Political Management: The Dance of Government and Politics 9780367467067, 9780367467043, 9781003030515

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‘Lees-Marshment’s book will surely become the seminal text in what is a burgeoning literature on political management. She rightly understands that because political managers make decisions and take actions within the public arena, the profession requires as deep of an understanding of partisan politics and coalitional diplomacy as it does of good business management principles. She also correctly distinguishes political management from public administration in that she acknowledges that government policy-making and administration are not without politics of their own. Her “4Ds” model of “deliberating, designing, doing, and dancing” aptly describes the challenges involved with successfully delivering on campaign promises and policy platforms. Through her interviews and her primary documents research, she provides substantial empirical evidence that supports her argument of the need for greater professionalization of the political management field. A truly excellent work – Lees-Marshment’s book should be read by anyone who is frustrated that governments never seem to be able to get things done.’ Associate Professor Lara M. Brown, Director, Graduate School of Political Management, George Washington University, USA ‘Political advisors are the unseen navigators of the political world. Their work is essential to keeping the ship of government running and on course – and ensuring their ministers don’t run aground. Yet very little has been documented about the key management role that advisors play. So this research is overdue, and I warmly welcome it.’ Mike Munro, Former Chief of Staff to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ‘In this innovative book Jennifer Lees-Marshment applies the tools of management to the work of politics. Through extensive research and real-life examples she shows how political practitioners of all kinds can improve their capabilities, essential if they are to meet the public policy challenges we face.’ Professor Helen Sullivan, Director, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University ‘In this wide-ranging and important study, Jennifer Lees-Marshment powerfully contends that in the hyper-complex twenty-first century there is no effective political leadership in the absence of skillful political management. Indeed, the tools to manage government presented here look set to become a key resource for presidents and prime ministers worldwide. Essential reading for scholars and political practitioners alike.’ Professor Ludger Helms, University of Innsbruck, Austria, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Political Executives ‘Politics is a complex and high stakes undertaking, yet electoral candidates, elected officials and supporting staffers are often inexperienced and unprepared for crucial aspects of the job. This book provides a valuable introduction to key aspects of political management which will benefit practitioners, students and researchers alike.’ Paul Wilson, formerly Director of Policy to the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, currently Associate Professor, Clayton H. Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

POLITICAL MANAGEMENT

Political Management lays out the core tools to manage government, campaigns and parties. The first book to combine management concepts with politics and government, it provides core theories for what political planning, political human resources, political organising, political leadership and political reviewing involve, illustrated with high level political practitioner interviews, examples and political documents. The text presents the four Ds of political management – deliberating, designing, doing and dancing – to convey that political management is more of a dance than a march. Even presidents and prime ministers do not have enough formal authority to control the myriad of practitioners, players, processes and policies involved in 21st-century governance. In this book, the author demonstrates why political practitioners in campaign teams, parties, government departments and political offices need political management tools to utilise the resources they have available and overcome multiple obstacles that practical politics presents. By offering a clear sense of what political management involves and providing the theoretical frameworks to be used in empirical research, this book will stimulate significant future study. It will be invaluable to practitioners, scholars and students in politics, government, policy, leadership, management, public administration and political management. Jennifer Lees-Marshment is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a research-led but practice-oriented crossdisciplinary academic working in the areas of political marketing, political management and political leadership. She has authored or edited 16 books, including The Political Marketing Game, Political Marketing: Principles and Applications (now in its third edition), and The Ministry of Public Input, which won the IAP2 Australasia Research Award. Jennifer also edits a book series on political marketing and political management. She has strong interests in research impact and employability, and was academic advisor to TVNZ’s Vote Compass in the 2014 and 2017 New Zealand elections. She is an employability advocate and teaches an employability course ‘The Practice of Politics’. See www.lees-marshment.org.

POLITICAL MANAGEMENT The Dance of Government and Politics

Jennifer Lees-Marshment

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Jennifer Lees-Marshment The right of Jennifer Lees-Marshment to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lees-Marshment, Jennifer, author. | Routledge (Firm) Title: Political management : the principles of managing government, parties and campaigns / Jennifer Lees-Marshment. Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020005255 (print) | LCCN 2020005256 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367467067 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780367467043 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781003030515 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Politics, Practical. | Political consultants. | Political campaigns. | Campaign management. | Elections. Classification: LCC JF2051 .L366 2020 (print) | LCC JF2051 (ebook) | DDC 324.7--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005255 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005256 ISBN: 978-0-367-46706-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-46704-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03051-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

This book is dedicated to my family – P-J, James and Hazel

CONTENTS

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements

x xi xiii

1

Introduction: The importance and nature of political management

2

Political planning: Designing and implementing organisational strategy in government, parties and campaigns

28

Political organising: Power, structure and culture in government, parties and campaigns

70

Political human resources: Appointing and utilising staff and volunteers in government, parties and campaigns

112

Political leadership: Using diverse power sources to exert influence in government, parties and campaigns

160

Political reviewing: Reflection and renewal in government, parties and campaigns

194

Conclusion: A model of the four Ds of political management

207

3 4 5 6 7

Index

1

241

FIGURES

2.1 Illustration of alignment between higher level presidential management and lower level agency planning 7.1 The four Ds of political management

55 209

TABLES

1.1 Indicators of effectiveness in political management 1.2 Typical political manager positions in government and political offices 1.3 Typical political manager positions in political party organisations and offices 1.4 Typical political manager positions in government and political offices 1.5 Core areas and activities in political management 2.1 Key areas of political planning 2.2 Examples of mission statements in politics 2.3 Examples of vision statements in politics 2.4 Principles in the UK Ministerial Code 2.5 An example of linking expectations of staff to government priorities from the ACT Government Shared Capability Framework 2.6 A theory of political planning 3.1 Key areas of political organising 3.2 A theory of political organising 4.1 Key areas of political HR 4.2 The competencies for candidates and MPs 4.3 The competencies for a chief of staff 4.4 The competencies for political advisors 4.5 The competencies for a press secretary 4.6 The competencies for policy advisors in political offices 4.7 Needs analysis for creating a volunteer program for FEMA 4.8 Organizing for Action’s (2015) use of incentives in its recruitment of volunteers for its Fellowship Program 4.9 Political management benefits and disadvantages of politically appointed staff versus non-partisan civil servants 4.10 Motivations of New Zealand ministerial advisers

18 19 21 22 24 29 30 32 46 57 63 71 105 114 117 119 120 122 123 124 125 130 136

xii Tables

4.11 4.12 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Benefits to try to offer party members A theory of political HR Key areas of political leadership Tactics leader should/should not take in a crisis Examples of presidential proclamations External strategies to manage unpopular policy reform Internal strategies to manage unpopular policy reform A theory of political leadership Key areas of political reviewing Data to utilise in measuring progress against strategic goals Suggested differential levels of membership post-2016 UK Conservative Party review A theory of political reviewing The five areas of political management Deliberating in political management Designing in political management Doing in political management Dancing in political management

146 154 161 164 172 180 182 189 194 195 201 205 208 210 215 224 230

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was a long and challenging project – there is no manual for how to write a book to define a new field that doesn’t really exist, even though it’s a major area of political practice. Despite being a world leader in the field of political marketing and thus used to cross-disciplinary translation and application, grasping an entirely new discipline – management – and figuring out how to connect politics to it was not easy. It took four years and two sabbaticals to get here. But now we are here, it opens the door to a whole new world of research, teaching and impact. A number of research assistants contributed to the book in its early stages, and I want to acknowledge their hard work but also persistence and agility in learning a new discipline in order to be able to collect and analyse political material relevant to management – James Barrett, Edward Elder and Lisa Mulgrew. I also appreciate the informal discussions my former students now working as political advisors for MPs and ministers took time to have with me, which helped to understand the context of political practice. I also want to acknowledge colleagues at Carleton University’s Political Management Programme in Canada, especially Paul Wilson and Andre Turcotte, who hosted me at the beginning of this project, and the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University who hosted me as a Visiting Fellow at the end of it. Funding from the University of Auckland’s sabbatical grant and the School of Social Sciences enabled me to stay in the Australian capital for an extended period and conduct interviews with high level political practitioners. Thank you to the practitioners who agreed to be interviewed and those who helped me to get interviews. The interviews were inspiring and brought the material alive. I look forward to talking with many more of you in future empirical research. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for their patience and support. You know all the trials and tribulations that come with my job, continue to respect that I still love it nonetheless, and tolerate all the consequences that come with writing books. In particular, thank you for supporting me when I worked over-time, and to P-J for cooking most of the dinners when I was trying to complete this book in 2019. It is not

xiv Acknowledgements

something I want to repeat in a hurry – sabbaticals are supposed to be peaceful – but at the very least it was productive, and – finally – the book is done. Jennifer Lees-Marshment Auckland, New Zealand, 29 January 2020

1 INTRODUCTION The importance and nature of political management

Political management is about how political practitioners utilise management concepts and tools encompassing strategic planning, organisational design, political human resources (HR), leadership and reviewing to achieve organisational goals. Political management is important because it influences how effectively political practitioners cultivate and wield influence in a complex system of competing interests. The ability to get the right people on the team, persuade others, utilise long-established rules and adapt different leadership approaches to suit the circumstances has significant impact on achieving political goals. Academically, political management is an emerging cross-disciplinary field that is part of public administration, and also draws on political science and management, but is not the same as public management. Political management focuses on how political practitioners – as opposed to public servants – do, and could, use management. Despite substantial research on public management, there has been little research on how politicians and staff manage organisations, resources and people. And yet the work of these political practitioners – who are the eventual elected leaders (and advisors to leaders) in government – ultimately has significant influence on the work that the public service is directed, authorised and resourced to do. This is the first book to explain what political management is, what activities it involves, and why it is important. It lays out the conceptual architecture for a new field, using a literature synthesis filtered through core management concepts, illustrated empirically with excerpts from political documents and quotes from select high level political practitioner interviews. It aims to facilitate future empirical research in political management as well as to be used in new training to ensure our political workforce is properly qualified to serve us effectively. This chapter explains why we need to research political management and provides an overview of the methodology for the book. It then provides a definition of political management, before discussing the political organisations involved, their goals, the practitioners and stakeholders in political management and the five core areas of political management: political planning, political organising, political HR, political leadership and political reviewing.

2 Introduction

Why we need to research political management There are two fundamental reasons to research political management: the problems with current practice and the lack of existing research. This is evident both from existing literature and informal conversations and interviews with practitioners.

The problems in practice Imagine you are scheduled to be operated on for a brain tumour. You find out at the last minute that your surgeon has not been trained; neither has their assistant: maybe they’ve studied the history of medicine but they don’t know how to ‘do’ medicine and give the surgeon the right drill. Would you still go under the knife? The chances are the answer is ‘no’. Yet we let ourselves be ruled every day by ministers and chief executives, pay them a surgeon’s salary, but do not train them or their staff in how to manage government. Those working in government offices and departments are effectively in charge of multi-million-dollar budgets, projects and hundreds to thousands of staff. And those working in party offices and campaign teams are one election away from getting into the same position of power. Untrained ministers and advisors decide on laws, regulations, policies and budgets, not for just one operation, but for every hospital, every publicly funded institution, public servant and indeed every aspect of how our worlds are run. There are therefore several core practical arguments for researching political management: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The scope of management practice in politics and government is huge and complex and thus requires political management skills. Politicians and political staff lack management skills, even if they have engaged in management in business. The way politicians and political staff are recruited or appointed fails to assess skills for the job. Existing training for politicians and political staff is limited. Problematic workplace conditions and culture.

The scope of management practice in politics and government is huge and complex and thus requires political management skills Political parties and campaigns are growing in their complexity with more extensive technical tools, greater involvement of volunteers and challenging rules around campaign finance. As the National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party said when interviewed, ‘the governance issues that party officials face are escalating’ because ‘you are executing or managing massive budgets and executing some huge outlays’ yet there is ‘incredible administrative complexity’ around both the legal regulations and ethical expectations for donations as well as the impact of digital communication which includes ‘all sorts of forms of misinformation which can just occur organically but also can be manipulated by malicious actors’ meaning that ‘you have got all those things coming at you’ (Erickson 2019). Once elected, politicians also face significant pressures working in increasingly complex environments. As Coghill et al (2008, 74–6) explain, this requires effective management of an electorate or constituency office and its staff ‘which is equivalent in effect to operating a small business’ and affects their effectiveness, as well as being engaged in advocacy and negotiation.

Introduction 3

Government involves managing billion-dollar budgets, political and non-partisan staff, and multiple organisational units (Brady and Catterall 1997 p. 524; Moore 1995, 57; Wood and Marchbanks 2008, 375). Even in a small country such as New Zealand, which has a population under five million, the financial numbers run into billions: the three largest areas of total Crown expenditure for the 2014/15 financial year were: social security and welfare: $28.2 billion; health: $14.7 billion; and education: $13.5 billion (New Zealand Treasury 2015). In the US, even back in 2000 staff numbers in federal government were estimated at nearly three million (Lombard 2003, 1107). Yet the structure of political offices is unclear, and as a former political staffer in the Australian Prime Minister’s Office noted when interviewed, ‘most of the structures that the bureaucracy runs on aren’t replicated in a political office’ (Campbell 2019). As Cohen (1998, 450–1), a career senior executive in the US government for 34 years noted in his article ‘Amateur Government’, ‘we wouldn’t let a high-rise office tower be designed and built by a real estate industry lobbyist with no architectural training and no construction experience or a young man a few years out of college who had never managed funds or supervised more than a handful of people multimillion dollar corporation be made the head of a major operating division.’ Yet government appointees – and elected politicians who become ministers and their staff – lack relevant managerial skills to run even larger government departments with the biggest budget and staff, the widest range of products and services, and the greatest impact on lives (Cohen 1998, 451–2). This makes achieving change a difficult and lengthy process (Crumpacker and Crumpacker 2004, 235; Cohen 1998, 487–8) and putting into practice their election policies hard (Bourgault 2007, 258; Benze 1987, 50). Having a good policy is not enough; management of competing individuals, diverse staff, pressures and conflicts is needed because as one practitioner said, ‘Government [is] not just about policy but also about political management’ (quoted in Eichbaum and Shaw 2010, 134). Formal, positional power is not enough to get things done. Just as President Trump did not get his promised wall built in his first term, the election of Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister of New Zealand, which made world news, came about via a complex electoral system which meant her party held only 75% of the governing parties’ 63 seats and thus as her Chief of Staff commented, ‘the authority of the government is spread across parties … so, it is a lot harder to get things done. The processes are slow, there are niggles along the way, there is a lot of arguing that has to happen. It is a less than perfect process’ (Munro 2019).

Politicians and political staff lack management skills, even if they have engaged in management in business Both practitioners and academics highlight the lack of political management skills amongst practitioners, particularly in the context of taking on senior roles in government (see Wood and Marchbanks 2008, Fawcett and Oonagh 2010, 34, 41). Even when politicians have managed parties or campaigned effectively, they are seen as lacking the skills to manage government. Once elected they move from managing hundreds of people and small budgets to thousands of staff and multi-million budgets. UK political advisor Dominic Cummings (2014) argued that ministers were completely unprepared to run government: ‘Most MPs have never been responsible for managing even a 100 people and they are suddenly put in charge of managing sometimes 10,000 people or more. They’ve never ever

4 Introduction

managed a budget of a million quid, and suddenly they are managing budgets of say 70 billion quid … and there are no training systems in Whitehall that can begin to cope with this.’ New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who governed for over eight years, recalled how when he got into power he had to ask others how things worked: ‘When I became Prime Minister I’d never been a Minister. I remember asking Tony Ryall – because he’d been a minister – basically what does a cabinet paper look like; how does the process work? I’d seen one obviously in the work we’d done but how does it all work? I’d just gone straight into being PM so that was a bit odd.’ (Key 2016) Business management experience is not enough. A former US Chief of Staff noted that often business men or women brought in ‘always fail’ because they neglect personal relationships, thinking they have power, but ‘in the White House all those normal management techniques go out the window’ (quoted in Walcott et al 2001, 469). As another practitioner observed, some political advisors ‘have had no experience with public sector, they’ve had a corporate career and they do not understand that the realm of working is far more complex than the profit motive’ (Stefanic 2019).

The way politicians and political staff are recruited or appointed fails to assess skills for the job One of the biggest areas for concern is the lack of proper HR in politics. Personnel recruitment and management are crucial to organisational success – as one campaign chief of staff noted, when managing campaigns ‘the first thing it involves is you recruiting your staff’ (Nash 2019). Yet often there is a lack of a professional selection processes in politics – as staffers note, ‘there is no merit or selection process or anything. You are there at the pleasure of the prime minister’ (Campbell 2019) and ‘there is no formal process for going out and recruiting political advisers and ministerial advisers. It happens almost by accident’ (Munro 2019). As Heclo (1998, 54) argues, ‘the present personnel system of political management is itself insufficiently managed.’ Political appointees, ministers and political advisors are appointed for political loyalty or to reward those who helped an election campaign (Cohen 1998, 452, 457, Brady and Catterall 1997, 520; Kerby 2009, 595–6) which can result in an ineffective staff (Dickinson 1998, 768–9). Practitioners talk of picking people they know for campaigns, who in turn choose others they know (Nash 2019), using networks (Gartrell 2019), those who have worked for Members of Parliament (MPs) or ministers before (Gartrell 2019; Munro 2019) and contracting external staff to fill skill gaps in campaigns (Greiner 2019; Nash 2019). It isn’t a perfect process, as conceded by two Prime Ministerial Chiefs of Staff:  

‘It’s very much just taking a bit of a bit of a punt and picking the right people’ (Kunkel 2019). ‘It sounds quite haphazard and untidy, because it was haphazard and untidy! Somehow we got a crew together in the end and made that work. But it wasn’t easy getting there’ (Munro 2019).

Introduction 5

Turnover amongst political advisors, party staff and political appointees is high (Cohen 1998, 453; Wood and Marchbanks 2008, 392).

Existing training for politicians and political staff is limited Despite the professional standards set for other occupations, a strong theme in the interviews with practitioners when discussing working in parties and government was that politicians, ministers and political advisors are left to learn on the job:  

 

  

‘You are thrown in the absolute deep end … There wasn’t even an induction process about “OK this is how best to work with the bureaucracy”.’ (Campbell 2019) ‘I said “so okay, what does a political adviser actually do?”, and they said “you will work it out.” And this is the case for many advisors … It’s a lot to learn. In some ways I had it easier because my main aim was to get the Zero Carbon Bill through, so I just did everything I could to achieve that.’ (Baker-Jones 2019) ‘There was a pool of people there they turned into advisers overnight.’ (Munro 2019) ‘When I was in the ministerial advisor role it was kind of just turn up to work, no one ever told me what was my job … there was whole lot of norms and cultural expectations … but no one ever tells you. No one ever says to you “here is the manual, here is your job”’ (Erickson 2019) ‘It is pretty much jump in the fast-moving river and swim along’ (Gartrell 2019) ‘I’ve heard ministers say – and not surprisingly – “I haven’t done this before, actually how does that work?” … These people who are fresh to government, some of the processes and procedures they don’t know how they work’ (Baker-Jones 2019) ‘We don’t educate ministers in how to be minister, there’s no real guide book … there is an assumption that you spend a number of years as a parliamentarian; you learn your trade, your craft, and then you eventually progress once you understand how the Executive works.’ (Stefanic 2019)

Yet conclusions from exit interviews with White House staff were that ‘the White House is no place for on-the-job training’ especially in the early stages of a government when effective planning is needed to ensure a good year ahead (Kumar et al 2000, 769). Moreover, peer learning, which might go some way to offset the lack of preparing – and make on the job learning effective – is rare amongst those at higher levels because ‘there are so few others who do these jobs’ (Nash 2019). Thus when you are a chief of staff ‘you don’t necessarily meet others’ and wisdom gained from experience is not passed on because ‘when you actually finish you don’t have a lot of time to go tell other people how to do the job better … when you leave you are dispersed to the wind’ (Nash 2019). Similarly, senior party officials are few in number: ‘Being a party organiser or party official, there isn’t really any direct equivalent function. If you are a manager of a team or a comms team in the public service in some department you are probably performing very similar functions to some people in other departments or levels of government. If you’re a party official, there are handful of other party officials in your party and it stops there. I am not even sure if my counterpart in the Liberals or the Nationals or the Greens, whether the rhythm of their jobs is similar

6 Introduction

because they are in different organisations with different cultures and things like that. That becomes kind of baked into the way party officials think and we think that we are doing this thing is totally unique and no one else will understand it and as a result we get very little training, because you are almost under the assumption that no one can train you because it is so unique and different to everyone else so there is no training. You then end up in a cycle that can reinforce some of lower denominator behaviours.’ (Erickson 2019) Existing training is seriously lacking despite the challenging nature of their roles and wideranging impact on society. Coghill et al (2008, 74–7) note how although training is expected in other professions to ensure practitioners possess the level of knowledge, skill and ethical standards required to practice competently, there is nothing for MPs, ‘there are no defined qualifications or criteria for their role; nor is there a professional supporting body … there is no formal professional development regime.’ Existing training tends to be restricted to information giving about procedural rules: as the Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services conceded: ‘we educate parliamentarians on being a good member both from the procedural point of view and what the resources they have access to discharge their jobs. It a fairly narrow sort of learning that they get, and they have obviously come from all walks of life. We don’t actually teach them how to manage an electorate office, or how to engage with the minister.’ (Stefanic 2019) This is also true of political staff working in parties and government:   

‘You’re not trained at all is the reality.’ (Campbell 2019) ‘There’s no formal training for political advisors, there’s no template out there that says, “Take this away and make it work”.’ (Munro 2019) ‘In the five years I’ve been here I haven’t made the time to do any formal training on management or any of the particular skills that I am supposed to have. And I think that’s a real short-coming. I don’t think I am unique in that – I think this is generally true of party officials … and it leads to lesser outcomes because it’s just natural that if you are untrained you are not going to perform to the level that you otherwise might.’ (Erickson 2019)

Problematic workplace conditions and culture This raises a range of ethical issues, firstly around the working conditions for MPs and ministers and their staff. Organisational psychology research suggests they would be seen as against many standard HR practices in companies because of their high workload and poor work–life balance which has ‘ramifications for the lives of thousands, even millions’ (Weinberg 2015, 252). Similarly Brady and Catterall (1997, 520) note that ministers are over-burdened by overload, which could impact on their policy-making and strategic thinking. Marland’s (2016, 205–6) interviews with Canadian practitioners revealed a range of problematic workplace practices, including higher level political staffers exercising control through fear, and swearing at and threatening public servants. Comparative studies edited by Eichbaum and Shaw (2010 and 2011) suggest a range of issues about the relationship between political staff and officials/civil

Introduction 7

servants. Another issue is harassment and political offices, which prompted an external review by the Speaker of the House in New Zealand (see New Zealand Parliament 2019). The Australian Labor Party secretary reflected how trade union leaders remark that governance requirements in their organisations have ‘dramatically lifted over the last 20 years’ but ‘and then they walk into a room in the Labor Party and we are still basically operating like a bowls club’ (Erickson 2019). How to manage the behaviour of unpaid volunteers for campaigns and parties has also become an issue: ‘There are going to be people who have not worked together before, don’t really know each other, there are going to be personality clashes, there are going to be kind of tensions and difficulties to be worked through … and then there are going to be more unpleasant risks like there will be bullying and there will be incidents of sexual harassment and things like that … You have to have core policies in place that are widely understood and clearly communicated and are real and not just “oh we’ve got the policy over there” but are alive and are available to people and acted upon … that is a challenge for all parties. We are voluntary organisations and we’ve got these massive, very high expectations from our stake holders, and this is just one challenge amongst many, but no party could say they have this under control.’ (Erickson 2019)

The gap in existing research Universities need to provide the dedicated research on management in political organisations; as Coghill et al (2008, 80) argued ‘it cannot be appropriately researched and delivered by parliaments alone … Objective and independent third party evaluation and participation is necessary’ and ‘independent accreditation would also pave the way for the standardisation of knowledge, skills and ability within the profession.’ However, government and politics is a management-free zone in theory as well as practice and there is a profound lack of proper, dedicated research in political management that might inform the development of potential training to overcome some of the issues in practice. Existing political management research and teaching is very limited. Management is about getting things done: utilising resources to achieve goals, involving planning, organising, leading, controlling, manging and motivating people, and organisational structure, design, culture and change. Yet most of the existing literature called political management does not use management concepts. Despite promising titles, it is on local government only and/or lacks management concepts (e.g. Blackeney and Borins 1988; Heatley 1996) or focuses on campaigns (Johnson 2009). Other research in public administration and policy (e.g. Ingraham et al 1995; Stewart and Maley 2007) offers discussion of behaviour that might be, but has not yet been, connected to political management. A few rare pieces use management concepts but without applying them to empirical examples from politics, or if they do the examples are very dated (e.g. Heymann 1988; Vasu, Stewart and Garson 1998; Moore 1995). Even the book series ‘Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management’ has thus far focused on political marketing rather than management. Existing definitions are therefore also limited, with an encyclopaedia entry on political management by Johnson (2016) focusing on campaigns and communication, and the definition by GWU political management program founder Chris Arterton (1988, 52) focusing on electoral campaign management, government relations and lobbying.

8 Introduction

The two institutions that offer political management teaching – the GWU Graduate School of Political Management in the US and the Carleton University graduate program in political management in Canada – offer little that is actually about the management of politics. An analysis of the different topics in business management and those taught at GWU/ Carleton and chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Political Management (Johnson 2009) revealed major gaps between what is considered management in business scholarship and what has been taught/written about in politics. Traditional MBAs, masters of public policy, public administration or public management do not cover management by politicians and political and party staff. Business research is useful but not good enough to create effective training for political practitioners (Coghill et al 2008, 75, 78). Other scholars have also noted very specific gaps in the literature, such as research into the presidency failing to put White House staffing as the centrepiece (Hult and Tenpas 2001, 262), research on parties and candidate selection neglecting to use organisational behaviour concepts (Granik 2005, 72; Silvester and Dykes 2007, 12), while there is little work on performance management for political leaders (Kim 2009), and work on strategic campaign management fails to utilise concepts of strategic management (O’Connell 2011, 64). There is therefore a significant, and profound, gap in research in political management. As a senior chief of staff told me, because of the lack of a book on political management, staff working in political offices end up relying on the West Wing. We need proper research on managing politics so that we can have proper training for political managers. One of the causes of a lack of research on political management is that it is interdisciplinary. Political management crosses political science and business management, but also public administration, all of which neglects to combine politics and management, especially when discussing policy advising because of the desire for policy making to be separated from politics, which does not reflect reality (Heymann 1988, xiii–iv; Hamburger and Weller 2012, 374; Chetkovich and Kirp 2001). Interestingly, there is a sense from reviewing the existing literature of the beginnings of political management research and teaching which got lost somewhere along the way. Brock (2004, 618) argues that in the mid-1970s separate courses were first taught ‘on political management, bringing the discipline of political science into contact with the recognition that the management and construction of programs (and policies) required political interaction … Without a persuasive literature, however, the subject of political management emerged, but largely as elective, material.’ Cases were built but these were business ones, and thereafter the focus was on public sector specific work. Terry’s (1998, 194–5) review of different approaches to public management mentions political management and argues it emerged during the early 1980s at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government when it still had a political and orientation which distinguished it from traditional public administration. At some stage, however, the politics seems to have been removed from research and public management became more dominant. It is time to bring political management back out from the shadows and put it centre front, as something that connects both political organisations and management concepts of organisation, leadership, planning and HR. One final point to make is that we should no longer just rely on teaching business management to political practitioners because politics is far too different to business and we thus need dedicated research to provide appropriate training for practitioners. Firstly, political organisations are set up by and for the people, governed through democratic politics, and partly or wholly financed by public taxes, and need to work towards the

Introduction 9

public good for the benefit of society as a whole (Vasu, Stewart and Garson 1998, 6, 13; Moore 1995, 57; Moe 1994, 119). Dudley (1984) makes clear how the UK government considered keeping the British Steel Corporation open even when it was unprofitable because of political opposition and potential loss of domestic electoral advantage. Secondly, in campaigns, parties and government, power is more dispersed, there are more complex accountability lines and conflicting stakeholders. As a party secretary recalled ‘no one is singularly sovereign, everyone has got bit of a say and at different times that then plays out in formal spaces … and other times it plays out in completely informal spaces … who decides can be quite ephemeral and hard to define’ (Erickson 2019). Practitioners who have gone from opposition to government note how managing government is particularly hard. A former Blair political advisor argued that: ‘Governing is another country. In opposition the map may be murky but the destination is assured. The campaign team are bound together by a glue of shared purpose … Governing is different. The sense of shared purpose remains but is more opaque and disputed. Events and circumstances intervene, tiredness sets in, relationships unravel, the daily grind of responsibility becomes wearing.’ (Gould 2011, 399) US political appointees, despite their support from the president, have multiple external stakeholders to appease, including Congress and the president, as well as external pressures from interest groups, the media and the general public (Kelman and Myers 2011, 237). Even those at the top are constrained in a way that chief executive officers (CEOs) of businesses rarely are. As the Chief of Staff to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison commented when interviewed: ‘Having a little bit experience of the business world, there is no doubt that whilst the CEO is constrained, the decision of the CEO very rarely – if ever – in my experience, gets questioned to any great degree. I think the transparency, the scrutiny and the sheer nature of political compromise means that the Prime Minister – not withstanding whatever a formal authority they may have – will always be subject to a lot more push and pull than a CEO.’ (Kunkel 2019) Political leaders have to manage competing and diverse individuals, groups, committees, staff and organisations, all of whom have their own conflicting goals and interests, including opposition candidates and parties who have the downfall of the current leader as one of their prime goals. Thirdly, managing staff and colleagues does not work in the same way as businesses. Campaigns in particular are short-term organisations: as the Chief of Staff for the Federal Australian Labor 2019 Campaign headquarters commented ‘there aren’t many environments where you have to bring a team together for an 8-week period and build a team really quickly’ and ‘there is no manual or guide for how you actually do that’ (Nash 2019). Cummings (2014) argues that unlike business CEOs who can hire, fire, promote and train their teams, ‘no Minister has the power to do any of this in their government department.’ Individual MPs do not have clear line managers and are not employed by Parliament as such – Coghill et al (2008, 80–1) note how ‘parliamentarians have no such contractual obligation, no skill criteria to meet, no requirement to meet the standards of any performance indicator, nor to act in any particular manner.’ Political staff are employed by different

10 Introduction

departments depending on the country – the Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand and the Department of Finance in Australia – are hired to work in a minister’s or an MP’s office. At the same time as there being multiple and conflicting stakeholders to a much greater extent than in business, there is a lack of control in relation to performance. Fourthly, strategic planning is harder in politics because of the short-term time frames often at play. Political staffers explain that ‘it’s very very hard to actually kind of lock yourself in a room for three hours with your team, because in the age of Twitter, WhatsApp, you are always on call, you are always responsive. And you can’t really your lock yourself away’ (Campbell 2019) and there are things ‘you cannot plan for of course’ as ‘you have to respond to crisis all the time’ (Munro 2019). New governments rarely have clear plans. When the NZ Government led by Jacinda Ardern came to power ‘in a mad rush’, documents prepared for coalition talks were quickly ‘cobbled together as a 100-day plan’ and it wasn’t until 11 months later that a full plan for the three years of government – ‘Our Plan’ – was created. As Ardern’s Chief of Staff explained, ‘I know it seems rather strange that the plan was being produced 11 months after the government took office, but it was just a consequence of the speed and the way that the government hit the ground running and got on with stuff at the end of 2017’ (Munro 2019). Fifthly the short time frame makes HR and implementation hard. Recruiting staff for the highest political offices often has to be done at high speed. In the case where Scott Morrison became Prime Minister of Australia unexpectedly mid-term, his Chief of Staff reflected that ‘it was quite a unique and remarkable period of taking an office overnight from 15 to about 50 odd. A lot of that was getting people on board’ (Kunkel 2019). Getting policy delivered within a single parliamentary term is also challenging. As the ministerial advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw noted when reflecting on managing action on climate change: ‘When you’re trying to get your office set up, the first six months goes quickly … it takes at least a year for any piece of legislation, let alone those more complex, to get the policy in shape and the cabinet paper drafted and through Cabinet. We did it in a very short period of time for the zero-carbon bill. Then, once you get through cabinet you’ve got to go through the select committee process which takes you to the end of the second year … so, you’ve got such a short period of time.’ (Baker-Jones 2019) Lastly, limited planning and complex goals make measuring performance harder. Political staff working for politicians are often not managed: one practitioner noted that ‘most ministers certainly don’t have time to review their [advisers’] performance, and most ministers don’t have any management skills anyway’ (quoted in Eichbaum and Shaw 2010, 142). In management, controlling is used to review and check progress against original goals set in planning stages, but Cummings (2014) argues that ‘political institutions control what they do badly, they do a bad job of it.’ This is partly because goals are not as clear as in politics. Political goals include intangible values such as acting in the public interest, pursuing the common good and representing people. Individual politicians also have their own goals they want to pursue, so ministers ‘veer off course and have pet projects’ (Munro 2019), and uncontrollable developments means ‘you are very alert to the fact that naturally politics means that a lot of those best laid plans can get unravelled pretty quickly’ (Kunkel 2019).

