuable stock of knowledge about British cabinets since World War II, while arguing that the composition of the cabinet reflects the one-sided power of the prime minister. Yet the book’s theoretical and methodological commitments raise a number of conceptual concerns. One problem is the puzzling way in which the theoretical approach and the substantive reports are set out; the connection between the theorizing of prime ministerial power in terms of the principle-agent approach and the presentation of data characterizing the traits of those who gets into cabinet positions and the patterns of turnover is not clearly presented. Unexplained is how aggregate data about the personnel of an institution indicates the structure of power within it. Does this apparent incompatibility between theory and data arise from the principle-agent framework’s assumption that power is a structural actuality, an independent relational capacity, or from its behavioral methodology? In any event, clarification of the conceptual link between the theory of power and the data presentation would have enhanced this work.

A second concern arises from the way the theoretical approach and its methodology prefigure conclusions. The principle-agent framework’s predetermination of a prime minister’s asymmetric power engenders a research design predisposed to find evidence corroborating its own perspective. It is therefore not surprising that the analysis of the background traits of ministers finds that social privilege confirms domination by elites and evidence of prime ministerial preference. The various managerial styles of the premiers, similarly, serve to confirm these leaders’ dominance. Likewise, the numbers and types of events affecting the length of service and frequency of ministerial turnover serve as further evidence of the principles’ control over designated emissaries. However, the uniformity of these findings suggests that the theoretical frame precludes consideration of variations in the power structure within cabinets. Examining the ebb and flow of power would be important, for instance, to an explanation of the majority of resignation cases, those involving reshuffles and retirements, since they usually involve a prime minister’s attempt to recharge a government’s political capacity. But finding an answer would require going outside the principle-agent analysis and drawing on theories of power capable of explicating how the selection of different individuals contributed ideas, skills, and energy that, in changing the power dynamics within the executive, improved its ability to govern. At base, then, is the question about the validity of the use of foundational approaches prefiguring conceptual and empirical conclusions.

Finally, the effect of this theoretical approach is to narrow the research focus to cabinet composition and, in consequence, to overlook important debates about the role of the core executive in the changing character of state power in postwar Britain. One of these controversies concerns the effects of forces shifting power downward through regional autonomy and privatization, upward toward the European Union and international organizations, and laterally to units such as an independent central bank. Another scholarly dispute bypassed concerns the changing power structure within the core executive itself. This considers the variety of methods being developed for unifying and coordinating the center’s capacity to command, strategies such as setting targets, recentralizing resources, and controlling the details of policy planning and institutional multiplication. A third discussion overlooked involves the literatures that identify how governing formulas associated with distinct policy eras affect prime ministerial control. Postwar collectivism provided for the consolidation of strong party government; the crisis of governance from the late 1960s to the late 1970s undermined party discipline and prime ministerial control; and the triumph of Thatcherism after 1979 established a strong and personalized premiership, while utilizing market practices as indirect modes of control within as well as outside of the state apparatus. One would expect these very different contexts to affect power relationships between prime ministers and cabinets in different ways.

As the first book to give a systematic picture of the British cabinet during the period from the administration of Clement Attlee to Blair, Accounting for Ministers merits prominence. It goes beyond biographical and constitutional studies by drawing on principle-agent analysis and mining a new body of aggregate data, identifying objective factors affecting career patterns. It also raises a number of significant analytical questions. It is to be hoped that this study of the British cabinet will inspire similar studies of the core executive in a variety of other parliamentary democracies.