An Exploration of the Relationship between Government Type and Bureaucratic Structural Reorganisation in New Zealand, 1957–2017
The type of government, whether the cabinet is a single-party majority, multiparty coalition, minority, or oversized, is often claimed to be one important factor affecting the shape of bureaucratic reform. This claim has been widely used in comparative public administration studies across countries in order to explain or even predict why radical and far-reaching reforms are pursued in some jurisdictions but not in others. One example of these studies is Pollitt and Bouckaert (2017), which identified that the scope and intensity of public management reforms were greater in majoritarian governments (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) than in consensual regimes (Belgium, Finland, and the Netherlands). Yet, there are virtually no studies that have examined closely the impact of differences in cabinet type upon the nature of bureaucratic reforms. Thus, this study aimed to explore empirically the relationship between the type of government and bureaucratic structural reorganisation, one aspect—but a central one—of bureaucratic reforms, through the consideration of the unique case of New Zealand, where four different cabinet types have been formed in the post-war period.
In New Zealand, which was previously described as ‘the purest example of the Westminster model of government’ (Lijphart, 1987, p. 97), cabinet type has become more fluid since a proportional representation electoral system was adopted in 1996. For this reason, New Zealand was chosen as a model country to study the relationship, including identifying any dynamics in the shape and approach of government organisational and structural changes by the type of government. In the analysis of organisational restructurings in the New Zealand central government from 1957¬ to 2017, the impact of differences in cabinet type upon organisational changes was assessed quantitatively by measuring nine dimensions.
In addition to the investigation of the relationship between government type and bureaucratic structural reorganisation, this research explored the evolution of the New Zealand government apparatus over the past 60 years. The database of organisational restructuring, created for the purpose of this research, provided a means for mapping all government organisations that exist and have existed as well as capturing organisational changes made to each organisation. By analysing changes in the number of government organisations and characteristics of organisational changes over time, this research identified a number of patterns and trends, including not only NPM and post-NPM reform trajectories but also other important variables, such as policy areas and party constellations in government. In so doing, this research was able to provide a comprehensive and detailed profile of the nature of the evolution of the New Zealand state sector over time. The development of rigorous and systematic data on government organisations and reorganisations was also one of the contributions that this research made.
The results of investigating the relationship between the type of government and bureaucratic structural reorganisation in New Zealand over more than half a century did not demonstrate any real differences between cabinet types, except the sort of outlier cases in which significant associations were found between the single-party majority governments during 1984–1993—known as the most reformist governments in New Zealand’s history of state sector reform—and four out of the nine dimensions. They were 1) establishing larger numbers of new organisations; 2) using more consistent reorganisation approaches; 3) making more pronounced changes to organisational structure; and 4) initiating more difficult changes. By comparing different cabinet types and also distinguishing the most reforming governments from other single-party majorities, this research was able to identify methodologically what the government restructurings during the late 1980s and early 1990s were like. Other than this, the central finding that there was no evidence that differences in cabinet type affected the shape and approach of government organisational changes in New Zealand from 1957 to 2017 stood as a contradiction to the widely held view that the nature of executive government plays a major role in shaping public management reforms. For New Zealand, this finding means that having consensual cabinet types did not stop successive governments from undertaking frequent, continuous, repetitive and even significant government restructurings. As such, this research was concluded with the proposition that a consensual cabinet type is a fake mask of majoritarian ruling, meaning that New Zealand governments under MMP still remain largely as ‘majoritarian’ when it comes to government organisational restructurings.