Introduction 11

This doesn’t mean management cannot be applied to politics, but that it needs dedicated research that adapts concepts to political organisations.

Methodology for this book: pragmatist and multi-method If there is no research defining what political management is, what kind of methodology can you use to write a book to define an entire new field? Well there was no easy answer to this question. Writing a book to define a new field – when there are no existing books, definitions, concepts or foundations – is not something academics often do and thus there is no set in stone methodology that can be adopted. The research therefore synthesised previously disconnected literature from multiple subfields through the lens of basic management concepts, and illustrated this further with primary source documents from political organisations, media reports and interviews with political practitioners, to provide the first conceptual architecture for what political management involves.

Pragmatism methodology The book follows a pragmatist philosophy, adopting an overall aim to create research that has a potential practical application and identifies ‘what works’ (Vogt 2005, 244). As notes one of the earliest writers on pragmatism, James (1907, 46) explained, it is derived from a Greek term which means action ‘from which our words “practice” and “practical” come.’ Thus, as Vogt (2005, 244) notes, ‘pragmatists held that knowledge is defined by usefulness; the ultimate test of a proposition is whether it “works,” particularly in helping individuals solve practical problems.’ Ontologically, pragmatists believe that reality is constantly renegotiated, debated, interpreted – there isn’t one truth and the aim is therefore to understand the nature of reality and political context, rather than make causal claims (Cherryholmes 1992, 13, 15). This is appropriate for highly originally ground-breaking, field defining work which should not feel constrained by previous conceptual definitions. As James (1907, 51, 53) explains, ‘a pragmatist turns [their] back resolutely and once for all … from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins’ and is instead open to new possibilities, putting everything back up for questioning and rethinking. Thus, ‘pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.’ Epistemologically, pragmatists think that the best method is one that solves problems. With political management, the appropriate approach is emic or subjective: research aims to get inside the fish bowl, to find out what is going on there, to dig deep, talk to people and understand interactions between them within an overall context. As for methodology, pragmatism argues that the best method to use is the one that solves the problem or answers the question and thus the tools to gather data are also selected to that end. Given the lack of existing research, this necessarily meant being open to whatever may enable the research to lay foundations for new fields of research. As James (1907, 54, 62, 79) emphasises, pragmatism ‘stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines’ and ‘often the day’s contents oblige a rearrangement’ because pragmatism ‘will consider any evidence … she widens the field of search.’ Although the overall research aim was to understand what is best practice in political management – i.e. what is effective political management – because there is no research defining

12 Introduction

political management, it also had to ask a pre-emptive question: What is political management? What does it involve? Of course, setting out to define a new field was risky, as McKerchar (2008, 8) observed ‘whilst challenging the discipline-based principles can bring about change – after all, the rules are not set in concrete – it can be a perilous pathway.’ This was emphasised by one practitioner who said in an interview: ‘The number of academic papers that you read, about things like new public management, and you are like “you haven’t been up on the Hill for years – this is just not how it works in practice”.’ (Campbell 2019) Multiple methods were therefore used to understand and convey what political management is and involves.

Inter-disciplinary translation and adaptation Core management concepts potentially relevant to politics and government were identified through a synthesis of the key concepts/theories business management from six wide-ranging introductory texts.

Systematic literature collection Management key words were identified from the synthesis of the core academic management literature and political key words were generated through discussion with academics and practitioners working in parties/government on political staff/managers titles and in organisations as well as identifying more general synonyms for political staff and political organisations. These were used in an extensive database literature search to identify work that is already called ‘political management’ and may/may not be or is not called ‘political management’ but effectively is. Decisions throughout this process were made systematically based on available information and reflection, such as that done by Jungherr (2016, 73). The search was completed for a 35-year period, including publications since 1980 – thus mostly 1980–2015. It was conducted in early 2016 and took four weeks, involving 161 searches. This generated over 1,000 items. Whilst there is no way it could have identified all potentially relevant literature – and by the time the book was completed four more years of publications will have emerged – it did provide a comprehensive body of material that could be utilised to build new theory.

Literature synthesis and creative meta-analysis All 1,000-plus items in the database were read and notes were made on literature that was relevant to political management. Literature was excluded for several reasons, such as because it was relevant but not good enough (too dated, conceptual/abstract without providing strong theory, too narrowly focused), or it was not relevant (e.g. on politics in corporations, or political marketing rather than political management), or it was based at local/city level not national/federal level to enable a consistent focus (and make it possible to complete the project at some point in normal academic job conditions with no teaching buyout/external funding). This left around 340 relevant pieces, confirming Jungherr’s (2016, 73) argument

Introduction 13

from his systematic review of literature on Twitter that ‘simple keyword searches tend to overestimate the relevant literature significantly.’ These selected works were analysed, synthesised and reinterpreted through a management lens, producing over 350,000 words of notes.

Empirical illustration through political documents and practitioner perspectives Over 200 documents, including reports, strategic plans, policies, guidelines, rules, manuals, speeches and reviews were collected in June 2016 from the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada and analysed for material related to management concepts. Analysis drew on the three-stage Qualitative Coding Process of open, axial and selective coding outlined by Wesley (2015, 350–2). Analysis of political organisational documents focused on Stage 2, Axial coding, where the researcher reviews and entire sample, tagging specific bits that belong under the theme categories, or in this research, management theory/headings. For Stage 3, selective coding was used to identify anything missed before or miscoded passages or discrepant evidence and file this under ‘additional categories’. In the final book, many of those from government departments ended up being excluded to avoid overlapping with public management, but those that remain provide valuable illustration of political management concepts. Further empirical illustrations were identified by searching for media reports, interviews, and political speeches and videos which contained primary data in the form of comments by practitioners, such as political leaders, consultants and candidates, quoted within them that were related to political management.

Theory building Firstly, theoretical frameworks were created for each chapter on the traditional functional area of management. While at first material was organised in relation to the first summary of core basic management concepts, through the process of writing this was adapted and updated in light of political material. When the first draft of each core chapter was completed, the material was assessed carefully to identify every significant element from the literature synthesis and an extended theoretical summary of the chapter was produced. This was then reorganised where there was too much overlap, such as between delegatory leadership tactics and leadership styles. For example, some aspects of this were merged to create a more synthesised, comprehensive, logical and succinct theoretical framework such as the category or heading ‘Political Organising 4: Enact and Manage Improvements’ was created from parts of four original headings/areas: ‘Political Organising 3: Improve the effectiveness of the organisational culture’; half of ‘Political Organising 4: Identify Necessary Organisational Development’; ‘Political Organising 5: Manage Organisational Development’ and ‘Political Organising 6: Promote and Support Innovation’ also. This provided more focused and cohesion. The chapter material was then reorganised under the new headings, providing an understanding of each key area which will also be useful for focused research and teaching on just one area, such as political HR. Secondly, the theoretical frameworks for each core area were reorganised into four core areas of similar types of activities in political management terms to create a new model – the four Ds of political management: deliberating, designing, doing and dancing – which is presented in the conclusion. The four Ds of political management model conveys a sense of political management overall.

14 Introduction

High level practitioner interviews Primary data was collected at the end of the project through interviews with political practitioners in Australia and New Zealand to add further illustration and understanding. Participants were selected with the aim of covering a range of positions and organisations involved in managing government, Parliament parties and campaigns in Australia and New Zealand. Practitioners were selected to cover the core areas in the book (planning, HR, organising, leading, reviewing) and different political organisations (Prime Minister’s office, government department, Parliament, political parties, campaigns) and roles (political staffer, party official, campaign management, public servant, parliamentary secretary, politicians with parliamentary roles). Interviewees included Chief of Staffs to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, Party president/secretary for the Australian Liberal and Labor Party, the Australian Labor 2019 Campaign and Manager of Opposition Business in Parliament. Whilst small in quantity, the data was profoundly important in terms of quality as it illustrated the importance and complexity of political management, the core concepts within the theoretical frameworks and final model, as well as the value of this research and need for future research. Overall, the approach taken enabled the building of a conceptual architecture with foundational theories and an overall model illustrated with multiple empirical examples and perspectives from government, parties and campaigns. While it was not perfect, and could with hindsight be improved, the reality is that when starting out it would be impossible to do better given how challenging it is to write the first book in any field. As such, this book provides initial ideas for what political management is and involves and thus lays the foundation for further research to emerge in this new field of research and practice.

A definition of political management Political management is about how political practitioners, including politicians, political staffers, party officials and political consultants in political organisations, such as political offices, party organisations and campaign teams, utilise management concepts and tools involving planning, HR, reviewing, organising and leading to achieve organisational goals, whether that be to win an election or pass a policy in government. Political management involves hiring, managing, leading, motivating and organising people, including politicians and their staff but also volunteers, utilising resources such as rules, procedures, budgets, donations, and designing, building and improving structures within political organisations. In contrast to political marketing, which is about designing a strategy, product and brand to gain support from the public, political management is about implementing those product and brand strategies. Like business management, political management is about getting things done. Whilst political marketing might be about deciding what you want to do; political management is more about actually doing it: the nitty gritty, so to speak, of implementation. It is much more internally focused on what happens inside an organisation. Political management is part of public administration, but is not the same as public management. Political management focuses on how political practitioners – as opposed to public servants – should use management. There are some areas where the distinction blurs, such as discussions about how effectively political leaders such as presidents and prime ministers direct and influence the rest of government and appointments of non-political staff, and where

Introduction 15

units with prime minister’s offices work closely with civil servants (also known as careerists, bureaucrats or public servants) across departmental policy areas. There is also some ambiguity when studying the US where more government staff are politically appointed than in other countries. The key criteria though is that it involves politics and political practitioners. Political management also crosses political science and management because it includes consideration of campaigns, parties and Parliament. It is also distinct from campaigns, electioneering and political marketing as suggested by Johnson’s (2016, 1) encyclopaedia entry and includes management. Applying the core concepts of business management to politics, we can argue that political management is also about managing resources available to achieve your goals, whether it is delivering on policies in government, running a prime ministerial office effectively, leading a well-functioning campaign, or building a strong party organisation in constituencies, states or provinces. Political management involves all the same aspects of management as business – planning, leading, organising, HR management and reviewing (or controlling).

The organisations involved in political management There are three core arenas of political management: government, parties and campaigns. The core organisations involved in political management include government departments and offices, political parties and campaign teams such as:         

Prime ministerial offices/The White House. Ministerial offices. Political parties – both central and local party headquarters or offices. Politician’s offices. Parliament/legislature. Campaign teams. Task forces. Working groups. Committees.

Some will be permanent organisations such as Parliament; others, such as a crisis management team, may be brought together to manage specific incidents, whether it is a short-term political scandal or a longer-term initiative such as the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority in New Zealand that responds to an event albeit it is working for a longer time period. Political organisations operate on different organisational levels. For example, the highest level of political offices include The White House in the US, the Office of the Prime Minister, Canada and Prime Minister’s Office in New Zealand and Australia. Within these sit a range of organisational units, such as within the White House there is an Office of Public Liaison, The Office of Digital Strategy, The Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and The White House Office of Legislative Affairs. There are also government departments set up specifically to serve these including the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) in New Zealand and Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) in Australia. The latter has sub-units including Social Policy, an Office for Women, Policy Innovation and Projects, and a Priorities and Delivery Unit. There are Government/State Departments or Ministries including the US State Department, New Zealand Treasury and

16 Introduction

UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There are also government units that look more broadly over the whole of government such as the Canada School of Public Service, State Services Commission, New Zealand, The Office of Management and Administration in the US. Within these there are also smaller organisational units, such as press offices, communication teams, crisis management teams, public liaison office, and overlapping units such as the executive or Cabinet. Political parties have national or federal level organisations such as the Democratic National Committee party headquarters, as well as state level organisations such as the California Democrat Party, and different organisational units within these levels such as a media office within a political party. More temporary organisations are created for election campaigns, at top and lower levels, and including campaign committees or teams such as an outreach team. Government also creates short-term units such as working groups – e.g. the New Zealand Tax Working Group and task forces such as the Social Impact Investing Taskforce and APS Review Taskforce within the Australian PM&C. Temporary and less extensive organisational units will have less time to build and change organisational culture, and may have less complex organisational structures, but a culture would nonetheless exist, leadership would still be crucial, and campaign teams which are temporary clearly do involve management of extensive resources in a highly pressured period of time. Thus political management is as relevant – even if it is different – in temporary political organisations as it is permanent ones. As discussed in Chapter 3 on political organising, there are a range of ways of structuring an organisation, developing it and affecting its culture. Not all of these will be viewed by all scholars as political, given that some are predominantly staffed by public servants, but then ministerial offices connect to their relevant government department, so the line between political and public organisation is not always distinct. This book focuses predominantly on the more political organisations where political or partisan practitioners work, but it also includes discussion of what might be classed by others as ‘public’ organisations where relevant especially to discussion of political management in government and on aspects such as the mission and vision of government departments and ministries, which are often influenced by ministers or political appointees.

The organisational goals of political management The primary goal of political management is to utilise resources to achieve organisational goals effectively. Of course, what those goals are is the subject of debate and they can be multi-faceted and complex. They include ideals and values such as to manage the government in the public interest, and to ensure good governance for the country. A more partisan version of that is to pursue the public interest as the governing party sees it and to implement its agenda, or to do what it promised and to deliver. As discussed in Chapter 2 on political planning, political organisations often set a range of strategic organisational goals, including mission and vision statements. Goals can be set at any level of an organisation, for multiple time periods, be broad (e.g. ‘continuous improvement of the US education system’) or specific (‘increase college degree attainment in America 2014–2017’) and be on a range of areas, including the service provided to the public, public response, staff satisfaction, staff capability, member and donor responses, organisational culture, and public policy achievements. For example, the New

Introduction 17

Zealand National Party (2013, 3) cites its goal as being to seek ‘a safe, prosperous and successful New Zealand that creates opportunities for all New Zealanders to reach their personal goals and dreams’ and UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband claimed that the Party’s plan was ‘to build a secure, prosperous and more equal country open to the world, in which everyone has the opportunity to get on and do their best. We will provide strong and effective government but everyone will need to contribute and play their part’ (UK Labour Party 2015, 12). The US Office of Personnel Management (2014, 5) aims to ‘be the Nation’s model employer by leveraging diversity and fostering inclusion to deliver the best public service.’

Effectiveness in political management There are multiple – and debatable – ways to measure the effectiveness of political management. On a simple level, success in political management can be measured by looking at the extent to which organisational goals are achieved and how effectively organisational resources are utilised in doing so. It will vary from one organisation to another: for example, a political party may measure its effectiveness according to its electoral success and vote share, yet the extent of vote share necessary to constitute high effectiveness will differ between major and minor parties, whilst effectiveness for a government/executive would differ again, and may be based more on its ability to implement its electoral manifesto. Table 1.1 lists potential indicators of effectiveness in politics.

Practitioners in political management The people involved in political management includes volunteers, candidates, staff, party leaders and ministers working on campaigns, for political parties and in political offices in government. There are a substantial range of partisan roles in political offices, parties and campaign teams. Some of these roles are obviously management – they even have management in the title. But political management is not just for those in leadership positions, and thus political managers are not just those at the top of organisations, such as ministers and chiefs of staff. All political practitioners are inevitably involved in managing people and resources and working towards achieving an organisation’s strategic goals even if they don’t have ‘manager’ in their title. This book mostly excludes non-partisan staff working in government, i.e. those termed civil servants, public servants, career staff or bureaucrats in academic literature. However, there are aspects of the relationship between politicians/political staff and civil servants which are relevant to political management. For example, the overall effectiveness of direction given by political offices, and internal communication and relationship between political practitioners and non-partisan government staff, can impact on the overall effectiveness of government. Examples and previous research that discuss material about civil servants which is connected to political offices, political practitioners and partisan goals are included. Below are indicative lists for each type of political organisation – government, party and campaign. The suggested inclusions will, of course, be subject to debate in terms of how wide we should define political managers. Nevertheless, it provides a starting point for discussion and understanding.

TABLE 1.1 Indicators of effectiveness in political management

Category

General indicators or source of data

Citizens/voters

   –

Stakeholders

Internal organisational culture

HR

Policy

Unity within the organisation

Long-term security of the organisation

Organisational context including factors outside control Innovative capacity and creativity

Election results Public opinion Reputation e.g. high public trust and confidence in government, support for specific policies/action and increased voter registration, popular political leaders  Candidates  Members  Volunteers  Donors – e.g. membership joining rates have declined, membership are satisfied with their rights and opportunities, party donations rise  Employee satisfaction rates, motivation and engagement levels – e.g. government staff are highly engaged and motivated, it is easy to recruit volunteers in a campaign, party staff are effective relationship managers and communicators, there are no HR crises such as claims or reports of harassment and bullying in political offices  Number and significance of scandals  Working conditions and staff health  Effectiveness of internal communication  Staff surveys – e.g. the organisation has a culture of excellence and collaboration, the working environment is seen as supportive by staff, staff perceive the organisation to have strong, credible leaders who collaborate, build effective relationships and inspire their staff  Role design and definition clarity  Ease of recruitment  Diversity and skill level of the workforce  Effectiveness of orientation  Levels of staff turnover data  Professional training programs and evaluations of them  Passing and implementation of legislation  New benefit proposals  New rules  Changes in behaviour  Levels of parliamentary compliance  Party unity – e.g. few or no challenges to party leaders  Continued electoral success for a political party  Re-election for a politician  Levels of trust in politicians and the government  Levels of legislation passed in a Parliament/governmental term  Crisis such as a global financial crisis, earthquakes, bushfires, hurricanes  Winning despite difficult electoral conditions  Innovation, change, development  Capacity to respond to changing voter demographics/views/crisis/ economic changes/turbulence

Introduction 19

Political managers in government and political offices of elected politicians A search of publicly listed staff in prime-ministerial/presidential offices in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, informal discussions and interviews with political practitioners, suggests that typical positions include those listed in Table 1.2.

TABLE 1.2 Typical political manager positions in government and political offices

Top elected politicians or political appointments Top political advisor levels

Political staffers involved in communications

Parliamentary/legislature positions

Externally facing roles

Political marketing related roles

Issues/crisis management

Logistics/operational

Planning and implementation

Prime Minister, Ministers, Secretaries of State Chief of staff, Deputy Chief of Staff, Ministerial advisor, Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs to the Prime Minister, Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister White House Communications Director, White House Press Secretary, Director of Communications, Senior Press Secretary, Press Secretary, Prime Minister’s Spokesman, Media Relations, Media Monitoring Officer, Head of Cabinet Office Communications, Government Communications Director, Media/Communications Adviser, Media Strategy Consultant, Communications Strategist, Director of Strategic Communications, Producer – Strategic Communications, Manager of the Prime Minister’s Communications, Advertising Manager, Manager of New Media and Marketing, Manager of Cultural Media, Manager of Scripting, Visual Communications Manager, Speechwriting Manager, Manager Prime Minister’s Correspondence, Senior Correspondence Writer, Regional Communications Advisor, Government Digital Service Director, Photographer for the Prime Minister Director of Parliamentary Affairs, Manager of Parliamentary Affairs, Manager of Government/Opposition Business, Leader of the House/Senate, Legislative Assistant, House Manager, Director of Legislative Affairs Director of Strategic Initiatives, Director of Stakeholder Relations, Manager of Stakeholder Relations, Manager of Stakeholder Relations & Outreach, Director of Outreach, Outreach Manager, Public Liaison Manager, Director of the Office of Public Liaison Senior Advisor, Digital Outreach, Advisor, Outreach, Director of Market Research, Market Research Manager, Director of Research and Advertising Director of Issues Management, Issues Management Senior Officer, Issue Advisor, Research, Issues Management, Issues Management Assistant Director of Operations, Deputy Director of Operations, Lead Media Advance, Media Advance and Technical, Head of operations, Manager of Operations to the Prime Minister, Chief Operating Officer for Government, Scheduling Assistant, Scheduler to the Prime Minister, Director of Oval Office Operations Planning Manager, Director of Strategic Planning, Director of Priorities and Planning, Manager of Priorities and Planning, Policy Advisor Priorities and Planning, Administrative Assistant Priorities and Planning, Director of Planning, Executive Director of Strategy and Delivery, Director of Implementation, Director of Delivery, Director of Strategy, Director of Political Strategy (Continued)

20 Introduction

Table 1.2 (Cont.) Advisory roles Policy-related roles

Administrative

Project/area focused Specialist

Personnel/HR

External event organisation

Politicians’ key office staff

Analyst, Senior Advisor, Special Advisor, Principal Advisor, Senior Adviser, Adviser, Prime Minister’s Advisor Policy advisor, Director of Policy, Policy Advisory Group Director, Policy Advisory Group Deputy Director, Programme Manager, The Policy Project, Chief Executive of Policy Secretary, First Assistant Secretary, Executive Assistant, Administrative assistant, Personal Assistant, Office Manager, Chief Executive, Director of the Office of the Chief Executive, National Assessments Bureau Director, Secretary of the Cabinet, Director of the Office of Administration, Cabinet Secretary Head of Taskforce, Project Office Director, Executive Director, National Director, Director of Government Innovation Head of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat, Director of the Propriety and Ethics Team, Head of Domestic Policy, Ethics Advisor, Legal Advisor, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Director of White House Information Technology, National Security Advisor Chief People Officer, Head of Civil Service Human Resources, Human Resources Director, Director of Appointments, Director of Personnel and Administration, Manager of Personnel and Administration, Special Assistant, Personnel and Administration, Appointments Manager, Research Assistant, Appointments, HR advisor, Chief Executive of the Civil Service, Head of the UK Governance Group, Director of Presidential Personnel Director of Tour and Scheduling, Manager of Tour and Scheduling, Special Assistant, Scheduling, Tour Coordinator, Tour Logistics Coordinator, Tour Operations Coordinator, Tour Visuals Coordinator, Senior Events Coordinator, Scheduling Assistant Executive assistant, Constituency assistant – Constituent manager, Parliamentary assistant

Party staff Staff roles in political parties are listed in Table 1.3.

Campaign staff Staff involved in campaigns are listed in Table 1.4. There are also political management roles which are external to the organisation such as political consultants – including strategists, specialists and vendors, crisis management and public relations consultants.

Variances in role The practitioners involved would also of course operate at the lower levels of government – state/province, local government, councils and municipalities – and thus include council staff, councillor advisors, etc. Additionally, the importance and influence of political managers will vary from one organisation to another, and can be impacted by

Introduction 21

TABLE 1.3 Typical political manager positions in political party organisations and offices

Overall top level positions High level manager/director positions Finances/donor related Policy related roles

Strategic/political Committee roles

Community groups/specialist roles

Regional/area related roles

Legislative related roles

Communication

Members/volunteers/grass roots work/external Information/data/digital Logistics/operations

Administrative Legal

Party leader, Party president, General secretary, Party Secretary, Federal director, President, Senior Vice President Chairwoman, Co-Chair, Chief of staff, Deputy Chief of Staff Treasurer, Fundraiser coordinator, Fundraising manager, Accounting Director, Finance Coordinator, Revenue Chair Policy development officer, Policy Council Representative, Policy Secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff (Policy, Parliament and Research), Head of Policy, Senior Adviser Social Policy, Senior Adviser Economic Policy, Senior Adviser National Security Political Advisor, Political Director, National Director, Elections chief, Head of Research, Senior Advisor (Parliament/Research) Chairman of the Congressional Campaign, National Chair for Candidate Services, Partners & Allies Council Co-Chair Committee Women’s Vice President, Youth Vice President, National VicePresident (English/French), Maori Senior Vice President, Affiliates Vice President, Pacific Island Vice President, Rainbow Representative, Te Kaunihera Maori Representatives, Co-Chair Indigenous Peoples’ Commission, President National Women’s Liberal Commission Director, Liberal Party of Canada (Newfoundland & Labrador), Director, Liberal Party of Canada (Nova Scotia), Director, Liberal Party of Canada (Québec), Auckland/Northland Representative, Otago/Southland Representative Speaker of the House/Senate, Senate Majority leader, Senate Majority Whip, House majority leader, Party whips/Musterers, House majority whip, Parliamentary Leader, Opposition leader in the Senate, Leader of the opposition, Senate Conference chairman/woman, House conference chairwoman/man, Head of Parliament and Research Deputy Chief of Staff (Strategic Communications), Head of Communications, Senior Press Secretary, Media advisor – Media Office, Senior Communications Adviser, Communications Adviser, Speech Writer Vice Chair of Civic Engagement and Voter Participation, Head of Engagement, Senior Advisor (Engagement) Data Director Director of Operations, Organisation Director, State Director, Regional Field Director, Regional director, Leader’s Diary, Office Manager/CoS Diary Administrator, Party executives, Executive Director, Caucus Secretary, Correspondence Manager, Receptionist/Admin Constitutional and Legal Adviser

22 Introduction

TABLE 1.4 Typical political manager positions in government and political offices

Overall top level positions High level manager/director positions Finances/donor related Outreach/community

Volunteers/Grass roots work Information/data/digital

Communication

Issues management/crisis HR/personnel Logistics/operations

Administrative Policy related roles

Marketing and research Legislative/legally related roles

Campaign director, Campaign manager, Campaign organiser, Campaign Co-Chair Chief of Staff to the Campaign Manager, National Political Director, Director of State Campaigns and Political Engagement Fundraising manager, Fundraiser coordinator, Donor manager, Deputy Finance Director for Operations Community liaison officer, Community organiser, Outreach Director, Outreach officer, Outreach Coordinator Latino Outreach Director, African American Outreach Director, Labor Outreach Director, Women’s Outreach Director, AAPI Outreach Director, LGBT Outreach Director Director of Grassroots Engagement, Field director – Field organiser, Local organisers Digital media organiser, Data manager, Digital Organizing Director, Social Media Strategist, Audience Growth Strategist, Director of Digital Operations, Chief Technology Officer, Infrastructure, Mobile, Ops, Security and Email, Director of Analytics, Director of Digital Analytics, Director of Digital Advertising Speechwriter, Lead Press Secretary, Travelling Press Secretary, Strategic Communications Advisor and Senior Spokesperson, Day to Day Spokesman, Director of Hispanic Media, Director of African American Media, Director of Coalitions Press, Women’s Press Lead, Regional Communications, State Press Team, Director of Media Planning, Director of Strategic Communications Director of Rapid Response, Rapid Response Communications Staff director, State organiser, Chief Diversity and Human Resources Officer, Director of Talent Acquisition, Senior HR Specialist National Operations Director, Primary States Director, Primary States Regional Director, Regionals – Massachusetts Director, Northern Tri-State Director, New York Co-Director, New Jersey Director Director of Scheduling and Advance, Scheduling Associate, Chief Operating Officer, Director of Delegate Operations and Ballot Access Executive Assistant Policy Chief of Staff, Senior Policy Advisor, Economic Policy Advisor, Foreign Policy Advisor, Policy and Research Consultant, Director of Policy Outreach, Domestic Policy Outreach Coordinator Director of Marketing, Research Director, Media Research Team Lead Director of Congressional Affairs, Compliance Manager

country’s legislation (e.g. in Canada a new code of lobbyists stopped people going from minister’s office to lobbyists office). Managers at different levels will also have different perspectives. Middle managers are responsible for specific programs and organisational units, whereas the priorities of frontline managers tend to focus on the task-related demands of their jobs and the people they are immediately serving. The focus of activity will vary between management levels.

Introduction 23

Stakeholders in political management As discussed earlier, one of the complexities of political management is the wide range of stakeholders political managers have to deal with, which to a much greater extent than business, include those outside the organisation. These include:        

Leaders – presidents, prime ministers, ministers, secretaries of state. Politicians/legislators – at all levels. Cabinet and subcabinet officers. Congressional committees that influence budget allocation. Any private or governmental organisation – local, state, foreign, or international – that has a role in causing or solving problems in the area of responsibility. Special interest constituencies organised to influence the president or Congress including lobbyists. Multiple interest groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and associations such as trade unions, market and employers’ federations including those whose staff work in government or as political consultants. All staff within political and governmental organisations including:   

       

political advisors; career civil servants/bureaucrats/public servants; frontline staff in the public services, e.g. military officers, teachers, nurses.

A wider public but also more specific markets such as regions, states, provinces, cities and demographic segments, e.g. Hispanic, African American, women. Media – national and local. Members, volunteers, donors. Political parties. The courts. The state if funding is provided for parties/campaigning. Competing candidates/parties. Collaborators including local and federal and state and international government, NGOs, charities.

