Are governmental culture departments important? An empirical investigation

Abstract

Abstract It has been often claimed that governmental culture departments are not particularly significant or important for governments as a whole. The extent to which this is true is investigated through a combination of quantitative and qualitative assessments of departmental significance using the United Kingdom and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport as a case study. Departments are assessed across a number of criteria incorporating expenditure, law‐making, policy centrality, ministerial career trajectories, press coverage, departmental age, executive centrality, manifesto coverage and staffing patterns. On these the British example demonstrates that culture departments are not significantly important for governments as a whole. The comparative implications of this finding are identified, and potential new research areas are indicated. Keywords: government departmentscultural policy departmentsmethodologycomparison Acknowledgements This article was originally presented at the International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, August 2010. The authors wish to thank all those people who commented upon that version or asked questions about it, particularly Jenny Johannisson and the reviewers of the paper. Responsibility for all failings within it remains with the authors. Notes 1. My thanks to Anita Kangas for information on this. 2. Unlike most other countries the United Kingdom uses the labels ‘departments’ and ‘ministries’ interchangeably. For simplicity this article refers only to departments unless a specific ministry is being discussed. 3. Finer's (Citation1997) three‐volume history of government deals largely with questions of political management rather than political structure and deals specifically with bureaucracy in four pages (63–66) of a 1650‐page book. 4. This also makes tests of significance of dubious utility for the findings. 5. Alternatives, for example, could have included the length of ministerial tenure (Berlinski et al. Citation2007), or civil service changes in structure and status between departments (Greer and Jarman Citation2010). 6. This is not necessarily true of more recently independent nation states following decolonisation or the fragmentation of previously existing states (e.g. the Soviet Union). In such cases the process of state development becomes truncated. Even so it has yet to be the case that governments have come into existence without a finance ministry at all, whereas they have managed without cultural ones. 7. Even earlier bodies such as the Poor Law Commission of 1834–1847 and the Poor Law Board of 1847–1871 were clearly precursors to the Ministry of Pensions but were independent of central government and were not headed by ministers, thus not being a part of the machinery of the central state. 8. These Reports are used to identify the contribution of Departments to the attainment of PSA targets. 9. Thus the Department for Health and the Department for Communities and Local Government both contribute to 18 PSAs but Communities and Local Government leads on 3 and Health on 2, consequently the former has a higher ranking than the latter. 10. The difficulties of defining culture for the work of governments in this field is well recognised (Gray Citation2009) but for current purposes clarity is concerned with functional, rather than subject, coherence. 11. Whether the description of European states as being fully ‘welfare states’ is still appropriate can be argued about but given that no other collective description appears to be close to the manner in which they function the title has been retained.