Agency Termination in the UK: What Explains the ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’?

In October 2010, the UK’s Coalition Government announced a radical reduction in the number of public bodies in the UK. This research tests the impact of three factors identified in the termination literature as affecting agency survival: political turnover, age and agency type. The research found that advisory Non-Departmental Public Bodies were five times more likely to have been identified for abolition or merger than other agency types. The research also found that agency age was a factor, but that political turnover was not significant.

[1]  K. Dommett,et al.  Bonfires and Barbecues: Coalition Governance and the Politics of Quango Reform , 2014 .

[2]  Moira Nelson.  Dismantling Public Policy: Preferences, Strategies, and Effects , 2013, Journal of Social Policy.

[3]  Sanghee Park.  What Causes the Death of Public Sector Organizations? Understanding Structural Changes and Continuities in Korean Quangos , 2013 .

[4]  Martin Ferry,et al.  Reassessing the concept of policy termination: the case of regional policy in England , 2013 .

[5]  E. Glor.  Patterns of Canadian departmental survival , 2011 .

[6]  Arjen Boin,et al.  The Life and Death of Public Organizations: A Question of Institutional Design? , 2010 .

[7]  D. Laws.  22 days in May : the birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative coaltion , 2010 .

[8]  Michael Howlett,et al.  The Dependent Variable Problem in the Study of Policy Change: Understanding Policy Change as a Methodological Problem , 2009 .

[9]  Christoph Knill,et al.  The Termination of Public Organizations: Theoretical Perspectives to Revitalize a Promising Research Area , 2007 .

[10]  Daniel Carpenter,et al.  Political Learning from Rare Events: Poisson Inference, Fiscal Constraints, and the Lifetime of Bureaus , 2004, Political Analysis.

[11]  David E. Lewis,et al.  The Politics of Agency Termination: Confronting the Myth of Agency Immortality , 2002, The Journal of Politics.

[12]  M. R. Daniels.  POLICY AND ORGANIZATIONAL TERMINATION , 2001 .

[13]  J. Greenwood.  The Succession of Policy Termination , 1993 .

[14]  Patrick Dunleavy,et al.  Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice: Economic Explanations in Political Science , 1991 .

[15]  Peter deLeon,et al.  POLICY EVALUATION AND PROGRAM TERMINATION , 1983 .

[16]  E. Bardach.  Policy termination as a political process , 1976 .

[17]  T. Lowi,et al.  The end of liberalism : the second republic of the United States , 1969 .

[18]  B. Grofman,et al.  Why so much stability? Research note Partial single-peakednes s: An extension and clarification , 1986 .