Functional areas of activity in political management The areas involved in business management are of course subject to debate, but generally include planning, organising, leading and controlling. In this research, the more common term ‘reviewing’ is substituted for ‘controlling’ as it is about monitoring performance against goals, but control implies power and authority in politics, which is not what reviewing is about. Additionally, managing staff and HR management has been separated out from the structure and cultural aspects of organising because issues such as the recruitment, training and motivation of political advisors have attracted significant attention and are therefore worthy of a distinct category of their own: political HR. In politics, there are therefore five core areas of political management: 1. 2.

Political planning: designing and implementing organisational strategy. Political HR: appointing and utilising staff.

24 Introduction

3. 4. 5.

Organising: internal structure and culture. Leading: using approaches and diverse power to exert influence. Reviewing: reflection and renewal. Examples of what each involves are set out in Table 1.5. Chapters 2–6 discuss each in turn.

Summary Political management is about how utilise management concepts and tools involving to achieve organisational goals. In practice, political management it is carried out every day by millions of government, party and campaign staff around the world. Political practitioners including politicians, political staffers, party officials and political consultants use planning, HR, reviewing, organising and leading to help them run effective party organisations, create strong campaign teams, win elections, structure their offices in government and pass policy in government. The scope of management practice in politics and government is huge and complex, and thus political managers need management skills, but political managers lack these skills even if they have engaged in management in business and yet the way political managers are recruited or appointed fails to assess skills for the job. Existing training for political managers is extremely limited. One of the reasons for the lack of dedicated training is that there is no theory, or literature, on political management. The distinct differences between business and government renders relying on business research inappropriate and unacceptable. Political organisations are set up by and for the people, and there are more complex accountability lines with conflicting stakeholders in government and politics. Career progress does not operate the same way in politics, influencing staff performance is complex because politicians lack a direct employer, and the lack of control or review means there are no consequences for bad political management. Unclear goals make strategic planning and management harder, and values are an important but intangible part of goals in politics.

TABLE 1.5 Core areas and activities in political management

Political planning

Political organising

Political HR

Political leadership

Political reviewing

 Understand the mission  Set the vision  Set organisational goals  Create organisational strategy  Develop strategic organisational plans  Construct lower level plans  Implement plans

 Create and utilise power  Organise and connect people  Identify need for improvement and development  Enact and manage improvements  Communicate internally

 Identify staffing needs  Recruit appropriately  Train and develop  Learn how people work  Motivate  Encourage excellence

 Develop skills  Be authoritative  Be transformational  Persuade  Collaborate  Delegate  Adapt

 Review organisational progress  Encourage individual self-reflection and adherence to norms  Conduct/respond to accountability mechanisms  Review a specific area  Plan/implement post-review improvements

Introduction 25

The rest of this book offers new adapted and synthesised theories and illustrations of political planning, political organising, political HR, political leadership and political reviewing that those political managers are involved in, before presenting an over-arching model of political management.

References Primary sources Practitioner interviews Baker-Jones, M (2019) Former Ministerial Advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment in Auckland, NZ. 18 November. Campbell, A (2019) Former political staffer in the Australian Prime Minister’s Office under Malcolm Turnbull, currently Assistant Secretary, Priorities and Delivery Unit, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Erickson, P (2019) National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at Labor headquarters, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Gartrell, T (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Greiner, N (2019) Australian Liberal Party Federal President, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 29 October. Kunkel, J (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 1 November. Munro, M (2019) Former Chief of Staff to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 12 November. Nash, Y (2019) Chief of Staff for the Federal Australian Labor 2019 Campaign headquarters and Chief of Staff for opposition leader Bill Shorten, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Stefanic, R (2019) Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at Parliament House Canberra, Australia. 25 October.

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26 Introduction

Practitioner comments Cummings, D (2014) ‘The Hollow Men: What’s wrong with Westminster and Whitehall, and what to do about it.’ November. Address to the IPPR retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNa WPV5l4j4. Gould, P (2011) The Unfinished Revolution: How New Labour Changed British Politics For Ever. London: Abacus. Key, J (2016) ‘Replay: Video chat with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.’ 4 May. Retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/79583457/live-video-chat-with-new-zealand-primeminister-john-key.

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Introduction 27

Hult, K M and K D Tenpas (2001) ‘The Office of the Staff Secretary.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31 (2): 262–280. Ingraham, P W, et al (1995) ‘Political Management Strategies and Political/Career Relationships: Where are we now in the federal government?’ Public Administration Review 55(3): 263–272. James, W (1907) Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking – Lecture II: What pragmatism means. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Johnson, D W (2009) Routledge Handbook of Political Management. Abingdon: Routledge. Johnson, D W (2016) ‘Political Management.’ In G Mazzoleni, et al (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Jungherr, A (2016) ‘Twitter use in election campaigns: A systematic literature review.’ Journal of Information Technology & Politics 13(1): 72–91, doi:10.1080/19331681.2015.1132401. Kelman, S and J Myers (2011) ‘Successfully Achieving Ambitious Goals in Government: An Empirical Analysis.’ The American Review of Public Administration 41(3): 235–262. Kerby, M (2009) ‘Worth the wait: determinants of ministerial appointment in Canada, 1935–2008.’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 42(3): 593–612. Kim, P S (2009) ‘A case for performance management for political appointees.’ Public Personnel Management 38(4): 1–18. Kumar, M J, G CEdwardsIII, J P Pfiffner, T Sullivan (2000) ‘The contemporary presidency: meeting the freight train head on: planning for the transition to power.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 30(4): 754–769. Lombard, J M (2003) ‘Reinventing Human Resource Development: Unintended Consequences of Clinton Administration Reforms.’ International Journal of Public Administration 26(10–11): 1103–1131. Marland, A (2016) Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control. Vancouver: UBC Press. See, especially, ‘Central Government Agencies and Communications’, pp. 201–242. McKerchar, M A (2008) ‘Philosophical Paradigms, Inquiry Strategies and Knowledge Claims: Applying the Principles of Research Design and Conduct to Taxation.’ eJournal of Tax Research 6(1): 5–22; also published as UNSW Law Research Paper No 2009-31. Online at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1464141. Moe, R C (1994) ‘The “Reinventing Government” Exercise: Misinterpreting the Problem, Misjudging the Consequences.’ Public Administration Review 54(2): 111–122. Moore, M H (1995) Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. O’Connell, D (2011) ‘Situational gamblers: prospect theory and the commonalities of presidential campaign management.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 41(1): 64–92. Silvester, J and C Dykes (2007) ‘Selecting political candidates: A longitudinal study of assessment centre performance and political success in the 2005 UK General Election.’ Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology 80(1): 11–25. Stewart, J and M Maley (2007) ‘The Howard Government and Political Management: The Challenge of Policy Activism.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 42(2): 277–293. Terry, L D (1998) ‘Administrative Leadership, Neo-Managerialism, and the Public Management Movement.’ Public Administration Review 58(3): 194–200. Vasu, M L, D W Stewart and G D Garson (1998) Organizational Behavior and Public Management. New York: CRC Press. Vogt, W P (2005) ‘Pragmatism.’ In W P Vogt (ed.) Dictionary of Statistics & Methodology. 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, p. 244. Walcott, C E, S A Warshaw and S J Wayne (2001) ‘The Chief of Staff.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31(3): 464–489. Weinberg, A (2015) ‘A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of Changes in the Job and the Expenses Scandal on UK National Politicians’ Experiences of Work, Stress and the Home–Work Interface.’ Parliamentary Affairs 68(2): 248–271. Wesley, J J (2015) ‘Analyzing Qualitative Data.’ In K Archer and L Youngman-Berdahl (eds) A Navigator’s Guide to Research in Canadian Political Science. 3rd edition. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, pp. 349–358. Wood, B D and M P Marchbanks (2008) ‘What Determines How Long Political Appointees Serve?’ Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18(3): 375–396.

2 POLITICAL PLANNING Designing and implementing organisational strategy in government, parties and campaigns

Introduction to political planning in government, parties and campaigns Political planning is about figuring out what you want to achieve and how. It involves creating goals and drawing up and implementing plans to achieve them. Planning in politics can often be forgotten given the high-speed nature of campaigning or the need to get going on implementing policy promises once elected to government. Yet it is even more essential given those challenges. As former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (2014, 8) noted, ‘government is the Queen Mary – huge, powerful, but not agile. The art of being prime minister is in charting a strategic course and using the sheet weight of government to plough through the rough choppy bits.’ A former New Zealand minister reflected that all ‘politicians must have a plan. A plan that is in place early, and one they are prepared to lead’ otherwise they become overcome by daily tasks and routines that do little to improve the lives of the people who elected them (Power, 2011). Similarly, campaigns often become side-tracked by attacks from the opposition and crisis. It is important to understand the organisation’s overall mission or purpose, and create a shorter-term vision to fulfil it, followed by setting organisational goals to keep the focus on them and building strategic management plans to achieve them at different levels throughout the organisation. These plans then need implementing. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s Strategic Planning for Political Parties framework covers four stages: (1) initiating and designing the planning phase; (2) internal and external analysis; (3) drafting the plan; (4) moving towards implementation (IDEA 2013, 23). As will become clear in this chapter, implementation requires using specific actions, relationship building and effective communication to mobilise supportive power and resources. Key activities in political planning are outlined in Table 2.1. Political plans provide a sense of direction to everyone involved in a campaign, party or government unit; and can guide resource allocation to priorities. The standard of political planning in practice is debatable, given the challenges that work against it. There are reports of political appointments or ministers becoming too focused on day-to-day operation than strategic planning (Friedberg 2007, 55). The electoral timeframe of three to five years works

Political planning 29

TABLE 2.1 Key areas of political planning

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Understand the mission Set the vision Set organisational goals Create organisational strategy Develop strategic organisational plans Construct lower level plans Implement plans

against long-term strategy and implementation (Bourgault 2011, 522). Planning in government communications is hard given the volatility of politics, the tendency of ministers to cancel strategic planning meetings when urgent developments occur and being subject to prime ministerial control, and thus communications remain mostly reactive (Schnee 2015). There can also be a lack of strategic planning expertise amongst staff (Schnee 2015, 169) as well as a general lack of resources, especially time. Yet strategic planning helps political organisations to achieve their goals more effectively given those challenges, because as IDEA (2013, 19) notes, ‘planning is a way of thinking, acting and learning that can enable organisations to better achieve their goals and secure their survival amid the uncertainty and complexity of their internal and external environments … it presents an approach to dealing with serious challenges and making the most of opportunities’ and considers the big picture alongside specific targeted actions. The rest of the chapter explores each area of political planning in turn.

Political planning 1: understand the mission The first step for any political organisation is to create, understand or update the organisation’s mission statement to explain its overall purpose.

1a. Create or understand the organisational mission statements which are long term and broad-ranging and contain key values to help staff and volunteers connect to the organisation’s purpose A mission statement is the organisation’s overall purpose and reason for being. They tend to be broad to enable all those involved in an organisation to feel connection to the organisational purpose and allow flexibility in interpretation. Analysis of documents created by political organisations found they often use the terms ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ interchangeably, but a mission statement should be much more long-term and over-arching, with the vision being more about short-term actions to achieve the overall mission. Examples of mission statements are in Table 2.2. Mission statements set the overall tone or direction, and often integrate values such as equality, social justness and integrity. Political parties in particular tend to have historical ideological statements, or constitutional statements about mission.

30 Political planning

TABLE 2.2 Examples of mission statements in politics

Party

Candidate

‘The Liberal Party of Canada is an association of members and supporters who share a vision of a prosperous, socially just, united and environmentally healthy Canada for all Canadians. Our mission is to represent Canadians in Parliament in order to realize our vision and to have Liberal values and principles embodied in the governance of our country.’ Canadian Liberal Party (2012)

‘Everyday Americans need a champion. And I want to be that champion. So I’m hitting the road to earn your vote – because it’s your time. And I hope you’ll join me on this journey.’ Hillary Clinton (2016) Presidential Campaign Announcement

For example, the New Zealand National Party states a broad mission in relation to specific values: ‘The National Party seeks a safe, prosperous and successful New Zealand that creates opportunities for all New Zealanders to reach their personal goals and dreams … We believe this will be achieved by building a society based on the following values: Loyalty to our country … National and personal security, Equal citizenship and equal opportunity, Individual freedom and choice … Competitive enterprise … Limited government.’ (New Zealand National Party 2013: 3) The value-aspects to party missions means that they are often long term – as Iain McNicol, UK Labour Party General Secretary noted at a party conference, ‘Labour was created for a very specific purpose, explicit from the very start. And that purpose is stated in black and white in our constitution: “To organise and maintain in Parliament and in the country a political Labour Party” and “The Party shall bring together members and supporters who share its values.” That’s our Labour party’ (McNicol 2016).

1b. High level political practitioners such as presidents/prime ministers, party leaders, candidates, campaign managers and heads of government departments set the overall purpose Mission statements should to be set by top political figures and senior staff such as party leaders, candidates, campaign managers and CEOs of government departments. For example, when Theresa May became UK Prime Minister she declared ‘the Government I lead will be driven, not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives … That will be the mission of the Government I lead’ (May 2016). Candidates often express their overall mission – John F Kennedy declared himself to be a liberal in his acceptance speech for the New York Liberal Party’s nomination in 1960: ‘If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the peopletheir health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil libertiessomeone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal”, then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal”.’ (Kennedy 1960)

Political planning 31

1c. Create the first mission statements for new government, organisation, campaign, or event; more permanent organisations may review and update theirs Newly formed organisations need to create a mission statement. For example, the Scottish Parliament, created in 1999, was set up with a mission statement which informed the development of its procedures and purposes of different organisational units. The SPCB (Scottish Parliament Corporate Body) declared its purpose was ‘to support the Scottish Parliament in fulfilling its constitutional role was a representative and legislative body by providing professional advice and services of the highest standards’ which integrated values such as integrity, impartiality and professionalism (Winetrobe 2003, 10–11). A mission statement should also be created for a new campaign or the start of a new government – or election of a new party leader who becomes Prime Minister as their party is already in power. Malcolm Turnbull’s speech after becoming elected leader of the Australian Liberal Party and thus Prime Minister, declared this government ‘will be a thoroughly Liberal Government committed to freedom, the individual and the market. It will be focused on ensuring that in the years ahead, as the world becomes more and more competitive, and greater opportunities arise, we are able to take advantage of that’ (Turnbull 2015). Permanent organisations such as political parties have more enduring, historical and sometimes constitutional mission statements which are rarely changed, but party leaders or presidents may state their own interpretation of their party’s mission. Australian Prime Minister and Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam argued in 1973 that ‘Our programme has three great aims. They are: to promote equality; to involve the people of Australia in the decision-making processes of our land; and to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people’ (Whitlam, 1973). Specific government departments may revise their mission following reviews. A review of the UK Treasury led to a proposal for a new aim and mission statement, which the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown argued needed to ‘take on board the need to improve our wealthcreating base and boost savings and investment if we are to deliver rising standards of living for all without inflationary problems’ and Treasury’s new mission was therefore set as being to promote rising prosperity based on sustained economic growth (Pliatzky 1997, 92).

Political planning 2: set the vision Setting the vision involves the top figures of an organisation such as prime ministers, presidents and party leaders creating or updating and communicating the vision statement with specific short-term plans and actions to fulfil the mission.

2a. Top figures in the organisation should create or update vision statements that express what they want to achieve in the short term to fulfil the mission, and how A vision statement focuses more on what the organisation wants to achieve in the immediate future, and how, including specific actions it needs to take to attain the vision. Vision statements can be found in party manifestos or platforms for an election, candidate campaign announcements, politicians’ speeches and government reports. In practice, political vision statements often lack specificity, see examples in Table 2.3.

32 Political planning

TABLE 2.3 Examples of vision statements in politics

Party

Campaign/candidate

‘OUR GOP – The Party of Opportunity – The Republican Party is fighting for a freer and stronger America where everyone has the opportunity to achieve the American Dream.’ US Republican Party (2012)

‘We are going to make our country great again. It can happen. Our country has tremendous potential. We have tremendous people … I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created … I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll bring back our money.’ Donald Trump (2015) announcement of his presidential campaign

Politicians play a key role in setting and communication the vision. Former President Ronald Reagan has been noted to have been very effective at setting out his strategic vision (Pfiffner 2013, 87). This is also important for non-political staff: vision was rated as the most important leadership trait by US federal executives in administration positions during the Reagan administration (Benze 1987). UK Prime Minister David Cameron set out his vision for a Big Society a few months after being elected, arguing that: ‘the Big Society is about a huge culture change, where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace, don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities.’ (Cameron 2010) However, a vision should include action steps. In 2016 the New Zealand Labour Party leader Andrew Little announced in his party’s State of the Nation speech that the party would focus on backing the ‘Kiwi Dream’. This was then listed on the party website under their vision, but lacked action steps and disappeared by the time of the 2017 election. The lack of a clear vision makes it hard for communications staff to create a narrative to support policy decisions (Schnee 2015, 96), and a lack of discussion of how the vision will be achieved can open up a candidate to criticism. Existing vision statements such as those for a political party may need revisiting over time or for specific election campaigns. A former Australian Treasurer, Peter Costello (2016), emphasised the importance of parties setting out their vision. He warned that ‘Labor’s got a very clear view of what it’s there for, it’s got a clear view of its constituency, and it’s got a very clear view of how it will stand by that constituency … But the Liberal Party’s got to think about what are the things that it’s really going to chase over the next decade’ and better explain its agenda, motivations and priorities. The 2016 US Democratic platform laid out its overall vision and beliefs in the Preamble of the party platform: ‘In 2016, Democrats meet in Philadelphia with the same basic belief that animated the Continental Congress when they gathered here 240 years ago: Out of many, we are one … Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls … Democrats believe we are stronger when we have an economy that works for everyone – an economy that grows incomes for working people, creates good-paying jobs,

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and puts a middle-class life within reach for more Americans … and we can have more economic fairness, so the rewards are shared broadly, not just with those at the top.’ (US Democratic Party 2016: 1) Parties can also offer a vision in relation to specific election promises. In 2015 the Canadian NDP’s leader Tom Mulcair set out the vision to ‘form a more progressive government in Ottawa’ through key policy goals such as ‘step up to fight climate change’ by leading ‘the Canadian delegation to the COP21 climate conference in Paris with firm targets to cut pollution, and bring in a home retrofit program to lower your household heating costs’ (Mulcair 2015, iii).

2b. Communicate the vision in speeches, documents, announcements and reports Vision statements are often communicated in politicians’ speeches such as a State of the Nation Speech offered by the US President, an Inaugural Presidential Speech, the Queen’s Speech in the UK Parliament or Speech from the Throne in Canada. After being elected, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement to mark the delivery of the Speech from the Throne, which includes both visionary principles and specific planned actions: ‘This plan was developed by listening to Canadians. It reflects their priorities, interests, and ambitions. Canadians have told us they want a real and fair chance at success. To provide real change, we will deliver a tax cut for the middle class, introduce a new Canada Child Benefit, and create jobs through new investments in public transit, as well as green and social infrastructure. We will work with the provinces and territories to make post-secondary education more affordable, begin to develop a new Health Accord, and enhance the Canada Pension Plan. We will restore Canadians’ trust in their public institutions, including the House of Commons and the Senate, by working with greater openness and transparency. This will include consulting on and implementing electoral reforms. Canadians want to live in a country where a clean environment and a strong economy go hand-in-hand. We will fight climate change, with the provinces and territories, as Canada works to put a price on carbon and reduce carbon pollution. We will also invest in clean technology and introduce new environmental assessment processes that seek and consider public input, with decisions informed by scientific advice. We will keep our diverse communities strong and will renew Canada’s nation-tonation relationship with Indigenous peoples. This will include launching an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and working in collaboration so that every First Nations child receives a quality education. We will make it easier for new Canadians to build successful lives in Canada, reunite with their families, and contribute to the economic success of all citizens. In response to pressing international need, we will welcome 25,000 new Canadians from Syria by the end of February 2016. We will also provide more support for our veterans and their families, recognizing their service to our country. Canadians want a safe and peaceful nation that provides them with opportunities. We will strengthen our relationships with our allies and continue to work with them in the fight against terrorism, provide

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assistance to the world’s most vulnerable, contribute to greater peace throughout the world, invest in our Armed Forces, and negotiate trade agreements that expand our economic opportunities. We will undertake these and other initiatives while pursuing a responsible and transparent fiscal plan suited to challenging economic times. I have every confidence in this ambitious plan to bring real change to Canada. We will deliver what Canadians have asked for, open up new horizons for our country, and show the world that diversity, creativity, and compassion are vital to a peaceful and prosperous future.’ (Trudeau 2015)

Political planning 3: set organisational goals Goals can help bring people together: in a campaign ‘there are very very clear goals … It’s very much focused on the end game which is winning the election’ (Campbell 2019). But how they are set and what their nature is can vary.

3a. Set overall organisational goals that will focus direction on key priorities and help to accomplish the vision Setting clear goals is crucial to effective political management. Goals help to focus direction on key priorities and can be used to monitor progress and performance. Obama advisor David Plouffe (2016) spoke of the influence of goals on campaigns: ‘With elections, it always starts with how many votes you need … But then you think through, “what’s your base?” “Are there swing voters?” “What concerns do they have about you and your opponent?” You have to find ways to turn out your supporters … The way you measure is by always making progress towards a vote goal. Even the money you raise has to be married to a campaign to acquire a vote goal.’ Goals include winning elections, maintaining public support, getting legislation through Parliament, getting policy delivered, re-election and historical legacy. They may be set through presidential or campaign manager speeches that set the agenda as well as formal directives through government memos and campaign targets. For example, the US Democratic National Committee (n.d.) National Voter Expansion Project had goals such as ‘ensure that every eligible voter is registered, ever registered voter is able to vote, and that every vote is accurately counted’ and the New Zealand Electoral Commission (2013) Voter Participation Strategy set one goal as ‘a national discussion on the implications of declining voter participation’.

3b. Make goals challenging yet achievable, measurable, results-oriented, with completion dates Goals need to be results-oriented, offering promises for future achievements with specific target dates, and achievable given existing resources as well as measurable. As Robbie Mook (2016), Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, said about trying to raise donations ‘You have an objective and, if you don’t believe that you’re going to meet that objective, then [you ask]

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what are you doing? Why are you bothering to do it? … every day we made a little of progress and, ultimately, we got [there].’ Goal-setting helped the process of central government restructuring in New Zealand in the mid-1980–1990s: senior managers noted that it meant they focused more on outputs and staff gained a clearer idea of what to do and why (Stace and Norman 1997, 22, 27). However, goals in politics are often less clearly defined than business. Cummings (2014) argued that ‘political institutions control what they do badly’ because in politics ‘it’s much harder to formulate clear goals.’ In 2015, the United Nations adopted new Sustainable Development Goals which set ambitious targets for all nations to achieve by 2030, such as ‘no poverty,’ ‘zero hunger,’ ‘gender equality’ and ‘clean water and sanitation’. Their achievability is doubtable: ending poverty, hunger and gender inequality will not be achieved easily. Nevertheless Ballou-Aares (2016), a Senior Advisor for Development to the US Secretary of State, argued that ‘real-time data’ can be used to identify a ‘starting point’ and then where action is most needed to keep governments accountable for delivering progress towards them. Thus even if they are not achievable, setting them may prompt action.

3c. Set goals at and across different organisational levels Goals can be set for organisational units such as campaigns and government departments, temporary groups such as working parties and presidential transitions, events such as campaign conventions, and non-units such as policies and programs, for individuals, and also across different units. Traditional goal setting means top levels set the goals first then others follow with their own version for lower levels. Goals may also be set at the top by political leaders for implementation across different organisational units. In the US, the Government Performance and Results (GPRA) Modernization Act of 2010 set Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) goals to accelerate progress on presidential priority areas, involving multiple agencies in collaboration (US Social Security Administration 2016, 11). CAP goals were created by the Office of Management and Budget to reflect President Obama’s second-term priorities (US Social Security Administration 2016, 11). The US Social Security Administration’s Annual Performance Report 2015–2017 illustrated how each CAP goal had two senior leaders, one within the Executive Office of the President and one within key delivery agencies (US Social Security Administration 2016, 11). Naturally, different organisations can have conflicting goals which can make it challenging for them to work together. The UK Government tried to develop e-government to improve service delivery by working with a range of organisations, but goals for national government, local government, public service providers (both profit-driven and not-for-profit), voluntary and community organisations and individual members of the public often all vary (Grimsley, Meehan and Tan 2007, 175).

3d. Set goals for different time periods, projects and events Goals can be set for different time periods and specific projects and events. A former Deputy Director for Management in the Office of Management and Budget argued that goal-setting actively helped federal agencies serve effectively during the transition to President Obama (Johnson 2009). A President Management Council made up of the chief management officers from the largest federal agencies met to define the goals, timeframes and tactics to preparing

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the agencies for the transition in May of the 2008 election year. The council worked to ensure that, for example, career leadership staff were capable of running government in the short-term absence of political leadership and that every federal program had clear goals and plans. Goals for the transition were distributed to agencies in July 2008 and included clear timelines. For example, the goal ‘Help ensure continuity of public services during the transition to the new administration’ was accompanied by specific actions such as:   

By August 1: Identify a knowledgeable, capable career official to lead/coordinate the transition at every agency. By October 15: Identify the career official who will be responsible for acting in place of the departing political official for each major bureau and office of the department agency. By November 1: Identify and summarise the ‘hot’ policy, internal management, legal, and infrastructure issues to require immediate attention by the new administration officials.

Departments were then effectively prepared and ready ‘to brief the new political leaders and get them “on board” as smoothly as possible’ (Johnson 2009, 822). Goals can also be set for specific party events. Paul Manafort (2016), Trump’s campaign manager from June to August 2016, set out goals for the convention to the Republican National Committee to fit the overall campaign ‘in the context of Making America great again’. Specific event goals included:   

‘To present a picture of Donald Trump that is broader than just the campaign image that people have developed from the primary season’. ‘The purpose of this convention is the opportunity to introduce the candidate to a broader spectrum of America that will be paying attention at this convention’. ‘The goal of the overall convention will be to present Mr Trump not just as the political figure running for office, but as the father, as the businessman, as the compassionate human being that he is when the spotlights aren’t on and when he wasn’t running for president’.

3e. To be more directive, use specific, prioritised goals; to allow more flexibility, make them ambiguous so there is freedom in how to interpret and implement them Political leaders need to make their goals as clear as possible, as they can influence where energies are directed in the organisation as well as staff motivation to try to achieve them. US President Reagan made the priorities of his administration clear with simple goals that helped to take the initiative in support for a conservative agenda (Rockman 1993, 112–13). Research on the perceptions and behaviour of civil servants suggests that the more specific goals were, the more positively managers were viewed (Chun and Rainey 2005, 547–50). Specificity or lack of it can be seen in the targets for performance, time periods, prioritisation of goals, how goals are interpreted during implementation, and evaluation mechanisms used. There is often still considerable freedom in how they are interpreted, or goal ambiguity (Lee, Rainey and Chun 2009, 459, Chun and Rainey 2005, 522–3). How high a particular organisation or group is on the political agenda can affect the attention paid to goal-setting.

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Goals may conflict and thus need prioritising. There can also be the need to debate which goals are more important, or take priority. This is especially true when they may conflict, such as parties who seek office and to enact certain policies may be prevented from achieving their goal of obtaining election to public office by retaining unpopular policies.

3f. Build motivation and gather resources to support achievement of goals Political managers play a key role in encouraging positive impact of goal-setting. The most successful top government executives’ in the US federal government under the Clinton and Bush administrations engaged in effective planning, including the assessment of the environment and a selection of a smaller number of overall goals (Kelman and Myers 2011, 236). Goal-setting impacts on employee and volunteer motivation – and performance – in government, parties and campaigns. For example, the US Department of State (2016) emphasises the importance of leaders setting clear goals, ‘a goal is a simple but powerful way to motivate people and communicate priorities. Leaders in states, local governments, federal programs, and in other countries have demonstrated the power of using specific, challenging goals (combined with frequent measurement, analysis, and follow-up) to improve performance’ along with review of progress towards goals which ‘leads to the discovery of what works and what does not.’ Political managers need to ensure that goals are clear, that employees feel capable of meeting challenging goals, and that they see the relationship between their job and the overall organisational goals and support staff in order to achieve them. Managers also need to connect their agenda to public service motivation so that goals become, as one practitioner put it, ‘something that they can really believe in and want to be a part of … it’s easier to work hard when you know that that work is amounting to something and it’s for a goal that you believe in’ (quoted in Kelman and Myers 2011, 236). Goals also help to allocate resources effectively. In campaigns it influences where to focus the effort, which is particularly important for minor or independent candidates who do not have the party infrastructure (Hochschild and Wallace 2011, 575–7). Political managers also need to gain support from key political figures for goals to be granted, in the form of resources, cooperation and authority, through direct contact and socialisation with key politicians (Kelman and Myers 2011, 250; Heymann 1988, 13–15).

Political planning 4: create organisational strategy Organisations need to create strategies to achieve the set goals, which vary depending on the current and prospective circumstances the organisation is in. For example, the Australian Labor Party secretary explained that parties need ‘to identify priorities and to triage things and put them into some order so that they are manageable’; ‘you can’t be debating everything all the time because you would end up at cross purposes, so you’ve got to put in some order’ (Erickson 2019).

4a. Set aside the time and resources to create an overall organisational strategy to achieve the set goals Strategies need to be created to achieve the set goals. For example, party committees seek to grow their voter base through getting people enrolled to vote, and governments can create a strategic planning staff and teams within central policy teams and political offices. Campaigns

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have strategies to win elections but also lower level goals. Often after losing successive elections parties set longer-term transformative strategies, such as when in 1994 UK leader Tony Blair set a new transformative direction for his party to become ‘New’ Labour and David Cameron set a new direction for the UK Conservative Party, declaring in 2005 ‘this party has got to look and feel and talk and sound like a completely different organisation’ (quoted in Evans 2008, 293). Cameron initiated a wide-ranging policy review process, attempting to differentiate from the old conservative part as well as New Labour and moving towards a more socially-oriented centre ground to transform the party (Evans 2008, 296–313). Once elected, it is important for political leaders to set organisational strategy and priorities as this gives not just political staff but also civil servants a sense of direction. US President Reagan was effective at setting a strategy and directing his administration towards achieving it, such as reducing the size of government and cutting income tax, in a way that both White House and non-partisan government staff were aware of what the president wanted and there wasn’t any struggle over the overall direction (Wildavsky 1987, 56–7; Kumar et al 2000, 767–8). It can though also be left to civil servants to infer the goals: as an Assistant Secretary in the Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet explained: ‘They encourage us to read or listen to the Prime Minister’s speeches. The Prime Minister will often give speeches where he will outline the things that are important to him and how he thinks about it. That is the other way we can try and get a sense of what he is thinking. But it is not as linear and organized as I can make it sound! It takes a while for new advisors to get across what the priorities are, for advisors to integrate well with each other, and to understand where the PM [Prime Minister] is coming from.’ (Lloyd 2019) Indeed, political leaders are not always successful at setting the overall strategy. Former Minister Nicola Roxon (2013) who served in government under Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd reflected that ‘Governments as a whole, and the prime minister in particular, need to keep their focus high level – spending time and energy on the things that really matter.’ She argued that the Rudd cabinet focused on detail and avoided discussing strategic items which prevented a focus on the big picture. It isn’t easy to find time for strategic thinking in political offices, however. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard reflected that: ‘Clearing time for strategic thinking about your own political position is incredibly hard when you are required to front for all the demands on a prime minister’s time … I struggled with this and so did my colleagues … setting aside time for political strategizing almost feels like an indulgence … ’ (Gillard 2014, 357) Strategies also need to be set to get policy through Parliament and be specific. Mark BakerJones, a Ministerial Advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw recalled how when he came into his position to help get the Zero Carbon Bill: ‘There was a broad plan but it was fairly simplistic: get the Bill into the House and then after that, deal with the select committee process. For my part, I came in at the beginning of the zero-carbon bill political negotiations, but not at the beginning of the policy development. I came in at a point where whatever plan there was, was being implemented, but I think it was probably that fairly broad plan.’ (Baker-Jones 2019)

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4b. Invest resources into environmental scanning and strategic foresight to identify and consider current and future organisational circumstances that might impact on the strategy Political organisations need to engage in ongoing evaluation of existing practice and foresight analysis, identifying and planning for potential problems, dangers, trends and opportunities, which will help them adapt more quickly to change and achieve their goals. Strategy development needs to foresee and consider current and future organisational circumstances which includes factors such as:   

   

Influential actors and organisations such as political leaders, media, public, other governments, other countries. Competitors such as other candidates, parties and the opposition or minority party. Collaborators, e.g. central/federal and local/state party organisations/branches, potential coalition partners, politicians who might support a policy or Bill, NGOs who might support a particular policy, different government departments or units you might work with to achieve policy delivery. Rules, e.g. changes in the election system, regulations on the use of social media sites, fundraising/donation rules. Resources, political, people, financial, technological, informational (e.g. policy expertise, membership data, voter data). Existing conditions, e.g. previous election results and public opinion, economic conditions. Forecasts or foresight which considers the future broadly, using trend analysis, contingency planning, alternative future conditions, signposts, drivers, voter and service user profiling using big data, plausible futures, policy modelling, potential impact of a future election and change in political leadership, technological changes, opportunities, risks, threats, and provides a basis for predictive analysis.

Political documents often note the use of research and environmental scanning to identify opportunities, threats, big data analytics, voter profiling and policy modelling and integrate them into strategy formulation. For example, the US Democratic National Committee’s (n.d., 2) National Voter Expansion Project utilised analysis of a range of data, including public records, voter files, historical turnout data and targeted model predictions to identify potential new Democratic voters in each area. Conducting high level foresight is important in government as it helps anticipate emerging problems and opportunities for policy development, identify unanticipated consequences, create a sense of the bigger picture across traditional government units and synthesise a wider range of information. In 1977, President Carter commissioned The Global 2000 Report to the President which made forecasts about global warming, and stimulated substantial elite and public debate (Leigh 2003). The British Government created a Foresight Program in 1994 within the Department of Trade and Industry which aimed to present a five-yearly prediction of what the world will look like in 10–20 years, with different foresight panels covering different themes such as the ageing population and sectors such as financial services, consulting with a range of stakeholders and producing a range of events and consultation papers (Leigh 2003; Schmidt 2015). In the Australian state of Victoria, a Policy Development and Research Branch was established in the

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Department of Premier and Cabinet in June 2000, which drew on multiple sources to assist with long-term strategic thinking in the Victorian government (Leigh 2003, 6). Foresight can be challenging in government because it requires multiple units to work together and integrate their ideas into one comprehensive plan, and for time to be taken to think ahead rather than just the next election or even the usual daily battle or crisis. Futurist practitioner John Michael Schmidt (2015, 489, 494) argues that it is needed because government agencies face a complex and uncertain future even if they currently feel they are in stable position, yet although foresight is used in international bodies such as some United Nations agencies, the European Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, only about 10% have effective ongoing foresight functions. Research has found that in 2015 approximately 50 US federal government units were using foresight in some way, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Security Agency, Postal Service and the National Intelligence Council, with levels of activity varying within these (Schmidt 2015), and in Canada most federal government agencies had not integrated foresight functions into their work, with perhaps only as many as 10–15 out of 215 government units having active foresight programs, such as the Canadian Armed Forces, Army, National Research Council, Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Similarly, there are weaknesses in the UK foresight activity: a 2014 inquiry by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that horizon scanning performance was inconsistent across departments and its use was not generally systematic (Schmidt 2015). Strategic foresight occurs more often in defence policy, where practitioners try to anticipate how another country might respond to a given set of actions, imagining alternative futures or scenarios (Leigh 2003, 5). However, strategic planning in US national security and foreign affairs in the US has been limited because national security advisers often retain tight control over the policymaking in their own unit and filter communication to the president, focusing more on day to day than strategic thinking (Friedberg 2007; Evans 2014, 518). Strategies for international affairs need to be created at the top level, integrate expertise and information from throughout the executive branch, identify important trends or potential long-term issues and adapt to changes in opponents reactions, countermoves and initiatives (Friedberg 2007, 49, 57–9). In the UK, foresight in foreign affairs has been more effective. Historically, planning staff have been integrated into policy making in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office since 1964 to provide a longer-term perspective on British interests, and more recently staff in the contemporary Policy Unit in the Prime Minister’s Office contributed to strategic foreign policy and challenged existing policy (Evans 2014, 516–7). The British foresight program consults widely and then produces public reports (Leigh 2003, 5) including ‘bigger picture’ thinking on priorities, UK strategy, and organising government activity around key goals (Evans 2014, 517). Evans argues that the process rather than the plans created by it is beneficial to create a shared understanding of the country’s national interest (Evans 2014, 518). The effectiveness of strategic planning can depend on individuals, and thus Evans makes recommendations for practice (Evans 2014, 521–3), including:  

Provide staff with training, the time to think strategically and consider alternative perspectives or sabbaticals. Mainstream strategic thinking by involving a wider set of practitioners in policy-making.

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Retain a policy planning staff that works across departments, generates new ideas, encourages learning, and engages in bilateral and multilateral policy planning talks with counterparts which will provide insight into how other governments are thinking. Make space for strategic policy at the heart of government such as the Cabinet Office. Encourage multiple approaches and input to strategy, including ‘in and outers’, ‘adjunct’ advisers and input from academia, the private sector or charities.

4c. Ensure the strategy will create more political benefits than costs Organisational strategy needs to consider the political costs and benefits, in terms of potential impact on public support, political support (e.g. from the prime minister/president, ministers, key party figures, campaign managers), internal legislature support (from coalition partners, the opposition), party membership and party unity. Gaining support from political figures such as the president, Congress/Parliament, party leaders and candidates is important as they have power over the organisation in terms of influencing direction, resource allocation (e.g. budget appropriation, targeting strategy), selecting policies and candidates. But there can also be costs – adopting an office seeking strategy can lose party members and pursuing leadership of an unpopular policy can lose public support. Staff working in government departments need to integrate understanding of the goals and priorities of political figures, including political appointments, Congress and the president into their strategy building because their potential support will affect resource allocation to achieve the strategy (Heymann 1988, 4). The president’s strategic priorities indicate activities which will get support, ‘to the department head, the president’s expressed concerns are a letter of credit usable to support a range of activities’ (Heymann 1988, 66). It is important to understand long-standing presidential priorities and go beyond touching base with the White House.

4d. Build in flexibility to allow the organisation to take advantage of opportunities and take action to avoid a crisis Strategies need to be flexible enough to respond to change so that organisations can take advantage of opportunities and take action whilst there is still time to avoid or limit crisis. As GOP Strategist Ed Goeas noted, ‘strategy is a thought process, not a set of rules you put together in the beginning of the campaign that you are stuck with’ (Goeas 2003, 91). Growth strategies can be adopted in response to opportunities. For example, the New Zealand Electoral Commission (2013, 1) Voter Participation Strategy aims to grow voter participation by focusing on three key streams of work: starting a national discussion on the implications of declining voter participation; providing public information and education resources that facilitate participation; and conducting research on what affects participation. Campaign strategies need to be adapted to suit increasingly dynamic environment such as changing voter demands, opportunity structures and communication technology (Giebler and Wessels 2013, 57–73). For example, presidential campaigns include growth strategies, with analysis of presidential travel in election year showing that presidents strategically plan presidential trips to states that are larger yet more competitive (i.e. not secure) or target states where they previously had high levels of support to seek new donations to grow support and fundraising trips (Charnock et al 2009; Doherty 2010). Political party choice of issue focus can also depend on resources.

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Parties are not always consistently responsive to changes in their environment. In the 2009 German national elections the two major parties, CDU/CSU and SPD faced competing with each other after having all worked as partners in a Grand coalition government. Because they were all responsible for what the government did, merely attacking each other as parties normally do was problematic (Bachl and Brettschneider 2011). However, the parties varied in their ability to adapt. The SPD went back and forth, firstly focusing positively on their positive achievements and then returning to attacks and had a very poor election result with only 23% of the vote. In contrast, the FDP adopted a more consistent strategy with a simple focus on traditional liberal policy issues, tax cuts, civil rights and a commitment to join a conservative–liberal coalition and support the re-election of popular Chancellor Angela Merkel, and achieved a higher result than normal. The CDU highlighted the reliability of their leader Angela Markel, focused on reports about the work of CUD ministers, and avoided debating policy with political opponents, or even discussing their former coalition partner the SPD at all. The CDU won the election and were able to form coalition with the FDP (Bachl and Brettschneider 2011, 57–71).

4e. Resolve conflicting goals and strategies from different parts of the organisation Political managers need to work through conflicting goals amongst different stakeholders within government and political parties. Both organisations are made up of different groups of people with conflicting views, and managers have to be particularly careful in how they handle the views of members when setting organisational goals and strategies as there are often conflicts between goals in order to win votes to get into government versus to pursue ideologically-driven policy. For example, a survey of Irish Labour Party members in 2003 found that amongst party members, 31% thought their party ‘should not compromise on policy even if this means remaining out of government’ while 24% focused more on the goal of government office, feeling that the party ‘should be willing to enter government even if this means compromising on policy’ (Kennedy, Lyons and Fitzgerald 2005, 181). Australian Labor discussed ideas and plans with the different stakeholders in the Australian Labor party after the 2019 election: ‘By using the people who you have got and viewing them as a means for establishing that agenda and defining what it is and working with them rather than viewing them as a hurdle that you got to get over I have found has been very effective. Because when you come in on day 1, and you think about what’s the next 3 years look like, there is just a massive shopping list and no particular kind of structure or order to it. By going through the proper processes of the organization you start to filter it and put it in some order.’ (Erickson 2019) The US Democratic National Committee’s (2015) Democratic Victory Taskforce Final Report and Action Plan emphasises the need for co-operation between the national and state party organisations. It states that ‘one key finding is abundantly clear and affects every single recommendation and implementation strategy: State Democratic parties are a critical component to winning elections by promoting new voices, expanding the reach of the national Party and helping recruit new candidates and activists’ (US Democratic National Committee 2015, 8).

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It notes the resources that the national committee has, such as a library of opposition research about Republicans, financial support and training, but explains that nevertheless ‘it is only through state Democratic parties that DNC resources can reach candidates and ultimately the American voter. Neither the DNC nor state parties can operate independently of one another’ and thus they need to work together ‘within the bond of a complete and coordinated relationship’ (US Democratic National Committee 2015, 13). Part of its strategy therefore is to strengthen collaboration with state Democratic parties by ‘partnering with state parties and enabling them to become self-sustaining, powerful engines for change’ (US Democratic National Committee 2015, 16).

Political planning 5: develop strategic organisational plans Overall strategic organisational plans need to be developed to achieve the strategy. Plans can be specific and rigid, such as a set of rules that have to be adhered to and leave no room for debate or change, or they can be flexible, providing a general sense of direction but with room for change. Examples of strategic organisational plans can be found in a range of political contexts, including government planning at different levels, presidential transitions, coalition formation and management, event management, campaigns, resource allocation, rules in government and parties and government communications planning. For example, a former political staffer to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office noted that communication plans are ‘useful because you can always go – OK I’m not going to be distracted by the opinion poll that after day or the report that’s out today, we’re doing what’s in the grid’ (Campbell 2019). Similarly, parties in opposition need to create plans because as the Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese explained: ‘When you’re in opposition you can end up just getting swept along with responding to the government’s agenda and that’s very dangerous. You have to have a work program of your own, including starting to work out alternative policies for consideration … [and] longer term strategic questions and what actions are going to be undertaken around those.’ (Gartrell 2019)

5a. Develop strategic organisational plans at different levels of the organisation to implement the overall strategy To achieve the overall strategy, organisations need to develop a plan including broader plans, detailed tactical plans and lower operational ground plans. Different types of plan are carried out at different levels of management over varied time periods, for one-off projects or more permanent activity, and with varying flexibility. Top level leaders such as prime ministers/ ministers, party leaders and campaign managers need to create broader strategic plans to determine activity for the next one to five years and then organisations need to engage in more specific and detailed planning at different levels and units of the organisation. For example, Labor leader Albanese made a speech at the Press Club laying out the Party’s processes for the following two years (Gartrell 2019). More detailed tactical planning involves the tactical allocation of resources within different states as part of a presidential campaign electoral college strategy and is more likely to be carried out by middle level managers, such as a minister or government CEO, a head of a party committee, or a department work team,

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building on priorities in the top level strategic plans to identify what a specific department or government unit might contribute to the strategic plan. For example, US Presidential campaigns often adopt an Electoral College strategy that allocates resources, such as candidates’ appearances and television advertising purchases, tactically within different states (Shaw 1999). Data on polling, television advertising, electoral vote totals and previous state-wide election results are used to determine which states were most likely to be cost-effective. President Bill Clinton’s strategist Mark Penn devised a model in 1996 to predict the potential impact of Clinton adverts on congressional races to decide whether to advertise or arrange candidate appearances in a given market or not. From a management perspective the plans were sometimes ad hoc, unprecise and insufficiently detailed for them to have allocated resources to achieve maximal effect (Shaw 1999, 904, 911). Strategy in government affects strategy in campaigning. US Congressional party leaders allocate the resources of campaign committees to encourage party support to help their policy strategies in Congress succeed (Damore and Hansford 1999). Republicans targeted candidates with the best probabilities of winning rather than equitably (Damore and Hansford 1999, 383). Lower or ground level operational plans such as how and where to allocate resources including volunteers, money, advertisements in campaigns are also important. This involves first-line management such as on the ground leaders of campaign volunteers, individual government staff in charge of a small team or project, and elected politicians, who utilise middle management’s tactical plans to determine how specific tasks will be accomplished with the available resources within the next year. Campaign plans include detailed operational planning such as flowcharts, tasks broken down into single factors, over the campaign timeline (Burton and Shea 2010, 23, 26–9). They also involve financial planning, and are thus used to allocate resources, including communication, advertising, staffing, technological equipment, travel expenses, consultants, refreshments and campaign merchandise. The Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor 2019 campaign discussed the need for coordination mechanisms to manage providing stories to journos, incoming communications from the other side and outgoing communication including ‘policy documents, campaign materials for a local campaign, a leaflet of some sort, media releases, digital content, Facebook advertising, television advertising … which is produced each day’ (Nash 2019).

5b. Use standing plans to cover repeated activities or situations including policies, rules and procedures Standing plans such as policies, rules and standard operating procedures are created for repeated activities. Policies outline the expected behaviour or response to a designated problem or situation, such as codes of conduct for ministers, political advisors and party members, policies to guide candidate selection by local political parties, and to rely on self-regulation and personal responsibility. The Iowa Democratic Party (2015), for example, lays out detailed policies in their Iowa Delegate Selection Plan for the 2016 Democratic National Convention. This notes how the process is governed by various charters and bylaws within the Party, and that Iowa will use a proportional representation system based on the results of the Caucus for apportioning delegates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, and the date of the ‘first determining step’ of Iowa’s delegate selection process will occur on 1 February 2016 with precinct caucuses (Iowa Democratic Party 2015, 12–13). The UK House of Commons (2015) Members’ Handbook also provides a guide to services and facilities provided to help

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MPs and their staff and covers things such as office accommodation, services and equipment; finance; employment of staff; information services; facilities; and visitors and guests. The Members’ Handbook also includes codes of conduct for politicians, such as ‘Members have a duty to uphold the law, including the general law against discrimination … a general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; and a special duty to their constituents … They should always behave with probity and integrity’ (UK House of Commons 2015, 6–7). There are also a wide array of formal documents with policies to guide the conduct of those working in government, such as ministers and staff. In the UK, a Ministerial Code was published in 1997 by the UK Cabinet Office and is used to judge the behaviour of individual ministers, as well as laying out expectations around political advisors in government (Fawcett and Gay 2010, 53). Over time, expectations for advisors have been changed in response to committees, or reviews such as by external bodies such as the (Nolan) Committee on Standards in Public Life. In Australia, although until the 2000s there were very few mechanisms for holding political advisors accountable, a scandal called the Children Overboard Affair of 2001 led to calls for increased accountability for Australian ministerial advisers, but there were questions about how it might be enforced and how to protect the confidentiality of the relationship between ministers and their staff (Maley 2010). In New Zealand, there are multiple sources of rules, including a State Services Code of Conduct that sets out that ministerial advisers must fulfil their lawful obligation to the government with professionalism and integrity, perform their official duties honestly, faithfully and efficiently, and not bring the public service into disrepute, as well as an employment contract with the Department of Internal Affairs which has its own Code of Conduct (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010). The Ministerial Code for the UK Cabinet Office (2015) covers the responsibilities of a minister in relation to a certain aspect of governance – e.g. ministers and appointments; ministers and their departments; ministers and civil servants; and ministers and travel. Under each section there is a ‘general principle’ which is essentially the main rule for that section, and more detail on that rule then follows in a list, see Table 2.4. Rules specify required action, covering parliamentary debates, the election of party leaders, boards and candidates, campaign finance rules, recruitment and termination of employees, receiving gifts, party membership, committee structure, party convention/conference debating and speaking rules. In some government documents there are dedicated rules on issues such as ethics, for example the US Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (2008) House Ethics Manual, which is ‘the first complete revision of the House Ethics Manual since 1992’ (p. iii) and is primarily about regulating behaviour of politicians and setting high ethical standards. The manual is divided into ten chapters: general ethical standards; gifts; travel; campaign activity; outside employment and income; financial disclosure; staff rights and duties; casework; official allowances; and official and outside organisations. The manual is very detailed and comprehensive, and connects rules to laws or specific statutory prohibitions. It also provides examples of the ethical questions public officials might face, and tells them what they should or should not do in that situation: 

‘Example 1. An office is throwing a farewell party for a departing staff member, and the office knows of individuals in the private sector, with whom the staff member has worked, who would probably be willing to donate refreshments. The office may not request donations from those individuals.

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Example 2. One of the cable channels recently showed a documentary that relates to some legislation before a committee. A committee staff person may call the company to inquire if the committee may purchase a tape of the show, but may not request a free copy’ (US Committee on Standards of Official Conduct 2008: 26)

Overall, the rules in the manual are very detailed, specific and rigid, such as ‘Travel Sponsored by Other Private Entities – Members and staff may participate in a multiple-day trip only if the trip is one that is sponsored by a private source that does not retain a registered lobbyist or agent of a foreign principal, or if the trip is being paid for directly by an institution of higher education’ (US Committee on Standards of Official Conduct 2008, 93). There are plentiful documents with rules for political parties. The New Zealand National Party’s (2013) Constitution and Rules lays out rules about a range of matters, including the annual conference, voting at conference, board of directors and meetings, representation at meetings and substitution rules, appointments of committees and sub-committees, and candidate section. For example, it specifies that ‘Constituency Candidates for Parliament shall be selected by a Selection Committee in strict conformity with all the relevant provisions of the following Rules 87 to 118 inclusive’, and one of these rules is that ‘the selection of constituency candidates for each and every general election or by-election shall be controlled by Electorate Committees TABLE 2.4 Principles in the UK Ministerial Code

1.1 Ministers of the Crown are expected to behave in a way that upholds the highest standards of propriety.

a. The principle of collective responsibility applies to all Government Ministers; b. Ministers have a duty to Parliament to account, and be held to account, for the policies, decisions and actions of their departments and agencies; c. It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister; d. Ministers should be as open as possible with Parliament and the public, refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest, which should be decided in accordance with the relevant statutes and the Freedom of Information Act 2000; e. Ministers should similarly require civil servants who give evidence before Parliamentary Committees on their behalf and under their direction to be as helpful as possible in providing accurate, truthful and full information in accordance with the duties and responsibilities of civil servants as set out in the Civil Service Code; f. Ministers must ensure that no conflict arises, or appears to arise, between their public duties and their private interests; g. Ministers should not accept any gift or hospitality which might, or might reasonably appear to, compromise their judgement or place them under an improper obligation; h. Ministers in the House of Commons must keep separate their roles as Minister and constituency Member; i. Ministers must not use government resources for Party political purposes; and j. Ministers must uphold the political impartiality of the Civil Service and not ask civil servants to act in any way which would conflict with the Civil Service Code as set out in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.

Source: UK Cabinet Office (2015)

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acting under directions from the Board and with assistance from the Regional Council or Regional Chair’ (New Zealand National Party 2013, 36). It also notes the party will have a Candidate’s College ‘to identify and prepare potential candidates for selection as Parliamentary Candidates for the Party’ (New Zealand National Party 2013, 37). It has a standing Rules Committee whose function is ‘to provide legal advice and support to the Board and the Party and in particular provide interpretations of the Rules’ (New Zealand National Party 2013, 22). Similarly, the UK Conservative Party’s (2009) Constitution specifies comprehensive party rules on practical matters such as party membership and how power will be shared, for example ‘there shall be a Leader of the Party (referred to in this Constitution as “the Leader”) drawn from those elected to Parliament, who shall be elected by the Party Members and Scottish Party Members in accordance with the provisions of Schedule 2’ (p. 6). Likewise, the US Democratic Party (US Democratic National Committee 2009) has a Charter and Bylaws with some specific rules which require actions, such as rules for the composition of the DNC and others which are brief and broad such as stating that the long-term obligations of the Party is to ‘Adopt and promote statements of policy’ (p. 1) and that ‘The Democratic Party may hold a National Party Conference between National Conventions. The nature, agenda, composition, time and place of the Party Conference shall be determined by the Democratic National Committee’ (US Democratic National Committee 2009, 6). Procedures and Standard Operating Procedures outline how to respond to problems such as disputes or a crisis such as breach of rules, and ethical issue or coalition disputes. The Australian Electoral Commission’s (2016) Scrutineers Handbook 2016 contains rules to govern federal elections, by-elections and referendums, including standard operating procedure in response to a particular problem or circumstance such as questioning electors and what to do if a person is claiming entitlement to apply for an early vote prior to election day (pp. 12–13). The UK Conservative Party’s (2009) Constitution lays out procedures for handling any ethical issues, noting that the Board of the Party will appoint a Compliance Officer who shall be responsible for identifying any breach of the Constitution, and will require: ‘by written warning, the member of the Party to remedy any identified breach of the provisions of the Constitution within a specified period of time. If any member fails to comply with this warning, they have to inform the Board unless there is an allegation of conduct bringing or likely to bring the Party into disrepute which will then be considered in accordance with further provisions.’ (Articles 80 to 89) The articles then detail operations for an Ethics and Integrity Committee (UK Conservative Party 2009 15–16).

5c. Develop action and operating plans to define strategies for the short term or one legislative/government term Action and operating plans include coalition formation and management, communications plan for a department or the White House/Prime Minister’s Office, including rollout and weekly calendars for press releases, speeches, events, travel and interviews, party training programs and victory action plans. They focus on defining the course of action needed for up to a period of about a year to achieve organisational strategies and identify clear targets and performance objectives.

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Government coalition planning Political management includes reaching agreements between parties who have to share power to form government, to ensure the government as a whole can maintain unity and the individual parties can deliver their key policy promises. Coalition planning requires cooperation and compromises between previously competing parties on the allocation of cabinet seats, policies and budgets. Coalition agreements vary in detail and explicitness, but detailed planning and design of standard operating procedures and rules in the early stages can help to avoid problems further down the road in the new government. The Grand Coalition by the CDU/CSU and the SPD under Angela Merkel in Germany had to reconcile significant policy differences. It used a very long written agreement (44,000 words) and integrated a range of tools to manage future behaviour, which Miller and Muller (2010, 337–43) outline, such as:  

   

Strict inter-party parity agreements such as cabinet committees were to be staffed by ministers from both parties, both partners would coordinate on the German position in decision-making in EU institutions. High ministerial autonomy, but checks created for other parties to ensure ministers’ actions follow agreements by adding watchdog junior ministers from different parties, and almost all committees were chaired by MPs from parties different than that of the relevant minister. Each party had a veto over cabinet decisions. Procedural rules for making future policy decisions. Agreed coalition voting discipline even on topics where no compromise had been reached in the coalition agreement. Conflict resolution was to be through a coalition committee.

The second Grand Coalition was shaped significantly by this agreement, with 72% of the key decisions that the government made being previously detailed in the coalition agreement. The planning helped to maintain unity and preserve original policy intentions. New Zealand has utilised a range of ways to manage inter-party dissent in coalition government, whilst preserving each party’s distinctive policy profile or brand (Boston 2011). More flexible ‘agree-to-disagree’ arrangements enabled by flexible constitutional rules around government formation and complex electoral outcomes have worked well. For example, the selective application of the doctrine of collective responsibility was used in the Labour-led coalition in 2005 and the National-led 2008 coalition where minor parties in the coalition held ministerial offices outside the cabinet and were not fully bound by collective responsibility, but were still expected to defend government policy in their particular portfolios.

Communications planning in government Internal planning has been used in multiple governments to help manage the coordination of external communication. In the UK Brown Government a planning process including a planning grid was used to manage media for politicians in the public eye and help coordinate communications strategies (Schnee 2015). In the Canadian Harper Government communications calendars were an ‘essential planning tool’, including parliamentary calendars

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tracking bills, human resources calendars that listed staff holidays and media event coordination (Marland 2016, 295–303). Plans were made for different time periods: yearly, six-weekly and weekly. An overall central planning calendar mapped out the policy agenda for the year ahead to provide guidance for government policy and communications. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) produced a six-week rollout calendar with messaging and thematic groups, and held weekly planning meetings with PMO staff and department heads to review and adjust the list of upcoming communication events. The Privy Council Office (PCO) and PMO had weekly calendars to harmonise and coordinate messages, communication events and announcements. This planning also let ministers and government MPs know about government announcement that might affect them. Non-partisan departmental calendars were also synchronised with the PCO and PMO’s central communications calendars to coordinate the government’s message of the day. The US White House also utilises communications planning, including a communications calendar which integrates fixed Washington events such as those related to the congressional schedule and the budget deadlines, political information and input from those outside the White House, and more tactical communication that focuses on issues the president is interested in and takes advantage of potential communication points such as the State of the Union message at the end of January which provides the chance to put policy priorities on the agenda (Kumar 2001, 618). Former White House communications staff have noted it is best to set the agenda earlier in the year when there is more freedom, but they also need to exert control over scheduling for the planning too be effective. Communications staff also integrate input on policy when deciding which policies to put forward, how and when, coordinating the Office of Strategic Planning and Communications and major policy units. They also need to coordinate different players involved in planned events such as the scheduling and advance office which coordinates Presidential and First Lady scheduling (see Kumar 2001, 623, 628, 632). The 1981 Reagan White House created a 100-day communications plan for setting the agenda that had been mapped out during the early stages of the 1980 presidential campaign, which focused on managing the media, planning all public appearances down to the last detail of specific words and places to stand, and was connected to the president’s policy and legislative agenda. White House staff were able to be proactive by setting out the time to do long-range planning (see Kumar 2001, 632; Rozell 1995, 85–6). One staffer noted, ‘We moulded a communications strategy around a legislative strategy. We very carefully thought through what were the legislative goals we were trying to achieve, and then formulated a communications strategy which supported them’ (quoted in Rozell 1995, 85). It is important to establish a communication strategy early: Carter also failed to establish a viable press plan to communicate their message clearly early on (Rozell 1995, 78–9). However, the effectiveness of communication planning can also be effected by contextual factors such as nature of the times, current issues and the partisan makeup of Congress (Rozell 1995, 68–9).

Party action plans The US Democratic National Committee’s Democratic Victory Task Force, created to learn lessons from the Democratic losses in the 2014 midterms produced a Democratic Victory Action Plan to help the Democratic Party improve its chances of winning more elections (US Democratic National Committee 2015). The document is seen as ‘a roadmap for how

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the DNC will implement these recommendations, strengthen its operations and better define its role in helping all Democrats engage and win elections’ (US Democratic National Committee 2015, 2). The action plan identified five areas where the Democrats could make substantial changes: messaging; state parties; voter protection and expansion; redistricting; and building the bench (US Democratic National Committee 2015, 6) and outlines a strategy/ action plan for the Democratic Party to follow. For example, the strategy for ‘building the bench’ includes initiatives such as a Leader 2020 Program to recruit ‘down-ballot’ candidates which will put an emphasis on recruiting women and Millennials and increasing the number of candidates from the Hispanic, African American, Asian American and LGBT communities. The summary at the end of the report outlined strategic recommendations for the Democratic National Committee to achieve its electoral goals such as ‘engaging state parties and other Democratic committees in long-term planning for redistricting’ and ‘fostering a national network that recruits, trains, employs and promotes volunteers, activists, surrogates, and both current and future campaign staff’ (US Democratic National Committee 2015, 16). Another example of a specific action plan is the OFA Canvass Guide (Organizing for America 2009) that outlined exactly what someone should do before they canvass to build support for President Barack Obama’s health care principles, and provided a sample agenda for the canvass (p. 4). The plan was to canvass neighbourhoods around America to build support for President Obama’s public health care reform.

Parliamentary opposition management plans MP and Manager of Opposition Business Tony Burke discussed how the opposition tries to create plans for what the party will do in Parliament, both short term ‘such as a plan for a parliamentary fortnight as to what I’m wanting to do’ but also longer-term plans ‘I try to backdate as well – I always think of where we want us to be by election day and I work backwards from there which is the only way you’ll ever land on a long-term strategy’ (Burke 2019).

5d. Create single-use plans for a one-off project or event Single-use plans can also be created for a specific project or program which is not likely to be repeated in the near future, such as a candidate’s campaign, a presidential transition including a staffing plan, a working party, a campaign launch or convention, Get out the Vote guides for a specific election in a particular city or mega events such as the Olympic games and 100-day plans for new governments.

Campaign plans Campaign plans set out a clear plan that helps to keep everyone on message, ensures the timing of events and new policy announcements is effective and avoids competing initiatives, and allocates resources effectively. Burton and Shea (2010, 23) note that even back as far as 1960 John F Kennedy and his advisers spent three years planning their presidential campaign. They argue that a good campaign plan describes in step-by-step detail what to do, when, by whom and how, covering aspects such as market intelligence, polling, targeting, profiles of districts, segments, candidate and opposition research, fundraising, communications, direct contact and policy announcements.

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Campaign plans include very specific plans for particular aspects and regions. For example, the Iowa Democratic Party’s 2016 County Convention Guide (Iowa Democratic Party 2016) created a single-use plan specific to the 2016 election, which also provides information for the lower levels of its party such as Rules for County Conventions. A voting guide by the campaign Vote for Bernie (2016, 3–4) gave specific guidance to voters who wanted to vote in the 2016 Wisconsin Democratic primary in a Wisconsin Voter Guide which includes general information about registering and specific content for the 2016 primary, especially regarding deadlines to vote in 2016, and website links specific to Bernie’s campaign.

Event planning One-off mega events are unique, highly visible and symbolic events which attract high level decision makers interested in building a political legacy for which planning often meets significant challenges because of the unclear decision-making processes and unrealistic cost predications (Jennings 2013). The Olympic Games is a case where the political symbolism and competition between potential host cities encourages grand missions and over-promising, and over-rides more usual planning controls. As they are unique events, it is harder for the usual tools such as feasibility studies and budget forecasts to be accurate. In the case of the 2012 London Olympics the government failed to recognise the uncertainties in the original forecasts, such as suggestions it could generate £738 million in private sector contributions. The problems that commonly arising from mega projects often convey managerial incompetence, which is damaging to governments.

100-day planning in new governments and staffing All newly elected parties or governments need to put in place plans for their first few months, especially the selection of staff. The right staff need to be in the right positions if political leaders and parties are going to deliver on their policy promises in government. Moreover, the media is likely to be more favourable just after an election so it is an opportunity to start building a positive reputation. The US Presidency has a specific period called the transition between election (in November) and taking up office after inauguration (in January the following year). The effectiveness of planning in this period is important as it can impact on the performance of the new administration once officially in power. Personnel planning is a crucial part of the transition, including over a thousand political appointees which presidents need to nominate candidates for but require confirmation from the US Senate (see Kumar et al 2000, 757). Within the White House, Chiefs of Staff need to be appointed early so they can be involved in both nominations and also the appointment of other White House Staff – a US transition team will receive ‘thousands of resumes’ after the election which need managing (Kumar et al 2000, 756–7). Kumar et al (2000) interviewed 69 White House staff members in several administrations – Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton – for the White House Interview Program, funded by Pew Charitable Trusts. Ineffective planning, including a lack of priorities, slow recruitment process, lack of instructions to staff and weak vetting of nominees for political appointments for the first Bill Clinton presidency damaged the administration. In contrast, Ronald Reagan’s team planned in advance for transition, processing preliminary appointee

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screenings occurred before the election, so that the president was able to move very quickly on his first nominations after he was elected, and also had an experienced head hunter involved called Pendleton James (Ingraham 1988, 63; Kumar et al 2000, 757). James reflected that planning and preparation are essential and should also be informed by policy priorities which for Reagan was the economy: ‘[Those] in the campaign were only worried about one thing: the election night. I was only worrying about one thing: the morning after the election. There is no start up and there is no learning for presidential personnel. It has to start its operation the morning after the election … Presidential personnel has to be functional on the first day, the first minute of the first hour … So we came up with what I called the key eighty-seven. This is going through a planning process and comes out in the planning stage. Obviously, you know you’re going to do the cabinet. Obviously, you know you’re going to do the White House staff. Then in what order are you going to do the other? So I and my group went through and said, what are the key economic policy-making jobs? Those are the ones we want to address first because, until that person is sworn in, confirmed or appointed, that desk is empty over at treasury or over at commerce. Economic policy goes from state department, commerce, treasury; it goes through everybody. It’s not just treasury department. You want to make certain in the early days to work filling those appointments crucial to your initiatives of the first hundred days.’ (quoted in Kumar et al 2000, 757) Of course, it is controversial to be seen planning staffing during the campaign, in case it is perceived as arrogantly assuming you are going to win the election. But Kumar et al’s (2000, 758) data suggests that careful and quiet personnel planning behind the scenes is essential. Recruitment of political staff can draw from staff who have previously worked in government, as well as on the specific campaign to ensure the new government remembers what the public expect of the candidate and that staff also understand the nature of the leader and adapt to their style.

Plans to get policy through in government New governments also often create a strategic plan for policy and delivery such as a 100-day plan. Reagan’s Chief of Staff James Baker discussed how they ‘had a really definitive, well thought out, right-here hundred-day plan. We went back and we looked at the plans of everybody all the way back to Truman … We drafted a hundred-day plan and we stuck to it. The first and only priority was the president’s economic plan’ (quoted in Kumar et al 2000, 767). Reagan’s effectiveness in setting out his vision as a political leader was thus supported by formal planning. In 2019, New Zealand was heralded for passing a Zero Carbon Bill and thus taking action on climate change. The advisor for the minister who worked on the Bill was interviewed for this book, and detailed the planning behind it. It involved thinking about parties and committees, both the parties in the coalition, opposition, and cabinet committees and select committees. Baker-Jones (2019) notes that ‘generally, there was always some degree of planning.’ First of all, the challenges was ‘getting it through the coalition government and making sure everyone understood the policy and what we were proposing, but also

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understanding how the other parties worked.’ They ‘made a big effort to find out who has to be involved and who should be informed’ in the other parties, to understand their decision making processes leading up to Cabinet. They also sought to understand what issues the opposition party would have in advance, although ‘sometimes in a negotiations new issues could pop up, things we hadn’t planned for, and that’s where more planning could have been beneficial.’ They then planned for select committees, identifying who would be involved in that process, and also ‘there was quite a bit of planning around what sort of information could be provided to select committee in order for it to do its job as best it could … what’s the best information that could be provided to the committee, and in what form in order for it to carry out its function.’ Baker-Jones argues that the ‘select committee process went well – looking at the numbers of submissions that were made and the timeframes – in part due to that early planning.’ Thus planning: ‘makes a huge difference. I sat down with Deborah Russell who was the chair initially of the select committee about the best way to deliver information and talked to her about what had worked and what hadn’t worked in previous select committees. Things like the form of the reports from the officials, and how the committee liked to be briefed, what Hon Shaw’s office could do and whether it could be involved, how individual members of the select committee responded to information, and what would be the best way to give information to them and to assist them. It was all about how we could best inform the select committee about a lot of complex information over a short period of time, and then prepare the committee for the large number of submissions we were expecting.’

Political planning 6: construct lower level plans Implementing strategies within organisations is not always straightforward. Governments often have difficulties in coordinating activity across different levels of government for several reasons, including that departments and their ministers may want to pursue their own objectives rather than those of the prime minister (James 2004), power games and resistance from public servants (Bourgault 2007). Parties do not always follow proposed transformation, for example when UK Conservative Party leader William Hague tried to reform his organisation by focusing on issues of concern to ordinary voters such as health and education, but the political strategy was not adhered to. Internal party memos conceded a lack of internal implementation, ‘we have not established internally that our overriding priority in everything we do must be to send a positive message about the Conservative Party. We have been unable to concede and move on … We lost the 1997 election because we had become arrogant and out of touch’ (quoted by Sylvester 2001). The Hillary Clinton 2008 bid to be selected as Democratic Presidential nominee was also criticised for the implementation of the campaign’s strategy. Green (2008) notes how although the campaign conducted substantial planning ‘her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other.’ Thus lower-level and individual strategic plans need to be designed to ensure that activity at all levels within an organisation matches the overall plans, and as discussed in the next section, steps need to be taken to ensure implementation actually occurs.

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6a. Involve managers and individuals across the organisation in creating their own plans that align with the overall plans using tools such as priority setting, expectations setting, steering, coordination, targets and incentives This stage of strategic management is about involving managers from across the organisation at all levels in the creation and implementation of plans to ensure that their management is, in practice, related to the overall strategy, and thus ensures the original strategy is upheld. As political practitioners who were part of the UK New Labour government noted: ‘The most difficult task of government is to construct a long-term political strategy and a set of agreed goals and priorities, and to adhere to these in the face of the many problems and distractions faced by every administration.’ (quoted in James 2004, 399) Thus, after the organisation’s leaders have set the overall goals and designed core plans, political managers at lower levels should be involved in creating a strategic management plan to implement activities specific to their role to achieve the overall organisational goals. They should use tools such as priority setting, steering, coordination, corporate management, targets, incentives, processes, setting expectations of staff and assigning responsibilities widely, such as public service agreements (PSAs), campaign resource allocation plans, communication plans and capability frameworks. In campaigns ensuring campaign decisions are aligned with the overall strategy and plan is important. In the Obama 2008 campaign, campaign manager David Plouffe (2009) recalls how in the 2008 Obama campaign ‘we wanted to control all aspects of our campaign’ and make proactive, strategic decisions and thus ‘everything we did, including three tracks of advertising, radio, internet advertising, the field, was coordinated.’ They worked to ensure plans were implemented down to the lower levels, ‘Jon [Carson] and I spent a lot of time talking about this. We wanted those volunteers at the door on October 20 in Roanoke, Virginia, to be as crisp in what they were saying as our advertising and our [candidate] was. And the only way to have that done was maintaining control over everything.’ In government, examples of organisational-wide plans to help strategy adherence through priority setting include careful resource allocation in campaigns, PSAs, the Queen’s Speech, manifesto commitments, White Papers and other policy documents, Cabinet Committees, systems of ministerial appointment, civil service management and organisation and expenditure control (James 2004). In the UK Blair Government, PSAs were used to enable it to improve coordination and maintain the strategic direction of the Government. PSAs set priorities related to the Government’s overall aims and objectives for departments or policy sectors, and measured progress towards them, which created incentive effects for ministers and officials to stick to the strategy (James 2004). Departments had to prepare draft PSA documents as part of their spending plans; these were discussed with the Treasury which, with the Public Services and Public Expenditure Cabinet Committee, intervened where needed to negotiate consistency with the Government’s overall objectives. PSAs also allowed the Treasury to monitor the performance of departments against the targets and discuss progress with departmental ministers. There were weaknesses, however, such as the incentives for ministers were not very specific and relied more on ministers wanting to meet them due to social norms of behaviour; departments still set priorities outside the formal PSA discussions; and there were difficulties in measuring performance in a meaningful way. Overall, though, the PSA did improve the core executive’s capacity for steering and coordination.

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Core executives need to steer and align planning at different levels of government, directing, influencing and coordinating individuals and organisations to set and pursue priorities consistent with the overall strategy and goals (James 2004, 397). Documentary analysis indicated connection between different levels of government and where political management connects with public management. For example, The National Science Foundation Administration and Management Strategic Plan shows how a lower-level government agency created a strategic plan to implement activities specific to their role to achieve the overall organisational goals set by the higher-level President’s Management Agenda (PMA) (National Science Foundation 2002). The plan includes a section titled ‘Addressing the President’s Management Agenda’ and illustrates alignment with PMA initiatives in a chart, see Figure 2.1. The US Office of Personnel Management Government-wide Veterans Recruitment and Employment Strategic Plan: FY 2014 – FY 2017 was produced as part of President Obama’s 2009 Veterans Employment Initiative seeking to increase the number of American war veterans employed by the federal government (US Office of Personnel Management 2014, 1). This required managers at various levels of federal government to implement activities to increase the hiring of veterans in their departments. Each section of the plan had a strategic goal, a list of actions, and a list of desired outcomes and discussed how to align action with goals by for example ‘ensuring that the execution of VEI is smartly integrated into agency workforce and succession planning’ and ‘establishing active and collaborative relationships with other Government-wide efforts to hire Veterans, transitioning military service members, and spouses’ (US Office of Personnel Management 2014, 6). The plan also notes that all federal agencies have responsibility for implementing the plan and will be involved in achieving specific objectives (US Office of Personnel Management 2014, 16).

President's management agenda ¥ Strategic management of human capital ¥ Expanding electronic government ¥ Competitive sourcing ¥ Improved financial performance ¥ Budget and performance integration

NSF A&M strategic plan

Business processes

Human capital

NSF mission-critical business processes ¥ Merit review ¥ Award management and oversight ¥ Resource allocation ¥ Performance assessment and accountability ¥ Knowledge management

Technologies and tools

Illustration of alignment between higher level presidential management and lower level agency planning Source: National Science Foundation (2002: 3) FIGURE 2.1

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6b. Utilise effective internal communication, events and retreats to support coordination and integration of plans across levels and organisational units Internal communication and relationships are an important factor in coordination and integration of plans. Integrated corporate management in government can also be used to encourage greater communication and co-operation amongst ministers and senior civil servants and thus make the overall management of the government’s agenda more integrated (Bourgault 2007, 271). With this approach the interests of the government take priority over those of a department, and the interests of the department take priority over those of a departmental sub-units. Managers need to work collaboratively but still impose authority when needed. In the Canadian government, a senior personnel secretariat within the Privy Council Office, located at the heart of the machinery of government, lead efforts to influence the behaviour of a wide range of senior officials in departments who work under, and advise, ministers. They have strategic roles in administrative organisation, transmission and implementation of the governmental agenda in the civil service and its networks and all contribute to the management of the machinery of government. Formal and informal measures that help to encourage understanding and transmission of the governmental agenda and thus overall coordination include:      

Instigate high level coordination efforts at early stages especially when change is being pursued. An integrated organisational system through committees, working groups and management processes. Hold events such as group dinners, brainstorming retreats, social and leisure events. Ensure effective internal communication through weekly or bi-weekly meetings to report on the short, medium and long-term plan, Cabinet discussions and work through any differences between different units working on the same program. Deputy ministers – the general administrator of a government department – can act as a strategic reflection group to provide a management perspective that is sensitive to the political agenda, but non-partisan. Evaluate senior staff on how they co-operated with each other. Hold retreats for senior managers to familiarise themselves with the government’s agenda, draw up plans, and reflect on implementation progress over time.

Bourgault (2007, 268–72) argues that in Canada this helped government effectiveness in cases such as the 2005 environmental plan and operational tools such as the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre. Almost all of those interviewed said the corporate management approach helped to create a better understanding of problems, a more coordinated development of policies and a better interpersonal relations. In recent governments – Chrétien, Martin and Harper – the higher civil service mobilised itself around working plans focused on achievable priorities. It inserts actions into the overall plan to achieve the political leader’s vision and utilises existing collective expertise to help carry out the government’s agenda. Internal communication is also important in the area of strategic communication in government. Internal government reports in the UK concluded that civil servants need to ensure coordination amongst different government units and to create and implement a

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TABLE 2.5 An example of linking expectations of staff to government priorities from the ACT Gov-

ernment Shared Capability Framework Team members

Team leader/semiautonomous

Managers/experts/ specialists

Executives

Understand how your role fits into the community/stakeholder and government priorities/ directions

Develop and communicate goals and objectives that are in line with community/ stakeholder and government priorities and directions

Ensure that planned activities/programs align to government priorities

Empower staff to understand and align their efforts to government objectives/strategic direction and outcomes for the community/ stakeholder

Source: ACT Government (2015, 6).

coherent communications strategy (Schnee 2015). The Tony Blair New Labour government set up a Strategic Communications unit at 10 Downing Street to try to improve strategic communication. Schnee (2015, 160–1) argues that certain factors increase the chance of communications being strategic, i.e. researched, planned, objective-led and thus better able to survive events outside the communicator’s control, including positive, trusting personal relationships between politicians and communications staff and effective media management and internal organisation and structures that facilitate communication between politician and media advisor. Another aspect found in documentary analysis is where political management crosses with public management, to ensure that directions set by government politicians are integrated in plans for staff personnel and civil servants. For example, the US Office of Personnel Management & Office of Diversity and Inclusion (2011) noted how a presidential executive order directed departments and agencies to develop and implement a more comprehensive, integrated and strategic focus on diversity and inclusion as a key component of their human resources strategies. The office argued that government entities should respond with ‘a continuing effort to identify and adopt best practices to promote diversity and inclusion and to identify and remove any barriers to equal employment opportunity, consistent with merit system principles and applicable law’ (US Office of Personnel Management & Office of Diversity and Inclusion 2011: 3). Similarly, the ACT Government Shared Capability Framework in Australia which outlines expectations of ACT public servants emphasises that staff at all levels of government have a role in helping the government achieve its overall goals and strategic priorities (ACT Government 2015, 5). Each capability domain is placed in a table with capability streams and organisational levels and assessed against capabilities to determine the capability descriptor – i.e. the strategy each level of the ACT government should use to meet that capability (or goal). For example, under the capability of service alignment, linkages are made back to government priorities, see Table 2.5. The framework also involves all levels of employees – team members, team leaders, managers, and executives – rather than focusing only on managers.

Political planning 7: implement plans Strategic management plans need to be implemented using specific actions, relationship building and effective communication to mobilise supportive power and resources.

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Implementation in politics is not easy. As one political staffer noted, ‘I found that actually setting up those planning days with my team going “ok, blue sky – ok, where do we want to get to?” – is really useful but still it’s so easy to get distracted from that. So so easy’ (Campbell 2019). The Chief of Staff to the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the PMO has to invest time in overseeing political staffers who in turn help to manage ministers, otherwise: ‘you can lose sight of it quite easily … to a certain extent though they go away and they work with their Ministers in their offices, and their seconded officials, on their bills, policies, and cabinet papers or whatever … Sometimes, you get all sorts of fiefdoms and empires being set up around the building and they become laws unto themselves.’ (Munro 2019)

7a. Create an implementation plan with specific actions and keep to the key strategy when managing campaigns, parties, policy and legislation As Obama’s campaign strategist David Plouffe (2010) commented: ‘The most fundamental part of organizational success is creating a strategy and then running every decision through the prism of that plan … If you stick with a strategy, people might not always agree, but at least they will respect it … One strategy, even if flawed, is better than multiple strategies.’ Similarly, the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (2014, 43) argues that implementation planning is needed to provide a ‘map of how an initiative will be implemented, addressing matters such as timeframe, dependencies with other policies or activities, program logic, phases of implementation, roles and responsibilities, resourcing, and compliance with legal and policy requirements’ and ‘provide sufficient detail to support and inform successful implementation’ such as manageable steps and milestones to ensure action aligns closely to policy objectives. Prime ministers’ offices also work to keep politicians on track: ‘it is all about keeping Ministers focused on priorities, acting as an eyes and ears for their Minster so they see trouble coming. It’s about working with officials, departmental officials, to make sure there is good advice coming through in a timely manner for their Minister. Keeping an eye on the quality of cabinet papers, making sure they are saying what they should be saying and affecting the policy.’ (Munro 2019)

7b. Mobilise support through relationship-building and communication with key players, using figureheads, and accessing internal and external sources of power Implementation requires identifying and mobilising internal and external sources of support for the strategy and plan, such as from politicians, the public, media, interest groups, lobbyists, other branches of government, different levels of government, public servants and volunteers and by using figureheads to lead implementation as well as internal communication and relationship-building.

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Strategic policy management in government Once elected, political leaders need to be politically strategic, not just policy-focused to get their proposed policies delivered, but in different ways including working with a much larger executive and the legislature. Altschuler (2005) details how US presidents engage in strategic policy management using polls to identify segments to target, staying on message, using communication tools, and labelling Congress or the media as ‘the opposition’, which can then be criticised for blocking popular presidential proposals. President Ronald Regan built external public support through market-research-driven communication that focused on the economic program such as large tax cuts, increased defence spending, and reduced social programs because polling suggested economic issues was the key to holding the traditional republican coalition together. Communication tools were used such as trips, State of the Union speeches and symbolic appeals. When support for cuts declined given the economic downturns, the president launched a new initiative, New Federalism, where the federal government took over Medicaid and left the states in charge of welfare and food stamps. Policy proposals were used strategically for political benefits. In contrast, President Bill Clinton’s administration was unable to keep the focus on the election priorities of economy and health care. Staff failed to adapt to the need to compromise with congressional Republicans in government, policy design progress was slow, and other side issues – such as his compromises on election promises to get rid of the military ban on homosexuals which he failed to deliver 100% on – moved the agenda away from his key issues. Once the proposed health care legislation was finalised, the complex 1,300-page Bill was hard to communicate to build public support and faced attack from interest groups. The administration became more strategic after approval ratings dropped mid first term, and adopted a new position of mixing mainstream traditional Republican and Democratic positions, and market tested new proposals on key issues such as crime, underage smoking, TV violence and school discipline before launching them. Clinton campaign advisor Stan Greenberg said ‘our problem is not being political enough, and focusing on doing the right thing in public policy’ (quoted in Altschuler 2005, 211). Instead, governments need to think strategically about policy management straight after being elected. This also includes building good relationships between the White House and Congress early on through connecting potential and existing senior White House staff with whips and committee chairs in Congress (Kumar et al 2000, 768). Parliamentary processes also need managing to turn policy into government legislation because even when governments have majorities they cannot simply formulate policies and put them on the statute book (Page 2003). Analysis of the passing of four UK parliamentary Bills in 2002 – Employment, Adoption and Children, Proceeds of Crime, and Land – found that the process is far from straightforward and there are many obstacles and unpredictable forces and the original policy designs often need to be adjusted. Politicians and government staff (neutral civil servants, both policy and legal specialists) are involved in this process of turning policy into legislation, and impetus can come from either group. The Crime and Land Bills were significantly influenced by the policy activism of civil servants who served on the eventual Bill teams in terms of placing items on the political agenda and making sure that the government committed itself to

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legislation. The strength of the government’s commitment to policies is influential: a separate Department for Work and Pensions Bill originally included in the Queen’s speech was later abandoned. The provisions were integrated into an Employment Bill instead, which covered multiple policies – called a Christmas Tree Bill because different actors try to hang their own policy tinsel on it. Whereas the Adoption Bill arose more closely from a prime-ministerial initiative, because Tony Blair had a personal commitment to reform adoption law because of his own father’s adoption but also because of public attitudes after a case of intercountry adoption gained high visibility in the media and led the Prime Minister to bring the Adoption Bill legislation forward. Momentum may or may not build up during the policy process at the right time. The Land Bill made progress because it fitted a key government priority, modernisation, due to including proposals to put the land registration process online. Legislation design needs to relate back to the strategic objectives of the policy but will be subject to internal debate and influence from the opposition in select committees and amendment processes in Parliament, as well as public opinion. Internal processes in themselves need managing: ‘the cumulative volume of paperwork makes its management a substantial part of the parliamentary work of the bill team’ (Page 2003, 665). But the challenge is not just workload: strategic decisions have to be made as to which amendments to propose are accepted depending on political not just policy factors, including outside lobbying, public opinion and other politicians.

Using figureheads to drive implementation The Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s (2014, i) best practice guide to the implementation of policies talks about how ‘policies and programs, when implemented, require active management to be successful’ and one leader is needed to drive a policy’s implementation by ‘obtaining buy-in by the executive and key players, and giving visibility to the strength of their support’ and giving progress reports to ministers (p. 23). Similarly, Chief Human Capitol Officers (CHCOs) were used to drive implementation in US Federal Agencies: under President George W Bush’s Management Agenda, the 2002 Homeland Security Act included a Chief Human Capital Officer Act which created a CHCO position in each of the cabinet-level departments and major agencies to provide the agency head strategic policy and planning advice and assistance (Crumpacker and Crumpacker 2004). The US Office of Personnel Management designed a set of metric-based systems to assess agency human capital management. The creation of CHCOs put chief human capitol officers at the same level as chief financial or information officers, creating a central point for information sharing, policy planning and coordination.

7c. Adapt to political context and unexpected events such as economic recessions, political scandals, changing political leadership, campaign crises and natural disasters Unexpected events will always happen in politics, and thus political managers need to be prepared for this and adapt to change.

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Despite the planning and predictive nature of campaign plans, they also need to be flexible because unexpected events will occur. For example, in the 2017 New Zealand election, one of the Green Party leaders and the Labour Party leader resigned two months before the election. Green Party staff reported that they had engaged in more effective planning with greater research, strategizing, and communications design completed earlier than normal, but then had to change their strategy once they lost one of their co-leaders. Labour Party staff also recalled that ‘from a pure planning perspective it was very difficult’ and they had to abandon their pre-designed grant grid plan and instead work ‘a day ahead of the time’ (Lees-Marshment 2018, 128). Other parties then had to adjust their positioning in relation to the new Labour leader: an advisor to the National Party noted that despite politicians saying the potential election of Jacinda Ardern as Labour leader worried them no one had planned what to do if it happened. Burton and Shea’s (2010, 30) research on multiple campaigns also concluded how unexpected external changes – such as changes in the world economy or failures to get expected levels of volunteers, and other candidates’ campaigns – impact on plans. In 1992, advisors beginning their planning for George H W Bush’s re-election effort in 1991 assumed the economy would pick up and there would be no real opponent in the GOP primaries and thus the president did not need to devote too much time to campaigning. But the economy did not pick up, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan ran well in the New Hampshire primary and independent candidate Ross Perot jumped into the race, then jumped out, then jumped back in again, rendering the campaign plan ineffective. We can see other examples from recent history. In 2008, the stock market crash and global financial crisis affected the 2008 US presidential election and the New Zealand election, with politicians forced to change their plans and policies mid-campaign. Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid did not foresee the rise of Barack Obama, nor did her second bid to be presidential nominee in 2016 expect the core Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders to carry on fighting as long, or to end up fighting against Donald Trump, who was the most outsider candidate for the Republican nomination. Effective planning should enable the strategy to be adapted rather than completely changed, updating it whilst retaining the core focus. The 1996 Clinton campaign pulled ads within a week after Dole pulled his TV ads out of Illinois and Iowa after conceding he had lost those states (Shaw 1999, 910). Practitioners advise campaign managers to ‘prepare for the unexpected’ and train staff to be ‘nimble in a campaign to pivot when the inevitable curve ball happens’ – in 2017, New Zealand Labour had prepared for change and coped with their change of leader reasonably well (LeesMarshment 2018, 128). Parties do not always adapt effectively, however. If elections are announced unexpectedly this makes it hard for parties to plan effectively: when the 2005 German federal election was called unexpectedly early by SPD leader Franz Muntefering in response to the party’s disastrous defeat in Germany’s largest state, no party was prepared for campaign mode (Schmitt-Beck and Faas 2006). Campaign organisation had to be reactive, as parties had to assemble teams and create a plan at short notice, without the usual baseline market research survey to inform strategy, or time to engage in on the ground operational planning for activities such as renting advertising space and locations for events. They were therefore

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significantly restricted in terms of time, but also funds, and the eventual election led to the Grand Coalition led by Angela Merkel.

7d. Work across different organisational units Strategy implementation also involves connecting and working across different levels of organisation in parties and government, and can take place over several years. The US President Executive Office’s (2011) creation of a strategic implementation plan for empowering local partners to prevent violent extremism in the US discussed the need to work with and involve organisations and groups at a very wide range of levels of government, and also communities, in order to achieve the overall strategic objectives. While implementation involved the usual expected organisations related to national security or law enforcement such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it also included agencies such as the US Department of Education and the US Department of Health and Human Services with expertise in engaging communities and delivering services because one of the ways to achieve the overall goals is to promote civic engagement and provide social support (US President Executive Office 2011, 4). Other activities included after-school programs, community-based organisations that provide assistance to new immigrants, and violence prevention programs. The plan created leads and partners with responsibility for ‘coordinating, integrating, and synchronizing activities’ to achieve the overall goal of the National Strategy (US President Executive Office 2011, 5). As the report states: ‘A complex issue like violent extremist radicalization and recruitment requires a nuanced path to guide a whole-of-government approach. The SIP outlines this path and facilitates a division of labor by assigning responsibilities between Federal Government departments, agencies, and components focused on law enforcement and national security and those whose efforts support, but do not directly lie within, these areas.’ (US President Executive Office 2011, 21) The implementation of government strategies can involve a wide range and different levels of organisation both in and outside government, and also relates to the subject of Chapter 3, political organising.

Summary and a theory of political planning In summary, political planning is the first key step in political management. Understanding the mission, setting the vision are essential first steps before setting overall organisational goals and strategy. To ensure plans are not just pieces of paper or verbal agreements, processes are also needed to create different versions of the plans at all levels and units of the organisation, as well as good internal communication and relationship building, and external communication to maintain public support. This is needed for campaigns, parties, campaigns and governments, including managing the implementation of policies by parties once they win campaigns and get elected to government. Table 2.6 summarises the key principles of political planning.

TABLE 2.6 A theory of political planning

POLITICAL PLANNING 1: UNDERSTAND THE MISSION Create, understand or update the organisation’s mission statement to explain its overall purpose 1a. Create or understand the organisational mission statements which are long term and broad-ranging and contain key values to help staff and volunteers connect to the organisation’s purpose 1b. High level political practitioners such as presidents/prime ministers, party leaders, candidates, campaign managers and heads of government departments set the overall purpose 1c. Create the first mission statements for new government, organisation, campaign, or event; more permanent organisations may review and update theirs POLITICAL PLANNING 2: SET THE VISION Create or update and communicate a vision statement with specific short-term plans and actions to fulfil the mission 2a. Top figures in the organisation should create or update vision statements that express what they want to achieve in the short term to fulfil the mission, and how 2b. Communicate the vision in speeches, documents, announcements and reports POLITICAL PLANNING 3: SET ORGANISATIONAL GOALS Set action-oriented and achievable organisational goals that help direct efforts on key priorities to accomplish the vision 3a. Set overall organisational goals that will focus direction on key priorities and help to accomplish the vision 3b. Make goals challenging yet achievable, measurable, results-oriented, with completion dates 3c. Set goals at and across different organisational levels 3d. Set goals for different time periods, projects and events 3e. To be more directive, use specific, prioritised goals; to allow more flexibility, make them ambiguous so there is freedom in how to interpret and implement them 3f. Build motivation and gather resources to support achievement of goals POLITICAL PLANNING 4: CREATE ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY Create an overall organisational strategy to achieve those goals, determined by current and prospective circumstances 4a. Set aside the time and resources to create an overall organisational strategy to achieve the set goals 4b. Invest resources into environmental scanning and strategic foresight to identify and consider current and future organisational circumstances that might impact on the strategy 4c. Ensure the strategy will create more political benefits than costs 4d. Build in flexibility to allow the organisation to take advantage of opportunities and take action to avoid a crisis 4e. Resolve conflicting goals and strategies from different parts of the organisation POLITICAL PLANNING 5: DEVELOP STRATEGIC ORGANISATIONAL PLANS Develop overall strategic organisational plans to achieve the strategy 5a. Develop strategic organisational plans at different levels of the organisation to implement the overall strategy 5b. Use standing plans to cover repeated activities or situations including policies, rules and procedures 5c. Develop action and operating plans to define strategies for the short term or one legislative/ government term 5d. Create single-use plans for a one-off project or event POLITICAL PLANNING 6: CONSTRUCT LOWER LEVEL PLANS Design lower-level and individual strategic plans to match overall plans 6a. Involve managers and individuals across the organisation in creating their own plans that align with the overall plans using tools such as priority setting, expectations setting, steering, coordination, targets and incentives 6b. Utilise effective internal communication, events and retreats to support coordination and integration of plans across levels and organisational units (Continued)

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Table 2.6 (Cont.) POLITICAL PLANNING 7: IMPLEMENT PLANS Implement strategic management plans using specific actions, relationship building and effective communication to mobilise supportive power and resources 7a. Create an implementation plan with specific actions and keep to the key strategy when managing campaigns, parties, policy and legislation 7b. Mobilise support through relationship-building and communication with key players, using figureheads and accessing internal and external sources of power 7c. Adapt to political context and unexpected events such as economic recessions, political scandals, changing political leadership, campaign crises and natural disasters 7d. Work across different organisational units

References Primary sources Practitioner interviews Baker-Jones, M (2019) Former Ministerial Advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment in Auckland, NZ. 18 November. Burke, T (2019) Australian Labor and Party Manager of Opposition Business, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Campbell, A (2019) Former political staffer in the Australian Prime Minister’s Office under Malcolm Turnbull, currently Assistant Secretary, Priorities and Delivery Unit, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Erickson, P (2019) National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at Labor headquarters, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Gartrell, T (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Greiner, N (2019) Australian Liberal Party Federal President, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 29 October. Lloyd, R (2019) Assistant Secretary, Taxation, Financial Sector and Employment Branch Economic Division, Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at PM&C, Canberra, Australia. 28 October. Munro, M (2019) Former Chief of Staff to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 12 November.

Government documents ACT Government (2015) ACT Public Service Shared Capability Framework. October. ACT, Australia. Report retrieved from http://www.cmd.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/805536/SharedCapability-Framework.pdf. (2017 updated version retrieved from https://www.cmtedd.act.gov. au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/1350620/Shared-Capability-Framework.pdf.) Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (2014) Successful Implementation of Policy Initiatives: Better Practice Guide. Barton, ACT, Australia: Government of Australia. Report retrieved from https:// www.anao.gov.au/sites/g/files/net616/f/2014_ANAO%20-%20BPG%20Policy%20Implementation.pdf. Australian Electoral Commission (2016) Scrutineers Handbook 2016: Federal election, By-elections, Referendums. Australia. Report retrieved from http://www.aec.gov.au/elections/candidates/files/scruti neers-handbook.pdf.

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National Science Foundation (2002) The National Science Foundation, Administration and Management Strategic Plan, Executive Summary. Report retrieved from https://www.nsf.gov/od/am/execsummary.doc. New Zealand Electoral Commission (2013) Voter Participation Strategy. 15 July. New Zealand. Report retrieved from http://www.elections.org.nz/sites/default/files/plain-page/attachments/electoral_ commission_2014_participation_strategy.pdf. New Zealand National Party (2013) Constitution and Rules of the New Zealand National Party. September. New Zealand. Report retrieved from https://www.elections.org.nz/sites/default/files/National_pa rty_rules_0.pdf. UK Cabinet Office (2015) Ministerial Code. October. London, UK: Her Majesty’s Government. Report retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 468255/Final_draft_ministerial_code_No_AMENDS_14_Oct.pdf. UK House of Commons (2015) Members’ Handbook. May. UK. Report retrieved from https://www.pa rliament.uk/documents/commons-governance-office/2015-election/members-handbook.pdf. US Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (2008) House Ethics Manual. 110th Congress, 2d Session. Washington, DC, USA. Report retrieved from https://ethics.house.gov/sites/ethics.house.gov/ files/documents/2008_House_Ethics_Manual.pdf. US Department of State (2016) Bureau of the Comptroller and Global Financial Services FY 2016 Department of State Agency Financial Report. 15 November. Report retrieved from https://www.state.gov/s/d/ rm/rls/perfrpt/2016/html/265078.htm. US Office of Personnel Management (2014) Government-wide Veterans Recruitment and Employment Strategy Plan FY2014-FY2017. April. Washington, DC, USA. Report retrieved from https://www. fedshirevets.gov/pdf/Vets_Initiative_Strategic_Plan_2014.pdf US Office of Personnel Management & Office of Diversity and Inclusion (2011) Government-Wide Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan 2011. USA. Report retrieved from http://energy.gov/sites/prod/ files/OPM%20Government-wide%20Diversity%20and%20Inclusion%20Strategic%20Plan%202011. pdf. US President Executive Office (2011) Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States. December. USA. Report retrieved from https://obamawhite house.archives.gov/sites/default/files/sip-final.pdf. US Social Security Administration (2016) Annual Performance Report 2015–2017. USA: Social Security Administration. Report retrieved from https://www.ssa.gov/agency/performance/2016/FINAL_ 2015_2017_APR_508_compliant.pdf.

Party documents Canadian Liberal Party (2012) ‘Mission, vision and values.’ Retrieved from https://www.liberal.ca/wp -content/uploads/2012/12/LPC-mission.vision.values_web.pdf accessed 29 May 2018. IDEA (2013) Strategic Planning for Political Parties: A Practical Tool (extract). International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Retrieved from https://www.idea.int/sites/default/files/publica tions/strategic-planning-for-political-parties.pdf. Iowa Democratic Party (2015) Iowa Delegate Selection Plan for the 2016 Democratic National Convention. 26 April. IA, USA. Report retrieved from http://iowademocrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ 2016-Delegate-Selection-Plan.pdf. Iowa Democratic Party (2016) 2016 County Convention Guide. IA, USA. Report retrieved from http://iowa democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/2016-County-Convention-Guide-website-version.pdf. Organizing for America (2009) How to run your own Canvass. Washington, DC, USA. Report retrieved from https://my.barackobama.com/page/-/pdf/CanvassGuideFINAL.pdf. UK Conservative Party (2009) Constitution of the Conservative Party. April. Westminster, UK. Report retrieved from https://www.politicalpartydb.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/UK_CON SERVATIVE_PARTY_CONSTITUTION_2009.pdf.

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US Democratic National Committee (2009) The Charter & Bylaws of the Democratic Party of the United States. 11 September. USA. Report retrieved from http://www.demrulz.org/wp-content/files/ DNC_Charter__Bylaws_9.11.2009.pdf. US Democratic National Committee (2015) Democratic Victory Task Force Final Report and Action Plan. Washington, DC, USA: Democratic National Committee. Report retrieved from https://uploads. democrats.org/Downloads/DVTF_FinalReport.pdf. US Democratic National Committee (n.d.) National Voter Expansion Project. USA. Report retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/fileid/2391/1228. US Democratic Party (2016) 2016 Democratic Party Platform. 21 July. Orlando, FL, USA: US Democratic Party Platform Committee. Report retrieved from https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/ uploads/2016/07/Democratic-Party-Platform-7.21.16-no-lines.pdf. US Republican Party (2012) ‘Our GOP.’ Vision statement retrieved from https://gop.com/our-gop/ accessed 29 May 2018. Vote for Bernie (2016) Wisconsin Voter Guide. WI, USA. Report retrieved from http://voteforbernie. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/V4BWISCONSINGUIDE.pdf.

Politician comments Cameron, D (2010) ‘Conservative Prime Minister, “Big society” speech.’ 19 July. Liverpool, UK. Retrieved from http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/speeches-and-transcripts/2010/07/big-socie ty-speech-53572 archived to http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130102234209/http:// www.number10.gov.uk/news/big-society-speech/. Clinton, H (2015) ‘Presidential Campaign Announcement 2016.’ 12 April. Retrieved from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=N708P-A45D0. Costello, P (2016) Speech at a forum for business leaders organised by the Menzies Research Centre, quoted in P Hudson and S Buckingham-Jones, ‘Peter Costello’s blast: Liberal Party lacks clear vision.’ 10 September. The Australian. Article retrieved from https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/peter-costellos-bla st-liberal-party-lacks-clear-vision/news-story/3e8974f875d3f85873eb2fb8d73a5c5d. Gillard, J (2014) My Story. Knopf. North Sydney Kennedy, J (1960) ‘Acceptance Speech for the New York Liberal Party’s nomination.’ 14 September. Speech retrieved from https://truthmonklibrary.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/kennedy_s-accepta nce-liberal-1960v01.pdf. May, T (2016) ‘First speech as Prime Minister.’ 13 July. Speech retrieved from https://www.washing tonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/13/full-transcript-may-promises-bold-new-positive-r ole-for-britain-after-brexit/. For video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDyZ8trge2E. Mulcair, T (2015) Building the Country of our Dreams. Canada: New Democratic Party. Report retrieved from http://xfer.ndp.ca/2015/2015-Full-Platform-EN.pdf. Power, S (2011) ‘Speech: Simon Power – Valedictory statement.’ 5 October.http://www.voxy.co.nz/ politics/speech-simon-power-valedictory-statement/5/103401. Roxon, N (2013) ‘“Such a Bastard”: Nicola Roxon Condemns Rudd in Button Memorial Lecture.’ Australian Politics. Transcript of lecture retrieved from http://australianpolitics.com/2013/10/16/ roxon-john-button-memorial-lecture.html. Trudeau, J (2015) ‘Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on the Speech from the Throne.’ 4 December. Ottawa, Ontario. Retrieved from https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2015/12/04/sta tement-prime-minister-canada-speech-throne. Trump, D (2015) ‘Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech.’ Retrieved from http://time. com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/. Turnbull, M (2015) ‘Speech on becoming Liberal Party leader’, and ‘Prime Minister, Vote on the Liberal Party Leadership.’15 September. Retrieved from http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/m edia/transcript-vote-on-the-liberal-party-leadership. For video, see https://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=W5q8isyVjNs.

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Practitioner comments Ballou-Aares, D (2016) ‘Data, Design, and Factivists: The Unexpected Formula for Global Progress?’ 18 April. Commentary by a Senior Advisor for Development to the US Secretary of State on the US Department of State Official Blog retrieved from https://blogs.state.gov/stories/2016/04/18/data -design-and-factivists-unexpected-formula-global-progress. Cummings, D (2014) ‘The Hollow Men: What’s wrong with Westminster and Whitehall, and what to do about it.’ November. Address to the IPPR retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= GNaWPV5l4j4. Goeas, E (2003) GOP Strategist comments quoted in R A Faucheux, Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy, and Tactics. New York, NY: M Evans, p. 91. Manafort, P (2016) ‘Trump’s Campaign Manager Describes Goals for RNC.’ 18 July. ABC News. Video retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/donald-trumps-campaign-manager-de scribes-goals-republican-national-40664939. McNicol, I (2016) UK Labour Party General Secretary quoted in A Sparrow, ‘Labour conference: Iain McNicol issues coded backing to Corbyn’s critics – as it happened.’ 29 September. The Guardian. Article retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2016/sep/25/labour-confer ence-jeremy-corbyn-liverpool-formally-opens-after-jeremy-corbyn-re-elected-leader?page=with: block-57e7b8c9e4b0f55a9f4030db#block-57e7b8c9e4b0f55a9f4030db. Mook, R (2016) Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager quoted in ‘POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush interviews Robby Mook.’ Podcast retrieved from http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-politi cos-glenn-thrush-interviews-robby-mook-226346#ixzz4JwKaN2Hf accessed 1 September 2016. Plouffe, D (2009) Quoted in K Hall Jamieson, Electing the President, 2008: The Insiders’ View. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 37–38. Plouffe, D (2010) ‘Keynote speech at the IMD Orchestrating Winning Performance program.’ Quoted in ‘Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe explains the details of a winning organizational culture in OWP keynote.’ 23 June. Article retrieved from http://www.imd.org/news/Obama-Campaign-Manager-DavidPlouffe-explains-the-nuts-and-bolts-of-a-winning-organizational-culture-in-OWP-keynote.cfm. Plouffe, D (2016) Quoted in ‘A Conversation with David Plouffe.’ 15 May. Article retrieved from http s://gspp.berkeley.edu/news/news-center/a-conversation-with-david-plouffe-1. Whitlam, G (1973) ‘Labor Party policy speech.’ 13 November. Blacktown Civic Centre. Speech accessed from G Freudenberg (1977) A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in Politics. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Secondary sources Academic literature Altschuler, B E (2005) ‘Learning the art of policy management.’ White House Studies 5(2): 195–214. Bachl, M and F Brettschneider (2011) ‘The German National Election Campaign and the Mass Media.’ German Politics 20(1): 51–74. Benze, J G (1987) Presidential Power and Management Techniques. New York: Greenwood Press. Boston, J (2011) ‘Government formation in New Zealand under MMP: Theory and practice.’ Political Science 63(1): 79–105. Boston, J and D Bullock (2012) ‘Multi-party governance: Managing the unity-distinctiveness dilemma in executive coalitions.’ Party Politics 18(3): 349–368. Bourgault, J (2007) ‘Corporate management at top level of governments: the Canadian case.’ International Review of Administrative Sciences 73(2): 257–274. Bourgault, J (2011) ‘Minority government and senior government officials: the case of the Canadian federal government.’ Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 49(4): 510–527.

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Burton, M J and D M Shea (2010) Campaign craft; the strategies, tactics, and art of political campaign management. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. Charnock, E J, et al (2009) ‘Presidential Travel from Eisenhower to George W. Bush: An “Electoral College” Strategy.’ Political Science Quarterly 124(2): 323–339. Chun, Y H and H G Rainey (2005) ‘Goal ambiguity and organizational performance in US federal agencies.’ Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 15(4): 529–558. Crumpacker, M and J M Crumpacker (2004) ‘Elevating, Integrating, and Institutionalizing Strategic Human Capital Management in Federal Agencies through the Chief Human Capital Officer.’ Review of Public Personnel Administration 24(3): 234–255. Damore, D F and T G Hansford (1999) ‘The allocation of party controlled campaign resources in the House of Representatives, 1989–1996.’ Political Research Quarterly 52(2): 371–385. Doherty, B J (2010) ‘Polls and elections: hail to the fundraiser in chief: the evolution of presidential fundraising travel, 1977–2004.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 40(1): 159–170. Eichbaum, C and R Shaw (2010) ‘New Zealand.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 114–150. Evans, S (2008) ‘Consigning its Past to History? David Cameron and the Conservative Party.’ Parliamentary Affairs 61(2): 291–314. Evans, S (2014) ‘Organizing for British national strategy.’ International Affairs 90(3): 509–524. Fawcett, P and G Oonagh (2010) ‘The United Kingdom.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 24–63. Friedberg, A L (2007) ‘Strengthening U.S. Strategic Planning.’ Washington Quarterly 31(1): 47–60. Giebler, H and B Wessels (2013) ‘Campaign Foci in European Parliamentary Elections: Determinants and Consequences.’ Journal of Political Marketing 12(1): 53–76. Grimsley, M, A Meehan and A Tan (2007) ‘Evaluative design of e-government projects: A community development perspective.’ Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy 1(2): 174–193. Heymann, P B (1988) The Politics of Public Management. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hochschild, T R and M Wallace (2011) ‘Three’s a crowd? The Nader vote in the 2000 presidential election in US metropolitan areas.’ Social Science Journal 48(4): 575–588. Ingraham, P W (1988) ‘Transition and Policy Change in Washington.’ Public Productivity Review 12(1): 61–72. James, O (2004) ‘The UK Core Executive’s Use of Public Service Agreements as a Tool of Governance.’ Public Administration 82(2): 397–419. Jennings, W (2013) ‘Governing the Games: High Politics, Risk and Mega-events.’ Political Studies Review 11(1): 2–14. Johnson, C (2009) ‘The 2008-2009 Presidential Transition: Preparing Federal Agencies.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 39(4): 819–858. Kelman, S and J Myers (2011) ‘Successfully Achieving Ambitious Goals in Government: An Empirical Analysis.’ The American Review of Public Administration 41(3): 235–262. Kennedy, F, P Lyons and P Fitzgerald (2005) ‘The members of Labour: Backgrounds, political views and attitudes towards coalition government and the party system.’ Irish Political Studies 20(2): 171–186. Kumar, M J (2001) ‘The Office of Communications.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31(4): 609–634. Kumar, M J, G CEdwardsIII, J P Pfiffner, T Sullivan (2000) ‘The contemporary presidency: meeting the freight train head on: planning for the transition to power.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 30(4): 754–769. Lee, J W, H G Rainey and Y H Chun (2009) ‘Of Politics and Purpose: Political Salience and Goal Ambiguity of US Federal Agencies.’ Public Administration 87(3): 457–484. Lees-Marshment, J (2008) Political Marketing and British Political Parties. 2nd revised edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lees-Marshment, J (2018) Political marketing and management in the 2017 New Zealand election. Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Leigh, A (2003) ‘Thinking Ahead: Strategic Foresight and Government.’ Australian Journal of Public Administration 62(2): 3–10. Maley, M (2010) ‘Australia.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 94–113. Marland, A (2016) Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control. Vancouver: UBC Press. Miller, B and W C Muller (2010) ‘Managing Grand Coalitions: Germany 2005–09.’ German Politics 19 (3–4): 332–352. Page, E C (2003) ‘The civil servant as legislator: law making in British administration.’ Public Administration 81(4): 651–679. Pfiffner, J P (2013) ‘The Paradox of President Reagan’s Leadership.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 43(1): 81–100. Pliatzky, L (1997) ‘The Treasury’s mission under Gordon Brown.’ Political Quarterly 68(1): 91–94. Rockman, B A (1993) ‘Tightening the Reins: The Federal Executive and the Management Philosophy of the Reagan Presidency.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 23(1): 103–114. Rozell, M J (1995) ‘Presidential Image-Makers on the Limits of Spin Control.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 25(1): 67–90. Schmidt, J M (2015) ‘Policy, planning, intelligence and foresight in government organizations.’ Foresight 17(5): 489–511. Schmitt-Beck, R and T Faas (2006) ‘The campaign and its dynamics at the 2005 German general election.’ German Politics 15(4): 393–419. Schnee, C (2015) Political Reputation Management: The Strategy Myth. Abingdon: Routledge. Shaw, D R (1999) ‘The Methods behind the Madness: Presidential Electoral College Strategies, 1988–1996.’ Journal of Politics 61(4): 893–913. Stace, D and R Norman (1997) ‘Re-invented government: the New Zealand experience.’ Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 35(1): 21–36. Wildavsky, A (1987) ‘President Reagan as Political Strategist.’ Society 24(4): 56–62. Winetrobe, B K (2003) ‘Political but not partisan: parliaments and their members.’ Journal of Legislative Studies 9(1): 1–13.

Media Green, J (2008) ‘The Front-Runner’s Fall.’ September. The Atlantic. Article retrieved from http://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/09/the-front-runner-s-fall/306944/. Sylvester, R (2001) ‘Why Hague left kitchen table.’ 23 April. The Telegraph. Article retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1317047/Why-Hague-left-kitchen-table.html.

3 POLITICAL ORGANISING Power, structure and culture in government, parties and campaigns

Introduction to political organising in government, parties and campaigns Political organising is about how to organise and connect people and power. It includes how campaigns, parties and government structure their work, communicate internally and allocate power. It is also concerned with when the organisation or its culture needs to change, and how best to support that change and innovation. How organisations are designed and the culture within them affects how well different units work with each other and how responsive they are to change, and decision making. As President Dwight D Eisenhower declared: ‘Organization cannot of course make a successful leader out of a dunce, any more than it should make a decision for its chief. But it is effective in minimizing the chances of failure and in insuring that the right hand does, indeed, know what the left hand is doing.’ (Pfiffner 2011, 246) More profoundly, political organising includes creating and utilising power. In politics, power is constrained, overlapping, dispersed and variable: each organisational entity competes for power in terms of formally allocated authority but also the informal potential to exercise influence. Organisations also impact on each other’s authority as they seek to assert control, such as Congress on the president, and the president on government departments. As Benze (1987, 4) argues, ‘all modern presidents have considered management a necessity’ because formal authority is not enough to assume influence and ensure implementation of policies they were elected on. This ultimately impacts on party functioning, campaign effectiveness and final policy outputs from government. There are multiple parts to political organising, see Table 3.1.

Political organising 1: create and utilise power Power, authority and control within political and government organisations are diverse, variable, formal and informal and ambiguous. Political managers can also grow power, authority and control in less obvious ways such as through centralisation, increasing

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TABLE 3.1 Key areas of political organising

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Create and utilise power Organise and connect people Identify need for improvement and development Enact and manage improvements Facilitate effective internal communication

political staff numbers, creating new communication processes or units, and choose how to distribute power within organisations.

1a. Understand that political power is dispersed, diverse, constrained and contested Power is dispersed and comes from diverse sources including legislation, rules, policies and processes. Moreover, because different players and groups and institutions compete for authority and influence – including top political offices such as the White House or central party headquarters, the legislature (Parliaments and Congress), political staff, political appointees/senior MPs, bureaucrats/public servants and external agencies – who has what power is not always set in stone. There are also many sources of constraint on power, including duties, line management and reporting hierarchies, candidate and leadership selection, committee structure, decision making, delegation, prescribed responsibilities, audits and accountability and resource allocation. Political managers need to understand constraints on power, authority and control before then seeking to utilise and create power to achieve organisational goals.

Power to determine who becomes party leader in government and opposition On the one hand, the leader of a political party has significant power allocated to them, but on the other hand such power is circumscribed in various ways, not least that their position as leader can be challenged by other politicians. The rules surrounding the election of party leaders ultimately affects who has most control in a political party organisation, both when parties are in government and the leader is a sitting Prime Minister, and when the party is in opposition. Such is the complexity of political organising that the impact of rules in practice is not always as expected in design. For example, allocating power to members actually helps to keep elected party leaders in power and thus devolving power to lower levels increases the power of the person at the very top. Factors other than rules affect whether leadership challenges occur, such as the leader’s standing in opinion polls, their own party, the alignment of party factions, prospective electoral defeat, the relative strength of the opposition, the popularity of alternative leaders, the potential impact on the perception of a party’s unity and governing capacity and cultural norms (Bennister and Heppell 2016). But organisational factors, including procedures and rules around challenges to sitting leaders, and degree of involvement of the membership in leadership selection, can facilitate or restrict the influence of horizontal and lower levels of the organisation. For example, despite three substantive plots to challenge UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he remained in power because in the

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UK Labour Party the Electoral College creates a protective shield for elites, especially when party leaders are in power because rules require the approval of party conference to initiate a leadership contest and members are involved in the final selection. In contrast, there have been repeated successful challenges to Australian party leaders both in the Labor and Liberal Governments. The Australian Labor Party ousted Rudd and did the same to his successful challenger Julia Gillard three years later because the rules allocate collective power to party elites, the caucus, and do not require involvement of the membership in leadership selection. Similarly, leadership selection rules also impact on a sitting prime minister’s power over their party (Weller 2012). In Australia, prime ministers in Australia have very constrained power within their parties because the rules mean challengers just need a simple majority from their fellow MPs and process wise it can happen very quickly as they just need to declare a motion and can get elected there and then. In the UK, leaders face an easier situation: Conservative prime ministers can be defeated by no-confidence motions, but it takes time to build demand for a ballot and there is still a process whereby nominations need to be called and due process followed before the election takes place. Labour challengers need to satisfy multiple electoral markets – MPs, party members and affiliated unions – and the process takes a lot of time – six months in 2010. Thus when Blair was Prime Minister, Gordon Brown was seen as a constant challenger but sought to critique Blair internally without directly challenging him. In Canada, sitting prime ministers are the safest: parliamentary parties have no power to topple a prime minister and thus dissenters such as Paul Martin had to leave government and develop support ready for when Chrétien stood down and then compete once the vacancy was created. The more diverse those who get to decide on the leadership are, the more secure a sitting leader is – devolving power to party members or other units within the organisation provides more security than when it is focused amongst the party elites/MPs.

Power to select candidates to become an MP The allocation of power to select candidates who stand to become an MP varies amongst different party organisations. In New Zealand, the UK and Canada, processes to determine candidate selection are determined at the national level but in Australia there are diverse methods used within the Labor and Liberal Parties (Cross and Gauja 2014). The two main parties have 32 different sets of rules governing the selection of their candidates for national public office, because the federal level organisation delegates power and mostly complete autonomy to create the rules for the selection of parliamentary candidates to the six separate state and two territory parties, each of which has its own rules and constitution. The Labor Party constitution and rules explicitly support differentiation. This results in a multitude of different processes around pre-selections with varying delegations of power, from members being given full authority, or power being shared with a central party body, to a central authority retaining full power.

Power within legislatures/Parliament Legislatures play a significant role in power distribution, often attempting to constrain the power of presidents, prime ministers and ministers, but with debatable and unpredictable impact. As a former Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in Australia noted, ‘the role and

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the use of the House is incredibly shaped by the numbers, so what is available to an opposition in terms of using the forms and processes and procedures of the House depends on whether or not there is going to be a close vote, or even a vote we could win’ (Dreyfus 2019). Parties can use internal rules within legislatures to exert power over policy making. In the US Congress, the majority party can control which Bills are given a chance of being heard, using negative agenda setting before Bills reach the chamber floor for a vote, and using its gatekeeping rights to prevent majority rules when the party is divided and moderate members support a Bill and more extreme members oppose it (Jackman 2014). Rules are chosen by majority vote at the start of each session and thus political managers need to pay attention to this period closely. Just the basic rule that Bills receive at least a majority vote in order to pass affects legislative outcomes; as do rules about who gets to decide which Bills are even considered in the legislature. Politicians in the Australian Parliament noted when interviewed how they can use different aspects and procedures for divergent tactical purposes. Question time gets most attention from the media, and ‘what works best in the evening news are questions … delivered repeatedly’ that state the party’s position, as they provide ‘really simple grabs that the journalists can weave into almost any story on the evening news’ because the media wants to run a story of ‘here is what the government thinks, here is what Labor thinks’ (Burke 2019). Thus questions are used to give ‘really long statements – “The economy is suffering from X, Y, and Z, why does this government only care about the top end of town” or something like that’ that frames the government as ‘You are bad people’. However within ‘the theatre of Parliament itself’ what works best are ‘short sharp questions that compel the government to deal with material that they are not comfortable dealing with’ which they have to answer according to the rules – ‘the strongest one probably was one day when we repeated questions to Angus Taylor, “Have Australia’s emissions gone up or down?” and he didn’t want to answer and he looked absolutely hopeless on the floor. And the speaker – because we have a good independent speaker, who applies the rules very rigidly – if the question is tight, he will insist the answer is tight as well’ (Burke 2019). Legislative review of political appointments constraints the power of ministers in the UK to exert control through appointments to positions in public life such as the Chair of the BBC Trust, Statistics Authority, Chairs of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, and the Office of Rail Regulation (Matthews and Flinders 2015). Ministers have the formal authority to make these appointments as they see fit, such as on the basis of personal, party or ideological affiliations to ensure they have a high-trust relationships with appointees and be more assured of being able to control the bureaucracy. However, the Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act 2011 gave select committees in Parliament a statutory veto over ministerial appointments. Similarly, the elected governing party in Canada is potentially constrained through the House of Commons standing committee system (Stilborn 2014). The committees are designed to encourage independent judgement and consensus-building by requiring written government responses to committee reports. Nevertheless, in practice, the ministers view committee views as just one of a number of influences on their decisions and the government exercises control of committee members from their party and thus they become partisan instead of fostering detached critique. In the US Congress there are often a greater number of committees but this can, in practice, dilute overall congressional influence over the bureaucracy compared to the White House

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(Clinton, Lewis and Selin 2014). When more committees are involved, it undercuts the ability of Congress as an institution to collectively respond to the actions of the presidency or the bureaucracy. For example, as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States argued, in 2010 Congress had over 100 committees and sub-committees overseeing the Department of Homeland Security. It lacked a single point of oversight for homeland security. Thus greater numbers of oversight units does not necessarily lead to more influence because any potential influence is too dispersed. A survey of nearly 2,000 federal executives responsible for implementing agency policy in 128 different agencies and bureaus during 2007–2008 suggested that whilst committees give individual politicians potential power to represent single electoral districts, they reduce the overall power of Congress to monitor and direct agency policymaking and compete with the single voice of the presidency on larger policy goals for the whole country. In Norway, the Parliament has followed a hierarchical perspective in trying to reinstall its formal rights and authority as a controlling authority by introducing new control devices such as public hearings and performance auditing (Christensen, Lægreid and Roness 2002). Revitalisation of the scrutiny committee has introduced new forms of specialisation and interest constellations. Nevertheless, the power within Parliament is ultimately controlled by the public through elections. For example, committee power may increase in minority governments because the governments’ control is more complex and unpredictable, but this is of course in turn influenced by the power elections give parties.

Power within the government and bureaucracy Despite any formal authority given to political leaders, the complexity and size of government means it is difficult for presidents, prime ministers and ministers coming into power after an election campaign to understand, master and control it and Benze (1987) argues that presidential management has grown due to politicians’ frustration over the challenges in implementing policy once elected. In reality, government is made up of multiple organisational units with a myriad of individuals working within them. The practical reality of government can constrain the power of the elected government to influence the bureaucracy because ministers only have a few hours a week to spend on departmental matters given their political duties and administration associated with being a member of cabinet (Savoie 1983). It also connects back to the public: the authority political leaders have is also affected by their own personal reputation which depends on their credibility with the public as well as government elites and leadership.

The pressure of audits and accountability Accountability and governance arrangements are designed to make government organisations and individuals responsible for their decisions and actions and open to appropriate external scrutiny – although they can impact on all players, including the prime minister/president and ministers. Mechanisms can be formal, specific and legislated or informal, broad and simply down to convention or current behaviour and issues on the public agenda. Multifaceted and complementary layers of accountability are designed into different roles held at multiple levels, with different individuals, groups or entities being accountable to another, resulting in potential mechanisms of control. The Victorian Government (2007, Figure 3,

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p. 62) report The State of the Public Sector in Victoria 2007–08 depicts how different accountabilities fit together. For example, public administration Acts and financial management Acts specify that Parliament can hold ministers to account for how a government entity performs. The department assists ministers in accounting to Parliament. The minister can hold the board of a public entity accountable. However, less formally, customers and clients of the entity, the broader community, business partners and organisations, local government and other departments and ministers are stakeholders to the government entity and can also influence their performance. Despite the increased use of entities outside departments to perform functions or provide services on behalf of government, government ultimately remains responsible and accountable. The Australian Public Service Commission (2003, 167) notes that the shift away from centrally set down prescriptive rules of process and transferring of responsibility to individual agencies can present challenges, ‘while federal agencies can outsource functions they cannot outsource their responsibility or overall accountability. Parliament insists that they remain accountable for the delivery of services, even where the service delivery is provided by private and non-government sectors’.

1b. Increase formal authoritative power by exerting control centralising decision making and exerting control over other organisations and individuals Despite the dispersed nature of power, political leaders can increase their power by centralising decision making and exerting control over other organisations and individuals.

Centralisation of decision making Presidential/prime ministerial control can be exerted by centralising, consolidating and influencing decision making and information sharing, even when accompanied by methods seeking to be deliberative and consultative. US presidents can extend control by moving control of policy to their offices and staff instead of delegating to cabinet secretaries of individual departments, hear views directly instead of using their chiefs of staff as gatekeepers to add an initial filter on information and people coming to them, and intervene in difficult political issues (Pfiffner 2011). President Obama preferred to hear views directly rather than using staffers such as a chief of staff to be neutral brokers of diverse opinion, to have in-depth policy deliberations between people with different perspectives at the same time in the same room. Obama also intervened when policies became a political problem, such as when Attorney General Eric Holder’s decisions on detainees attracted backlash and Obama centralised control of a high-visibility legal policy. He did the same with regard to economic policy: Obama organised daily half hour meetings with the treasury secretary, and whilst Secretary Geithner was central to deliberations, Obama made the final decisions and Obama’s chief of staff oversaw the secretary. Similarly, George W Bush’s office focused control on signature policy issues such as education but gave his cabinet members ‘managerial leeway’ on other areas (Kumar 2002). Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper exerted control through a consultative approach (Wilson 2015). Harper insisted that Canadian ministers with a policy proposal had to consult with their backbench colleagues, then take proposals to Minister’s Caucus

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Advisory Committees (MCACs) held monthly before finally taking them to cabinet. The system was designed to involve backbenchers in policy making, although the MCACs only gave advice: ministers retained the final decision on what proposal to bring forward. MPs found that the system helped to make them feel valued and part of the caucus team, and give them the opportunity to influence government policy direction or modify the details. Nevertheless, in effect the system centralised and consolidated power with the prime minister as it provided him with political intelligence about policy ideas and helped him gain political capital with MPs.

Control over the bureaucracy/civil servants appointments Politicising and influencing non-partisan appointments is also a source of control. President Ronald Reagan placed political appointees in positions previously held by non-partisan staff to exert control over policy implementation and the transition team made sure White House staff oversaw appointments to screen potential candidates for loyalty to the president’s agenda (Ingraham 1988; Benze 1987). Australian Prime Minister John Howard placed a partisan staffer in the most senior position, secretary to cabinet (Stewart and Maley 2007, 278). President George H Bush appointed some weaker cabinet secretaries and used subcabinet appointments to gain greater central control (Laffin 1996). President George W Bush and Chief of Staff Andrew Card controlled five positions in departments to retain control of the direction and keep things on message (Kumar 2002). Additionally, using management abilities as the criteria to assess civil servants can increase ministerial control as it give ministers greater potential to set the directions. The creation of the Senior Civil Service in the UK and the Senior Executive Service in Australia and the US enables staff to be recruited externally and deployed to different areas, but also gives ministers greater scope to remove or change department heads, as well as insert officials who are committed to implementing government policy (Maor 1999). Ministers were also able to use their discretion in the final stage of selection of public servants in the Belgian federal government and increase their control and politicisation of appointments after the adoption of competency management in recruitment (Brans and Hondeghem 2005). Reagan sought to gain greater control over top-level managers in the career civil service by directing department and agency heads to use performance appraisals to assess whether administration initiatives and policies were appropriately carried out to meet presidential objectives, and they also reassigned career staff for political reasons after 120 days as allowed by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (Benze 1987). In the major domestic departments and agencies surveyed in 1984, 85% of executives in administration positions thought that political appointees helped to shape the department’s or agency’s policies in line with the presidential administration goals.

Control over the bureaucracy/civil servants behaviour Another form of leader control is influencing the power and behaviour of non-partisan staff. President Ronald Reagan asserted direct control over bureaucracy with task-focused instructions and clear lines of management authority where civil servants are expected to carry out policy as directed by political appointees, which helped ensure the government’s agenda was implemented (Rockman 1993). US senior federal executives who worked in domestic agencies, bureaus and offices in cabinet-level departments surveyed in 1987 suggested that top

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bureaucrats felt that most influence at this time lay in political appointments rather than external actors such as members of Congress and interest group representatives (Stehr 1997). President George W Bush’s administration exerted control over his staff in a range of ways (Thompson 2006, 500), such by the Department of Justice barring staff attorneys from offering recommendations in Voting Rights Act cases and overruling recommendations by careerists on two redistricting cases that had important political implications. The administration even took action against career civil servants who publicly challenged administration policies, such as the top climate scientist at NASA who endorsed a policy on greenhouse gases that was at odds with that of the administration. Canadian prime ministers have increased government influence on the public service by ministers pressuring public servants to offer political-based versus policy-based analysis, communicate pro-government communication materials, developing a ‘Prime Minister’s court’ or inner circle with select ministers, deputy ministers and political staff and asked the public service to focus on policy decisions coming from the centre, including the PCO, Department of Finance and PMO (Aucoin 2010, p. 79). In the Harper minority governments in particular, the PMO exercised firmer control over the agenda and communications, and central agencies more frequent and stricter control over departmental management because it needed to exercise greater discipline both in cabinet and in government departments to get its agenda through (Bourgault 2011). This meant that (non-partisan) deputy ministers had less manoeuvring room in advising ministers and developing policy. However, government ministers can also exercise control without being proactive or creative. In Australia, non-partisan ministerial staff help ministers to gain political control of departments and thus achieve their goals (Dunn 1995). They help to monitor departmental implementation of policy, brokering positions within government and encouraging more cooperative approaches. They help because of their institutionalised memory and knowledge of how policy is implemented, including understanding the potential practical difficulties of implementing change from departments, assessing what departmental advice to listen to in relation to the goals the minister is trying to achieve, and helping to manage disagreements between the department and minister. They also help the minister to direct the department, conveying ministerial requirements and answering department queries to ascertain the minister’s likely reaction to a planned action or whether they need to run something past the minister. They also help to broker positions among other ministerial offices. They thus integrate policy expertise with understanding of the minister’s political goals, the minister’s public face, hot political issues, outside opinion (e.g. from lobby groups) and they will consider political tactics in relation to the implementation of the government’s program and that policy sector. They help to get horizontal support from other departments before seeking approval higher up in cabinet, such as when policy issues overlap departments (e.g. logging on federal lands falls under both the Minister for Arts, Sport, and Environment and the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy), but also from the three central control departments, Treasury, Finance, and Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C). Such staff help to support ministers’ political direction and this increases the chance of implementing policy change.

Diverse impact of control There are pros and cons to too much control or lack of it. The lack of control and organisation exercised by President Bill Clinton at first led to what he himself called chaos:

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‘There used to be chaos around here. Every day we would have three, four meetings lasting hours and hours. I’d sit in them, and we’d make decisions like a committee. And every day I’d read about them in the papers. It got so that the public had an impression that I was indecisive.’ (quoted by Villalobos, Vaughn and Cohen 2014, 744) On the other hand, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (2014) suggests that prime ministers should not try to over-control their ministers. Micro-management used by her predecessor Kevin Rudd also caused problems because there is not the time for leaders to exercise control over everything. Rudd failed to set priorities, thus work on key issues did not get completed, paperwork requesting sign-offs went missing: ‘Ministers would be desperately trying to get sign-off on items months old, even items that were in no way controversial. It was impossible for them to plan their diaries or media agendas with any certainty, to know on which days big announcements would be made, because at the last minute their plans were frequently countermanded by Kevin’s office.’ (Gillard 2014, 12)

1c. Extend informal indirect power through staffing, new organisational units, communication systems and auditing Political leaders can extend control through less obvious ways such as through an increasing in political staff numbers, creating new central government units, using tightly organised communication systems, recruiting new members and party figures who will support their party strategy.

Extending control in government through political staffing Governments utilise and increase the numbers of political staff to help them manage the challenges of modern government, thus extending political control but in a way that Maley (2010) appropriately explains as being able to effectively steer the government and thus including less direct actions such as prioritisation, coordination and managing political relationships. In Australia, the number and influence of ministerial advisors has grown over time starting with the Hawke Labor government 1983–1991 and Keating 1991–1996, and the PMO has exercised greater control and coordination of ministerial offices through this (Maley 2010). Political advisors help ministers to overcome challenges if the bureaucracy is not responsive enough to ministers, by providing independent advice and thus reducing the minister’s dependence on the department. They also increase the minister’s ability to direct the department. They also help coordination, communication and negotiation within a portfolio between senior and junior ministers and within the ministry between ministerial offices. In the UK, political advisors are called special advisers and they also help the minister manage the complexity of government (The LSE GV314 Group 2012). They play two key roles a political commissar role: they serve as the eyes, ears and mouth of the politician and political fixer; and they carry out partisan-related jobs for the minister that civil servants cannot do, such as dealing with party colleagues and writing political speeches. They also help civil servants who want to know what a minister wants or would think about issues. In Canada, the Harper Government also exerted control over the political staff of ministers, who became extensions of the PMO (Aucoin 2010).

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Creating new organisational units to exert influence Another way for political managers to grow their power is create new organisation units. In the US, presidents have developed new administrative agencies through executive action – executive orders, department orders and reorganisation plans – to increase their influence over the whole of government as then action can occur without going through Congress (Howell and Lewis 2002). For example, the National Security Agency and the Peace Corps were created by executive order and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency by reorganisation. Presidential political appointees have also created agencies by executive action which further extends president political control such as the Welfare Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Presidents tend to place agencies within the Executive Office of the President or the cabinet and use them to make policy. Administrative agencies help to translate vague congressional laws into concrete policy. Although Congress can cut off funding to these agencies through budgetary appropriations, overall such agencies significantly strengthen the president’s control. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard exerted control through managing the policy subsystem, the policy networks within that system and the cabinet (Stewart and Maley 2007, 278), which included expanding staff but also creating politically strategic units such as the Cabinet Policy Unit. Policy change came from advisors mostly in the PMO and by public servants particularly from the PM&C.

Using tightly organised communication systems The development of communication systems in both parties and governments has also increased central control. The Australian Greens found that their decentralised organisational structures and consequent disunified communications, with MPs and different party levels all revamping their own websites individually, hindering branding and campaign effectiveness. They thus created a centralised ‘web hug’ to act as a single entry point with multiple sites available from it, thus unifying the immediate look but enabling differentiated local online communication for the 2010 election (Jackson 2013). The Party also asserted control over candidates’ personal pages while leaving local and state levels with some autonomy such as over content development, thus increasing the overall level of centralisation. Similarly, new online communication technology adopted by the UK Liberal Democrats reinforced vertical power with elites rather than members, as the Party used the technology for top–down control and information dissemination (Gibson and Ward 1999). More recent research suggests that not just communication, but also the use of political market research has led to a general centralisation in information, decision making and communication control in UK political parties (Smith 2009; Hopkin 2009; Schnee 2015). Strategic political communication led to centralisation because media advisors understand that parties need to present a unified image. Thus UK Labour in the late 1980s created a separate campaign headquarters to its Party headquarters, giving more control to a small group of campaign experts to manage communications and limit potential influence by Party officials. Political marketing and political market research was used to help create more effective policies and strategies, but it also brought new practitioners into the organisation and the

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sensitive data was almost always kept in the inner circle of party leaders and advisors. This changed organisational decision-making structures, replacing or at least eroding members, activists and agents as information sources, and centralising decisions and information at the top. Market research thus reduced Party headquarters’ dependence on the constituency organisation as a source of information and increased its authority over local level organisations, which were then told that the central Party headquarters knew the state of public opinion in their area better than them. The US White House Communications Office engages in horizontal coordination to communicate the president’s goals and work, with the communications director playing a significant role in horizontal coordination, making connections to other offices such as White House scheduling, advance and speechwriting, and coordinating information as well as people and events (Kumar 2001). A former communications director Don Baer said his role was ‘to make sure that every office or every entity that had some role in conveying what the message and image was publicly, communicating that image and message and strategy publicly’ (quoted by Kumar 2001, 624). They also work with government departments on which policies to put forward, when to do so and in what sequence. The Canadian Harper Government adopted a centralised, controlling and mechanistic approach to communications in government to maximise its effective communication and ensure the government appeared unified (Marland 2016). This involved planning, coordination and control both vertically and horizontally. The PCO Communication and Consultations Secretariat organised and planned government-wide communications, including the messages and themes in announcements, as well as advertising, crisis management, digital media, strategic communications. Communication was also coordinated in relation to other government departments to ensure consistency. Communication, including day-to-day media, communication, the prime minister’s interactions with journalists, travel events, issues and stakeholder relations, were tightly controlled. Memos to cabinet were expected to consider the communications implications with a strategic communications plan to show how it related to the government agenda, and ministers had to submit a proposal to the PCO to get clearance to travel outside Ottawa. Influence was also extended to non-partisan staff: those in the PCO who supported the PMO, cabinet and cabinet committees were asked to contact departments to seek out information to ensure that government communication was accurate and understandable to Canadians (Marland 2016). Message Event Proposals (MEPs) were used in several government departments to orchestrate communication on big and small purchases, and scripted out how each political event should play out in the media, instructing both political staff and civil servants (Blanchfield 2010). A typical MEP template included sections detailing the desired headline, key messages, media lines, strategic objectives, desired soundbite, ideal speaking backdrop, ideal event photograph, tone and strategic considerations. As suggested earlier when discussing the use of formal authoritative power in decision making, there are pros and cons to such control. The tight control exercised by the Harper Government was critiqued for reducing the ability of the government to adapt when circumstances changed and limiting the prime minister’s ability to engage in ad hoc decision making when desired (Marland 2016). On the other hand, in the US White House Communications Office, the organisation has been so varied over time that there can be a lack of clarity because the line management is not clear or aligned (Kumar 2001). Moreover, despite efforts by prime ministers and party leaders to exert control over communications, it always operates within a constrained environment. In practice, there are multiple different power centres within

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government. In Canada, the PMO also influences the final decision on communication, albeit negotiated with the prime minister’s staff; the PMO, ministerial offices and departments are affected by rules created for government communication, such as the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Public Works; and Government Services Canada manages procurement activities, including public opinion research and advertising (Marland 2016).

Recruiting new members and party figures who will support your party strategy Tony Blair exerted significant control over his party when he became leader, through recruiting new more representative members to influence internal party votes and holding a ballot to reform Clause IV (Taylor 2001). He also had operatives in all parts of the organisation including the unions, youth and student wing and constituency parties, which gave Blair a level of control over his Party.

1d. Distribute power and control vertically down or horizontally across the organisation carefully given the variable impacts Organisational design includes deciding on where to allocate power, authority and control. Such aspects can significantly impact on the effectiveness and success of governments and campaigns. Established political organisations have pre-existing structures which may need reviewing, but when new organisations such as campaign teams or new presidential administrations are created the structure has to be designed from scratch. As Arnold, Walcott and Patterson (2001, 192) note the Office for Management and Administration in the White House can be structured according to what the president desires, but not all leaders realise the office is essential to getting things done and thus it is important to pay attention to creating an effective design. Power can be distributed differently within organisations, and be intentionally designed as well as informal or unexpected, with different impacts which vary and are not clear cut. On the one hand, more diversified and delegated power across horizontal and down to lower levels and organic decision-making can give coalition partners room to differentiate; ensure local party organisations have valuable autonomy which, in turn, makes being a member/ volunteer more attractive; enable local candidates to create a campaign that is responsive to their particular area; allow more views to be considered, supporting greater innovation; and political appointees can also get more done by working with rather than commanding career staff. On the other hand, however, when power and decision making authority is spread within an organisation it can also cause disunity, delays, inefficiency and uncertainty, which results in chaotic campaigns and government. Centralised power and clear boundaries make it clearer who has authority and responsibility, giving senior practitioners more vertical control over subordinates, and enabling effective communication. Clear authority lines give ministers resources and the potential to show progress in their individual department through initiatives such as introducing a ‘big’ Bill or a new policy. Better coordination helps governments to maintain unity and thus credibility, and ensures unified communication during campaigns which helps candidates and parties appear able to govern. However, greater mechanistic and micro-management control can slow decision making as it is concentred in a small group of people or one individual leader; strongly differentiated organisations with their own culture can discourage

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collaborative work on policies and projects that cut across organisational boundaries. For example, politicians who worked together in opposition towards the goal of winning office defend their individual departments once in government, and different cultures emerge (Kavanagh and Richards 2001). Given that there has been a rise in policy issues that ‘no longer respect organizational boundaries’ (Savoie 2004, 7) – such as truancy, which involves action by the police, education welfare officers and schools and the underlying causes relate to the Departments of Employment, Housing, Social Security and Health (Kavanagh and Richards 2001, 8) – more diverse organisational designs have been introduced over time.

Campaigns Campaign plans that establish command authority and delegatory roles such as deputies for the campaign manager, finance director, volunteer coordinator and the communications director can save resources (Burton and Shea 2010). Clearly differentiated roles to prevent staffers giving out mixed messages to the media also help to ensure consistency in communication in elections to avoid the candidate appearing unsure of their position and unable to govern.

Party organisations There are increasingly diverse forms of organisation and power distribution within political parties which can be seen as stratarchical with organisational power and authority dispersed and shared across different units and levels (Carty 2004; Bolleyer 2011). Parties use a franchise model where the central party organisation creates the political brand with the overall design, labels and communication and then allows differentiation at the local level to deliver a more tailored product to the local target market. This is because local organisations are better placed to understand, report and respond to local perspectives and demands. Local parties also mobilise volunteers for campaigns. Power for different roles is allocated to different levels: for example, local units may run candidate selection, whereas the central organisation makes decisions on overall party policy. The President of the Australian Liberal Party noted that they ‘have a federal system which therefore in a sense breeds localism and the party is state-based so they choose candidates, they run local campaigns … [and] they tend to be very protective of local rights to choose candidates’ (Greiner 2019). This can, though, prevent interaction between party levels: the Party Secretary for Australian Labor noted that ‘because of that branch culture often people don’t have a lot of exposure to each other – the assistant secretary in Western Australia and the assistant secretary in Queensland might never be in the same place. And so they don’t have any formal interactions … there is no lot of inter-operability in terms of the formal organisations’ (Erickson 2019). To avoid confusion and disagreement, the precise authority and responsibility for each unit or level need to be clearly spelled out. The franchise model should enable the centrally designed political product, communication and overall brand to respond to voters at large and local organisations to be responsive to local conditions. Examples include the Swedish New Democracy Party signing written contracts with autonomous local parties, which then used the central Party name, and the Australian Labor Party, which has powerful state-level machines. Analysis also found that power-dispersing models in environmental parties (e.g. the Irish Greens, the Swedish Environment Party, Groen Links and Les Verts and the three federations the Austrian, German and Swiss Greens) are more effective, but power is more centralised for national elections.

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The Australian Greens also have a diverse organisational design throughout its structure which results in variable implementation of principles of focusing at the local level rather than the elites (Miragliotta 2012). Although the Party has underlying principles of decentralisation and horizontalism, emphasising local groups’ involvement in decision making and restricting the power of the Party elite, in practice the extent to which authority is devolved to state divisions, their MPs and members varies between different parts of the Party. The confederal party structure explicitly recognises and protects each state division’s authority over key functions, including candidate selection and membership recruitment. However, there is also responsiveness of local contexts because, historically, local personalities, issues, geography and events have shaped the divisions’ formative experiences and resulted in organisational diversity. The beliefs of the founding activists influenced the organisational structure and culture of the state/territory party organisations, as well as the political issues they focus on. For example, Australian Capital Territory, the Northern Territory, Victoria and South Australia were created by local elites specifically to join the national structure, and Tasmania and Queensland focus on imperative politics given the importance of wilderness concerns in those areas, whereas other units focus more on good processes (means) as against electoral and representational outcomes (ends) with stronger formal commitments to the principle of grass roots local branches and consensus decision-making. The power given to lower levels therefore varies.

Coalition agreements Diversity can also be seen in decision-making arrangements in coalition agreements in an attempt to balance the need for majority party dominance to convey government unity with room for horizontal authority to allow party differentiation (Boston and Bullock 2012). Each party needs to maintain their political distinctiveness to be re-elected, but the overall government also needs to be united and achieve legislative success as this too will affect the re-election of each party involved. Thus major parties need to provide room for their minor parties to achieve their policy goals. If the minor party have to support policy positions which go against their previous commitments or ideology, or are unable to advance important policy gains, this will lose them voters/membership support at subsequent elections. Discipline needs to be maintained, but not too so tight that minor parties cannot differentiate – there needs to be the freedom to differentiate on issues key to their supporters. The specific details of coalition arrangements in New Zealand from 1993 to 2008 varied. For example, from 2005 to 2008, Labour’s coalition with the Greens was one of enhanced co-operation where the minor party agreed to co-operate with a major party on various policy and procedural matters, including a pledge not to oppose the government on matters of confidence and supply, in exchange for certain rights and resources, including the opportunity to speak for the government on specific issues. Whereas in 2008, National forged enhanced confidence and supply agreements with ACT, the Maori party and United Future. All the minor parties were awarded ministerial representation, but outside cabinet, and the ministers were only obliged to abide by the convention of collective responsibility in the portfolio areas for which they were directly responsible. Overall arrangements have, on the whole, given minor parties influence over the executive but retained their claim to horizontal power to dissent where needed. More varied forms of power and authority allocation, whilst more complex, provide coalition governments with a greater chance of success in terms of both unity and differentiation needed for governance and party re-election.

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The organisation of government staffing There is a new organisational design for White House staffing for each new president. It needs planning during the transitions so that the office can function immediately after the inauguration (Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne 2001). The White House Office of Management and Administration (OMA) plays a considerable role in staffing management and organisation, including allocating staff numbers, salary, office space, office budgets and staff privileges, such as parking spaces and passes, and supervises other units such as the Security Office, Visitors Office and White House Military Office (Kumar 2002; Arnold, Walcott and Patterson 2001). The OMA is essential to getting things done, being the ‘control point’ in managing several budgets and involved in controversial allocation of limited resources (Kumar 2002, 202). The effectiveness of staffing and thus the White House impacts on the president’s reputation for competence (Arnold, Walcott and Patterson 2001). The chief of staff must take control of the White House quickly, exercising vertical authority over the president’s time, including internal communication to the president and meetings with them, as well as presidential appearances, because it is not an organisation ‘conducive to lengthy discussion or loose management’ (Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne 2001, 488). They have to manage the president’s time and who they meet, control information flow to the president, but ensure they hear a range of views to inform their decisions and are seen to be listening to all sides. Reagan’s Chief of Staff James Baker used a decision process whereby decision memoranda with neutral framing of issue and options was circulated to all officials with expertise or a stake in the decision and these views along with background information on issues were given to presidents. They need to keep abreast of everything the president is telling people and they are telling them: New Zealand Prime Minister John Key (2013a) said of his Chief of Staff ‘he is pretty much always [there] … but every piece of paper I see, pretty much he sees.’

Political organising 2: organise and connect people Political managers need to organise individuals within a party, campaign team or government into units, groups or departments in a way that will help an organisation implement its plan. People can be divided up and organised into distinct units, groups or departments to suit segments of the public, policies, issues, processes, services, tasks, staff skills, program delivery and financial management. Formal, rigid, mechanistic, differentiated, vertical and linear structures include regional party branches or departments focused on particular policy areas or distinguishing between White House staff for governing versus staff for a presidential campaign. On the other hand, organisations can be more organised and fluid in their structure and internal communication. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, which may be dependent on what suits the political leader running an office: if they are someone who ‘cares about information, cares about actually kind of getting the right information regardless of who gives it to them then the flat office structure works. If you’ve got a very traditionalist leader, then the hierarchical model works’ (Campbell 2019). Clearly differentiated and formal organisation provides clarity and control, standardises employees’ behaviour with clear rules and procedures, allows for cost-efficient specialisation, with subordinates deferring to line managers, but may discourage flexibility, adaptability and collaboration to solve complex issues such as wicked policies.

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Organisational design also impacts on how people within the organisation interact. In a centralised, hierarchical, mechanistic organisation, interaction between people is more vertical with subordinates deferring to line managers, rather than across levels as in more organic, less hierarchical organisations. Organic organisations are more responsive to changing conditions, but the lack of clearly defined roles can cause confusion and the lack of hierarchy make management harder. However, it can encourage people to work together and combine skills more effectively to achieve organisational aims. In the Australian Labour Party leader’s office under Anthony Albanese, they adopted an informal and loosely networked structure ‘that requires a high level of trust and information sharing’ so that people ‘do not go outside their individual role but still share information’ (Gartrell 2019).

2a. Adopt more formal, rigid and differentiated organisation for specific areas such as skills, services, policies, issues, processes, tasks or a section of society to provide clarity and control For US presidents to be re-elected they need dedicated campaign staff in the White House (Tenpas and Dickinson 1997), as campaigning requires different skills and resources to governing, and thus the presidential staff have to be restructured to differentiate between the two activities. For campaigns, presidents need staff who understand electoral and campaign finance rules and use effective political communication, including the ability to convey policy in simple terms. This is very different to governing, which requires knowledge of policy detail, understanding of Washington politics and negotiation skills. George W Bush’s presidential team did not reorganise in enough time for the coming re-election campaign in 1992. Bush remained too focused on governing, and the restructuring of staff for the campaign began only in December 1991 under a new Chief of Staff Samuel Skinner. The new campaign staff met resistance from existing White House aides, causing problematic internal relationships. A second restructure was carried out in July 1992 and a new Chief of Staff was appointed, James Baker, who brought four aides from the State Department to be White House deputy chief of staff and directors of communications, policy planning and political affairs. Baker centralised the organisation and it became easier to execute decisions, but it was too late to help; the two types of staff need to be separated organisationally. This is backed up by the practitioners interviewed: one party staffer said that campaign and party administration ‘work to a different rhythm’ and requires a different sets of skills (Erickson 2019). However, hierarchical organisational structures also impact on internal communication. As one practitioner noted: ‘with a hierarchical model, there was almost what I refer to as “Chinese whispers”. The principle would be talking to the chief staffer to a senior advisor, senior advisor will translate it into, ok what they think the PM wants or what the minister wants. That will then be asked of by the advisor and then quite a few hours later or sometimes days later the principle gets the product and the product won’t be fit for purpose.’ (Campbell 2019) The Secretary of Australian Parliamentary Services also worked to break down traditional hierarchies in their organisation as this prevented effective communication across silos and staff levels (Stefanic 2019).

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2b. Utilise informal integrative, boundaryless and temporary organisation to encourage more collaboration and improve coordination Integration is where different parts of an organisation draw together to achieve a common goal. Informal, organic, integrated, boundaryless and lateral designs foster interaction across hierarchies. New structures may be created either temporarily or permanently which bring people together to work on something specific such as work teams, working groups, units, campaign teams or clusters that focus on a new area, development or issue, that improves collaboration. Permanent units include the US White House and Australian PM&C, which provide support to the top political leader but also connect with organisations and people across government. As an Assistant Secretary explains ‘within PM&C one of our roles is to bring a whole of government perspective. For example, whilst something might be a good economic policy, there could be an international side to it and we need to bring all together’ (Lloyd 2019). Temporary units include a delivery unit, task forces such as a Social Exclusion Unit, Drug czars, working groups, clusters, a policy campaign, a project team to manage a new big event such as the Olympics or a crisis such as an earthquake. These structures are more fluid and adaptive, and comprised of members linked to work of common tasks. For example, the Australian Greens create boundaryless organisational units such as working groups, quick decision-making bodies and administrative/executive organisations that support the central organisation (Miragliotta 2012). While the US White House needs to have clear structures and plans in place for recurring and predictable activities to ensure clarity and coordination, it also needs temporary organisational devices such as war rooms, task forces and crisis meetings to cope with particular problems or specific projects (Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne 2001). Similarly, the Australian PM&C creates task forces to work on big priority issues. As an Assistant Secretary commented: ‘At the moment, there is quite a lot of those happening in PM&C, typically, a high priority cross-cutting group in government to come up with options. You have staff from the line departments that are relevant, you’ll have PM&C people, you might have people from Treasury and Finance people involved so that all of those perspectives are brought together often in a very quick space of time. I did one of those at the beginning of the year on a vocational education and training review. We had an external reviewer but we were the secretariat and we had people from the education department, finance department, PM&C, employment department. And we all came together for very short time, bringing our own expertise but it also helped build those relationships.’ (Lloyd 2019) Integrative and fluid organisational forms encourage collaboration to achieve organisational goals. They also create more agility and may be more appropriate to deal with new issues, projects and wicked policies such as climate change that cut across multiple policy areas and government departments. The Australian Public Services Commission (2003) emphasises the need for more agility and ‘solutions to problems that cross governments, cross jurisdictions and cross portfolios’ and how the government’s management of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney involved many agencies at federal, state and local government levels and there were ‘tremendous cross-government and cross-agency efforts to quell the bush fires in eastern Australia in 2002 and 2003’ (Australian Public Services Commission 2003, 167).

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On the downside, boundaryless organisation can reduce accountability and control. It also can just be symbolic – needing resources and creating rewards for integrative units and collaborative behaviour. Thus the goal is to develop mechanisms, structures and cultures which meet whole-of-government principles and become firmly entrenched into governance not just for specific events or a crisis (Australian Public Services Commission 2003, 167). It can also encourage reactive instead of strategic behaviour, as a staffer who worked in Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office reflected: ‘The way I ran my team in the PMO was almost like a crisis communications model. And in a sense the benefits of that is that we were very very responsive. The detriment of that is that we very much focused on the short term. So, when you wake up in the morning – and in staffing roles you’re waking up at 5:30 in the morning, you have no idea what your day’s going to look like. You’ve got no idea whether you kind of have to like pull two all nighters in a row to fix the problem. You are the definition of responsive because you just don’t know where the situation is going. The downside of that is that you’re actually not focusing on the long term, or building the structures to focus on the long term.’ (Campbell 2019)

Parties and campaigns Virtual, or at least, geographically dispersed but connected teams are essential in parties which need to have branches and volunteers on the ground across different areas to be locally responsive and connected, and in election campaigns across large countries. As Jon Carson (2009), Executive Director and former Illinois State Director for Obama for America, recalled, ‘I called our office strategy our Starbucks strategy. We wanted offices everywhere because, despite all the focus on the online network, the truth of the matter was where we had offices and volunteers were working together with staff, we got work done’. In Canadian party organisations there is a range of formal and informal party integration across organisational levels. Federal and provincial parties in Canada engage in crossjurisdictional coordination (Pruysers 2015). Horizontal integration occurs between parties of the same name in different subnational units such as the Liberal Party of the province of Ontario coordinating with the Liberal Party of Quebec. Vertical integration between federal and provincial levels of the party occurs informally. Formal statutes require little organisational integration but in practice parties are much more connected informally. There are diverse forms of co-operation between different organisational levels. For example, 56% of Ontario riding associations share information about voters and party volunteers with their multilevel counterpart in the same riding to support one another – 44% Conservatives, 47% Liberals and 90% of NDP ridings. Consultants who work behind the scenes, including pollsters, campaign managers, strategists and communications specialists, are also shared, working across different levels during elections: 74% of constituency associations reported considerable overlap between the campaign teams in their constituency and the higher-level organisation. Constituency associations also receive direct campaign support from other levels of the organisation, such as a campaign visit from a key party figure such as a sitting MP. Connections occur in nearly two-thirds of candidate selections due to overlapping party personnel and strategic decisions where federal and provincial constituency association executives work together to find suitable candidates for both levels and prevent prospective candidates being ‘poached’ by another level of

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the party. Thus behaviour in political parties may be more integrated in practice than formal regulations suggest. Parties can also help policy integration in government by connecting, coordinating and improving communication between different decision-making arenas and subnational governments because they have their own affiliations and arenas that cut across government’s functional divides (Bolleyer 2011). Strong party ties in Switzerland and Canada help to bridge divides. In Canada, for example, policy issues and how they fit into the picture of government policies as a whole are discussed at cabinet ministerial meetings at the provincial level, which helps integration.

Government In Australia, the NSW Government consolidated government entities into clusters reflecting broad policy areas in 2011, Customer Service, Stronger Communities, Transport, Treasury, Premier and Cabinet and Planning, Industry & Environment (NSW Government 2011). This enabled similar and complementary services to be coordinated more effectively within the broad policy area of a particular cluster (NSW Government, Premier & Cabinet 2013). Each cluster had a coordinating minister who has overall cluster responsibility, a number of portfolio ministers with responsibility for their specific portfolio areas within the cluster, a principal department led by a director general and other entities generally led by a chief executive or a board (NSW Government, Premier & Cabinet 2013, 3). However, while they were ‘crucial in improving service delivery’ accountabilities were blurred due to the many different entities and governance arrangements within them. They were not legal entities in their own right, instead being more about bringing different legal and administrative entities together. The government thus created a new framework to articulate more clearly the relationships between coordinating and portfolio ministers and between directors general, chief executives and boards. Another form of integration is presidential appointments of policy czars to improve coordination across government on a specific issue or policy problem (Vaughn 2014). They tend to be appointed in areas of priority. Czars help the president to coordinate activity across different groups. The drugs czar appointed by President George H W Bush in 1989 said of the role that ‘a lot of it is coordinative’ and necessary because ‘when you look at the complexity of the Federal Government and the number of agencies that are involved in this question of anti-narcotics, it is a massive executive, coordinative job’ (quoted in Vaughn 2014, 529). Subsequent presidential administrations have all emphasised the coordination aspect: for example, President Barak Obama said of his new border czar that ‘the goal of the border czar is to help coordinate all the various agencies that fall under the Department of Homeland Security are working effectively with ICS, working effectively to our law enforcement agencies. So he’s really a coordinator’ (quoted in Vaughn 2014, 529). Czars can also contribute clarity and expertise as long as they have a clear, specified focus and purpose, are strategic and have the skills required, including being good at relationship-building with key stakeholders not directly under their control. Czars also help to extend presidential control but can be controversial because they work above existing rules albeit within constitutional prescriptions for presidents to staff their administration. Their effectiveness can also be limited if they are not given the time to create an effective national strategy, or do not have enough access to the president which is needed to give them the ‘organizational clout’ to manage a range of people and implement policy solutions (Vaughn 2014, 533).

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Specific government staff roles require cross-functional relationship building, such as the US White House communications director, who needs to work with other practitioners in and outside the office (Kumar 2001). Their work is very affected by other people in and outside the White House, and they can lack the resources to influence a president’s public reputation, which is determined by multiple factors outside their control. Communications directors are also affected by the chief of staff and how effectively they coordinate people, offices, policy and political information and their relationship with the press secretary. Overall, boundaries are declining in government with more moves towards more integrative governance. For example, UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair emphasised joined-up government to improve delivery (Kavanagh and Richards 2001). Blair established task forces with remits crossing departmental boundaries, such as the Social Exclusion Unit set up in December 1997 which took officials from a range of departments and externally from those with practical experience (e.g. social services, police, churches), and a Policy and Innovation Unit, which led projects commissioned by the Prime Minister such as on ageing and e-commerce and included staff from inside and outside government, and a lead from an unrelated department such as a high flying junior minister. Integrated budgets also helped which allocated cross-cutting funds for policy issues, such as drugs, criminal justice, children, instead of funds coming from an individual department. However, integrative attempts are often hindered by culture. The Policy and Innovation Unit noted that ‘in practice it has proved more difficult than expected to move peoples’ focus from purely departmental business’ (quoted by Kavanagh and Richards 2001, 16) and more serious cultural change is needed to ‘make officials and ministers … realise that they are being judged upon the outcome of the overall policy and not just on their own individual role of that of their department’ (p. 16).

Political organising 3: identify need for improvement and development Political managers need to assess if and how their organisation might be maintained or be improved, and understand their current culture and obstacles to change before leading development. Organisations need to change and innovate – creating and implementing new ideas – in order to survive and succeed. There are different types of innovation, such as changing the product, policy or service offered to the public; changing the process that produces, delivers or regulates those products; incremental changes; and more radical innovation that replaces existing products, policies or services. The Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (2009, iii) argues that innovation is necessary to help government become ‘better targeted, more responsive to community needs and more efficient.’ Politicians involved in successful campaigns talk of the value of being innovative, with President Barack Obama recalling how in Iowa ‘there’s no doubt that we were early adapters of everything and part of that was I had a bunch of twenty-somethings who were already using stuff that I had never heard of’ (Obama 2016). Potential changes include creating new presidential administrative agencies to extent influence, centralising communication and decision making through the use of new market research and communication tools, exerting authority over and introducing new forms of candidate selection such as primaries, staff training and development to improve skills and behaviour, changing the leader selection rules in party constitutions, creating special events for deciding on policy and leader selection, changing leaders even just before a campaign, changing internal power such as away from unions or less representative members within parties and creating new forms of

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participation focused on single issues for party supporters not just members. As well as organisational structures and rules, the culture within organisation affects behaviour and thus the ability of an organisation to achieve its goals. Culture is about beliefs, values and norms – what is expected, valued or rejected within an organisation.

3a. Be proactive at recognising and identifying the need for development through environmental scanning, political market research, party reviews after elections Political managers need to identify when and what organisational development – or change – is needed to help organisations be more effective. Organisational development is broader than just culture change: a range of changes can be identified and implemented, including changes to staff skills and behaviour, changing the technology in the organisation, altering the structure, constitutional rules and changing strategy. It is important to be self-reflective, for example conducting a review after election wins as well as losses, and avoiding denying or ignoring signs of trouble before the organisation declines too far into the ‘creep of doom’ and there is a crisis or major loss. Political and governmental organisations can often struggle to develop when needed, and often decline or stagnate. When political parties become successful and strong and win elections, over time in power they may fail to see their own decline both as a government and as a party organisation. Collins (2009) argues that even when institutions look strong on the outside they may ‘already be sick on the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall.’ In politics and government, leaders and organisation units remain in place even when their public support or responsiveness is declining not least as they are, at least for a time, immune to losing power or being closed down and thus often miss the signs of early decline. The five stages of institutional decline (Collins 2009) can easily be seen in the political world: 





Stage 1: hubris born of success: the organisation becomes arrogant, entitled, and forgets all the factors that contributed to their success instead of remaining disciplined and active. When the Conservative Party won the 1992 UK election against all predictions, but failed to undertake post-election analysis to understand why, they moved into quick significant decline and were then faced with a renewed opposition under Tony Blair (see Lees-Marshment 2001). Stage 2: undisciplined pursuit of more: organisations then pursue more success and move too far from their core purpose, strengths or popular issues. The UK Labour Party under Blair might be classified as falling into this stage during Blair’s third term as Blair devoted more time to foreign policy issues such as Iraq. However, political advisors acknowledge the increasing disconnect between Blair and the public, and they sought new external consultancy advice which led to renewal (Langmaid 2012). Stage 3: denial of risk and peril: organisations discount internal warning signs of decline such as negative data, blame external factors for the problems, and use less fact-based dialogue internally. One example of this is the New Zealand Labour Party, which lost the 2014 election but not as badly as they had expected, so still felt more positive. On election night, the leader David Cunliffe said to his supporters ‘you are amazing’ and ‘you should all be very proud’, failing to take responsibility for the loss and blaming external factors including the economy and ineffective fundraising, and saying he did not

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believe New Zealanders had showed no confidence in the Left (Cunliffe 2014). In comparison, National leader John Key repeatedly talked of the need to avoid arrogance despite his party having won a strong third victory. Stage 4: grasping for salvation: the lack of responsiveness means the organisation goes into sharp decline and may be tempted to engage in untested desperate changes, gamechanging tactics or new policies or put all hopes on a charismatic visionary leader. Stage 5: capitulation to irrelevance or death: if an organisation stays in stage 4 too long it can slip to stage 5 where it becomes insignificant, is reorganised, put under different reporting lines or closed.

Organisational development is often substantial and responds to either external changes such as election losses, changing electoral and campaign finance rules, or a change in government or a problem such as a fall in membership, polling, too much disunity, high staff turnover in political offices, lost election campaign or a crisis. Yet the best political managers will anticipate needed change and be proactive about leading development, scanning the environment to help them anticipate when incremental changes are needed in advance of problems or opportunities arising, even during or after success. One example of proactive development is a party still reviewing its performance after winning an election. For example, for the first time the UK Conservative Party conducted a review to identify areas for improvement to put it in the best possible shape to win elections for the long-term after winning an election in 2015, arguing that the positive election result ‘should not mask those areas where the Party may be declining in strength or underperforming’ (UK Conservative Party 2016, 7). In that way, political management becomes more about developing organisations to make them more effective, rather than just remedying problematic circumstances. Political managers should consider broader changes in their environment such as changing demographics, ethnicities, technological and communication advancements, new or increased public demands, regulation and laws (Rori 2008; Huhtanen 2015, 60). As IDEA (2013, 17) argued, parties need to respond to: ‘the continuously changing – and often challenging – political, legal, societal and economic environment in which political party organizations may find themselves … Managing these issues effectively may increase the party’s ability to achieve its goals. If such issues are either not addressed or ineffectively addressed, the consequences could be dire.’ Being proactive at identifying the need for change should also include identifying positive opportunities and new ideas. A former Secretary to the PM&C in Australia noted how leaders often announce reorganisation especially after an election victory (Shergold 2005). Politicians try to reinvigorate and refocus the machinery of government to suit the new party in power. For example, Prime Minister John Howard created a new Department of Human Services in 2004 to improve coordination across six key delivery agencies, promoting more integrative action to ‘allow the Australian government to think strategically about the combined service delivery resources of 375 Centrelink offices and 228 Medicare offices, and their respective call centres’ (Shergold 2005, 5) as well as to improve the responsiveness of government institutions to government policy direction.

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3b. Understand how the current culture works and impacts on the organisation, including existing internal traditions, norms and behaviours Both what the culture is as well as what those within the organisation perceive or assume it to be are important. Organisational cultures vary in multiple ways, including whether the organisation is risk averse, favours teams or individuals, pays attention to detail or the big picture, is inward or outwardly focused, nurturing or aggressive, collaborative or competitive. As Heymann (1988, 6) argues, the party culture affects the likelihood of challenges to a sitting prime minister’s power: in Australia the party culture in Australia ‘has always been brutal’ with sitting prime ministers vulnerable to speculation and critique from MPs, party powerbrokers and political journalists (Bennister and Heppell 2016). Campaign managers seek to foster positive cultures that prevent disunity and conflict but at the same time allow enough debate. Political advisor David Axelrod (2013) noted how Obama set three rules about having a grass roots campaign, including trying to enjoy what would be a tough competition for the presidency and the need for internal coherence. ‘He didn’t want anyone turning on anyone else. “If I see people leaking information on each other or pointing fingers then I’m going to ask you to leave” he said, “because we’re going to rise or fall together”.’ But campaigns create pressure, ‘you’ve got people working under enormous amounts of pressure … people can be short, people can be rude, as people under pressure behave in different ways towards their colleagues and that can sometimes lead to conflict’ (Nash 2019). Conflicts emerge over decisions. The Australian Labor campaign chief of staff notes how ‘the 2013 campaign was a terrible campaign to be involved not just because we were losing but because … people were on different sides, everyone was a bit everyone for themselves, and we had no cohesion at all.’ Learning from this, ‘people who were known to be problematic in the 2013 campaign, even if they showed interest in working in the last campaign, were dissuaded from doing so’ (Nash 2019). However, the 2019 campaign went too far the other way – ‘the norming process we went through actually resulted in a campaign that was very cohesive also ended up inadvertently resulting in too much agreement … the flipside of having a no or low conflict environment is you don’t necessarily have people who speak up and you get a bit of group think’ (Nash 2019). Finding the balance is hard. Another challenge lies in the working relationships between political staffers and civil servants. There is a challenge in that the typically slow civil service culture does not align with the high-speed communication environment political practitioners need to deal with in government (Marland 2016). In Canada, civil servants struggle to meet short notice requests because there are such strict approval processes, with one political staffer noting when interviewed ‘with the civil service is it’s process before outcome every time … They persist in letting it go through the approvals process and then handing it to you twelve hours late when you have no need for it’ (quoted in Marland 2016, 204). Whilst civil servants were effective in supporting regular scheduled events such as the throne speech for which there was plenty of time to plan, they were less effective when it came to the speed required for digital communication. Culture can affect the implementation and outcomes of new rules in government. Research into the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs found that just creating documents is not enough to influence actual organisational practice on risk management (Rothstein and Downer 2012). One factor is whether individuals feel responsible or

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not. The erosion of ministers taking responsibility for their civil servants’ actions means that responsibilities for problems are more evenly distributed amongst civil servants and ministers, and thus policymakers are more likely to pay attention to risk-assessment in policy making. Other factors includes ineffective internal communications about the potential adverse consequences of policy options, norms in terms of expectations from ministers for clarity of options presented to them, and how effectively staff can avoid collating knowledge about risk to support pre-existing beliefs rather than assessing them more objectively.

3c. Appreciate that there are lots of challenges to changing the culture of political organisations as they are more cushioned from change or performance consequences Any attempts to change culture face challenges. Innovative change may be harder because it is by definition new and thus a greater departure from existing behaviour. Staff and volunteers vary in how open they are to change personally. They can find it harder to change if they have been in an organisation a long time and have to change the most. As Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe (2015) said: ‘if you assemble a bunch of grizzled veterans, you’re not going to get that sense of inventiveness, and the culture will be one that is not terribly conducive to good ideas emanating from everywhere … It happens more naturally in the tech world, where the C.E.O. can come out of anywhere and brilliant people may not have a lengthy résumé.’ The timing of change and extent of change is influential. Innovative changes ask staff to take on new practices, and radical changes introduce practices that are new to the entire sector and are thus harder for people to adopt. The culture of political organisations may be even harder to change, because those such as parties continue to exist even when they lose – unlike in business, they don’t go out of business just because they lose customers. As Cummings (2014) argued ‘unlike marketing science where there’s feedback all the time – a company goes bust – there isn’t the same kind of feedback in the political world so people aren’t punished for their failures.’ Political organisations are more cushioned from changes in the organisation’s external environment change or the consequences of poor performance. It is therefore important that political managers at least understand the challenges they may meet when trying to change political organisations. Crisis also requires multiple organisations and levels of organisations to work together which can create culture clashes (Stern 2009). Coordinating different organisational levels and structures therefore requires organisations and individuals who may not know each other and have different ways of working and values to work together under pressure. Each organisation has its own worldview, culture, jargon, procedures, communications protocols, values, vantage points and perceptions of the common good, which can create misunderstandings and conflict that make decision making and responses in a crisis even harder. In the US case of hurricane Katrina, tensions between local, state and national governments prevented effective coordination and response from all levels of government, including local and state not just the federal government which was under the presidential management.

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Whilst politicians can try to lead change in parties, that in itself will not achieve actual change right away – there is ‘cultural lag’ whilst the previous culture persists, and all new information is filtered through the old beliefs (Metcalfe and Richards 1984). Party change is often restricted by ‘institutional inertia’ especially because, as with government, they have long-standing existing structures and rules (Hopkin 2003, 233). Under the leadership of William Hague, for example, businessman Archie Norman was brought into the Conservative Party as Chief Executive to lead a reorganisation. Norman altered the structure and organisation of Conservative Central Office, even knocking down walls to create an open-plan office design, but found himself hitting a range of internal cultural obstacles because of not understanding how different the Party was from business organisations (Lees-Marshment 2001). When interviewed about his work for the Party, Norman admitted that ‘it was a big change coming to this world’ and said ‘had I known I’d have been much more cautious’ (quoted in Lees-Marshment 2008, 221). Culture needs embedding but not necessarily formally or explicitly. Managers need to understand the existing culture and its existing norms and attitudes before trying to implement new ones. There are many obstacles to innovation in government. US senior government practitioners noted how resistance can occur due to the gravitational pull of the status quo, dilution of initiatives and changes in leadership which result in only incremental change rather than a real transformation with meaningful and lasting strategic change (Jackson 2005). The introduction of new public management systems into the Belgian federal administration as a result of the Copernicus reform produced mixed results where Belgian top officials were seen somewhat more as managers but their autonomy remained limited by rules that stifle top staff’s initiative (De Visscher et al 2011). Culture was therefore between the old Weberian culture centred on equality and legality and an entrepreneurial spirit. Politicians also resist change: in-depth insights from 100 senior managers who participated in reforms to restructure New Zealand central government in the mid-1980–1990s suggested that although government departments changed, the behaviour of ministers did not (Stace and Norman 1997, 22). Ministers did not understand the reforms nor accept the accountability the new order demanded and carried on playing the same old political games.

Political organising 4: enact and manage improvements As the Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet (2011, 66–7) noted, organisational change management ‘is a continuous process – a program, not a single event – and includes managing changes to the organisational culture including people, business processes, physical environment, job design/responsibilities, staff skills and knowledge, as well as policies and procedures.’ Political managers need to promote and support organisational development and carefully manage potential resistance to ensure that long-lasting change occurs. This includes leaders supporting and embodying change, working with non-political staff and building the motivation to change and innovate.

4a. Leaders need to support and embody the desired change through formal statements and role modelling For example, the Western Australia Liberal Party’s (2010, 6) Branch Office Bearers Guide notes the importance of commitment from the top in creating a strong governance culture, ‘senior

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managers must “walk the talk” – modelling good governance behaviours and demonstrating a commitment to achieving Government objectives through accountable processes.’ Furthermore, ‘Line managers also need to consistently and regularly send the same messages to reinforce the organisation’s governance approaches.’ UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministerial commitment to better management and greater efficiency in government helped to ensure that ministers and senior civil servants took the strategy seriously (Metcalfe and Richards 1984). A proactive mission culture and political support helps to overcome the negative impact of red tape on organisational performance if political leaders set a proactive culture that is mission-based and encourages managers to act with a greater entrepreneurial style to overcome constraints and support overcoming obstacles (Pandey and Moynihan 2006). Analysis of state-level primary human service agencies and interviews with senior managers confirmed that if the organisation has higher political support this will enhance such a culture as it will feel less constrained by rules and regulations. For example, the Clinton administration attempted to provide waivers from federal rules for any agencies or units that wished to avail of them. Interviews with departmental and agency heads in Australia also suggested that the scope for innovation is enhanced where there is government and ministerial support (i.e. a ‘permissive environment’), including recognition of the need for change (Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research 2009, 63). In contrast, where the behaviour of senior staff is negative that can adversely impact workplace cultures. In Canada, a PCO communications staffer recalled how her supervisor prevented them from intervening with a comment such as ‘what the **** are you doing?’ (Marland 2016). Another staff noted that ‘this man had ultimate control. Grown men at PCO were scared shitless of him. And PMO were scared shitless of him. In meetings, he would just take ’em down’ (Marland 2016, 205). Such behaviours were discussed as being learnt during a campaign involving long hours, crisis, high stress and rapid response – ‘senior politicos learn on the campaign trail that barking orders at subordinates is tolerated and even rewarded if results follow … rude behaviour is tolerated’ (Marland 2016, 208). However, the government went through 14 senior communication aides, including nine directors of communications in the PMO from 2002 to 2015.

4b. Politicians and political staff need to work with non-partisan staff Similarly, political appointees need to work with, rather than just direct, career staff to achieve policy change (Ingraham et al 1995). Presidents, their transition staffs and their political appointees need to recognise the complexity of public organisations and try to work with career staff or their efforts at policy change will be hindered. No one can just impose their direction on government departments, and command and control approaches can waste good will. Whilst the president and presidential staff need to give political appointees clear direction about policy priorities, the appointees themselves should avoid using unilateral hierarchical political control and instead work with non-partisan government staff who themselves think change is needed. The president and White House staff therefore need to communicate to their appointees the importance of working with career staff who may also understand that change was necessary to utilise their skills: ‘The effective political manager recognizes and utilizes that knowledge in building an effective policy management team of both political and career executives. To utilize

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available resources most productively, a joint strategy, not a unilateral strategy of hierarchical control, will be the most appropriate.’ (Ingraham 1988, 71) For example, analysis of the Housing Voucher Program in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the National and Dulles Airports Transfer in the Department of Transportation in President Ronald Reagan’s second term found that appointees utilised existing support for the need for change, as well staff skills and talents. However, this often does not happen because transition focuses on White House staff and political appointees, and cutting down the size of career staff in government, or ‘when management is considered, it is in relation to political management controls’ (Ingraham 1988, 62) which actually reduces productivity and effectiveness.

4c. Build the motivation to change and innovate using external drivers The motivation to change and innovate can come from a range of sources, including making presidential/prime ministerial priorities clear, gaining public support or a democratic mandate secured via election, election results, polling, changes in electoral systems and declining levels of traditional members. The policy priorities set by the prime minister and ministers can promote change. The Victorian Government (2007, 73) noted how government policy priorities, such as creating economic growth through investing in infrastructure and human capital, promoting fairness and participation and coping with climate change, generated public sector innovation. This included an increased emphasis on agile, joined-up government that works upwards with the Commonwealth; across government within the Victorian public sector; and with local government and the community; new forms of project management, including higher levels of community engagement; and environmental sustainability principles and actions being incorporated into everything the Victorian public sector does. Similarly, the Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (2011, 11) cites government as a driver, noting that the government sees ‘creating and maintaining an environment in which innovative ideas can be generated, tested, implemented, diffused and evaluated’ as a priority to avoid innovations just being a ‘one-off’, in response to crisis, or occurring despite the current working environment. Political leaders need to persuade the general public and public employees that reform will result in meaningful change in the quality of government because ‘after all, political management is a large part of public management; without the driving forces of high politics, needed adjustments to the process are delayed, downplayed, and under-funded’ (Kim and Wolff 1994, 85). Political leaders need to be willing to expend political capital and provide a clear vision both of the reform and improve government after the changes were made (Ingraham 1997). In the US, Vice President Gore’s reforms lacked a clear and comprehensible vision which left observers and participants asking what it all meant. Election results are a major driver in party development. As Quinn (2004, 172) argues, an unsuccessful party is like a plummeting hot-air balloon: if initial attempts to regain height are unsuccessful, items must be thrown overboard until the fall is halted and height regained. The longer a party is out of office, the more policies must be changed; organisational change is often a prerequisite for policy change, as the powerbases of those groups that cling to the old policies are undermined. The UK Labour Party implemented centralisation to increase

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the leader’s authority and loosen the influence of the unions, in order to make the Party more appealing to the wider electorate (Quinn 2004). The Party’s successive electoral failures helped to increase support for these changes, because electoral loss is a key stimulant of organisational change. The unions were perceived by the public to dominate the Labour Party’s organisation and be responsible for previous government failures, and thus threatened the Party’s credibility with voters. However, organisational adaptation to environmental pressures was not automatic, because substantial developments came only after four election losses and the election of Tony Blair as Party leader. Thus leadership is still needed to push through the changes in response to those external changes. Another driver is successive bad opinion polls. The Greek socialist leader George Papandreou seized the leadership after the previous leader resigned following bad polling, and attempted to use the pressure of forthcoming legislative elections in 2004 to transform the party (Rori 2008). The Prime Minister and Party leader Costas Simitis resigned at the start of the campaign, because of bad polling and proposed Papandreou to be his successor after performing well in the polls, saying ‘in my choice to propose him and not others, personal sympathies or dislikes did not play any role. Only the man who was most widely accepted by public opinion and could assure us a normal succession and a victory in elections’ (quoted by Rori 2008, 307). The change in leadership facilitated the introduction of innovative organisational changes. A special Party congress was held to elect the new leader, which gave the right to vote to both rank and filers and sympathisers and thus brought the wider electorate into the process. Open assemblies were introduced to encourage participation in selection of candidates; local, electronic or intraparty referenda were held; and important issues and appeals were made for participation from the youth, women, immigrants, social movements and marginalised social groups. The Party also institutionalised the equal participation of men and women to all candidate lists. Overall public opinion was used by the new leader to introduce radical ideas that were more likely to be accepted by the public than by hard-core loyal voters. However, the Party also had to scale back proposed reforms at times when they were unpopular and there was insufficient time to completely transform the Party in order to win. Changes in the electoral system can also drive change, but sometimes only when also accompanied by electoral loss. The introduction of the mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral system in New Zealand meant that parties had to campaign for two votes in each electorate: the party vote and the candidate vote; they also had to create national lists of candidates (Stephens and Leslie 2011). Parties also had to find candidates suitable for electorate as well as on the party’s list for the national campaign. The party leadership acquired more authority over candidate selection and parties needed to develop coordinating mechanisms to balance needing to appeal to voters as a whole and the local electorate party office and voters. Labour responded to these challenges quickly after suffering losses in 1996 by reassigning existing organisational resources such as central decision-makers’ time towards the tasks of creating candidate lists and running national campaigns. However, National’s responsiveness was not as effective: early attempts arty to respond to MMP soon after its introduction in 1993 met internal resistance and when the Party won regardless in 1996 the leadership gave up trying to push further reform. It was not until a second successive – and major – loss in 2002 that there was enough support for change. New reforms then centralised the Party’s leadership bodies, replacing the Party executive with a smaller national management board. Changes also centralised the Party organisation by restricting the number of veto players in key operations such as candidate selection and campaign management, and having the Party president selected by a small group including the Party leader.

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Parties have also made changes to the internal participation structures in response to declining members. Parties in Europe adapted and expanded organisationally in response to declining membership size, seeming to learn from change (Kolln 2015). Party managers have adapted to challenges in recruiting active volunteers and members by offering them incentives for activism (Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014). They are not, after all, paid, yet are an important part of an organisation’s ‘staff’ as such and invaluable in getting things done. Parties are increasingly involving party activists much more into the campaign structure, in areas such as deciding how campaigning is run and training activists to lead and manage the campaigning rather than being merely foot soldiers on the ground. Parties have also justified developing their candidate selection process in response to organisational decline and electoral loss as well as crisis. They claim to want to make them more democratic and increase participation by providing non-members with a means to be more involved in the party through primaries, which extend selection of candidates beyond the party membership (Gauja 2012). The precise form varies from open primaries involving all residents in a particular electorate to more closed ones where residents need to register as supporters and prospective voters. The UK Conservatives began in 2006 to hold over 100 open-constituency meetings and two electorate-wide postal primaries to select the Party’s House of Commons candidates. The UK Conservatives’ introduction of postal primaries before the 2010 election was an attempt to help the Party recover from a parliamentary expenses scandal. Australian Labor and the Nationals trialled community pre-selections for the state and local levels. The Norwegian Labor Party adapted the core idea from Obama’s campaign that organisation not technology was the key to success, using technology to organise, activate and recruit grassroots volunteers (Karlsen 2013). Thus while their 2009 campaign online strategy was mostly focused on engaging existing members and supporters, it also sought to recruit new members and activists by making it easier and more attractive to join the Party by giving new recruits instant ways to be involved. Parties have also responded to changes in their environment with issue-focused campaigns which use differentiated branding, asked people to campaign on the issues, rather than for the party itself, and enabled non-members to join (Huhtanen 2015). For example, the German Christian Democratic Union, called ‘teAM Deutschland’ divided its more than 21,000 volunteer campaign team, including both Party members and non-members, into local municipalities for the 2013 German general election. Its online platform called teAMNETz gave all members full information and opportunities to contribute ideas and make statements and thus contribute to defining the objectives of the Party. Similarly, in Finland the centre-right Kokoomus party launched 94 Café Niinistös for Finland’s 2012 presidential election, managed by volunteers, to try to make political discourse a normal aspect of everyday life for the campaign. Café Niinistö was very effective at mobilisation. Both examples had limited life, separate branding and clear operational concepts, and were run independently of the traditional Party structure. The parties evolved by adapting the tools used to deliver democracy to respond to declining desire to be full members.

Political organising 5: facilitate effective internal communication Political managers need to work to ensure there is effective internal and interpersonal communication within the organisation and between the individuals within it, because it influences how leaders’ instructions, plans and strategies are understood and implemented. As

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Gailmard and Patty (2013, 6) argue, ‘information is the lifeblood of executive branch action. Or at least, it is for effective action.’ For example, Congress and the president need to ensure that bureaucratic agencies have enough information to implement their preferred policies as desired. There are several aspects that make up interpersonal communication: how it is designed to pass on a message, including symbols and images as well as words; the communications medium used, whether email, speech, internal newsletter, annual report, verbal instructions to an advisor or social media; how it is received; anything that interferes with the transmission of a message or the ‘noise’ around the process; and feedback from the receiver in reaction to the communication. Political managers therefore need to use effective internal communication to inform, connect and support staff and volunteers, use technology and organisational units to connect and support communication and communications staff, and foster effective communication between politicians, non-partisan staff/civil servants and political staff.

5a. Use effective internal communication to inform, connect and support staff and volunteers and help individuals within the organisation follow strategic plan Information needs to be distributed throughout the organisation to inform, connect and support politicians, staff and volunteers. There are a range of interpersonal communication methods, including face-to-face communication, telephone calls, group meetings, formal presentations, memos, email, internal newsletters, videos, social media and policy documents. They include both vertical and horizontal communication. Vertical communication includes direct instructions from heads of government departments, emails between government staff, and party newsletters for members. Horizontal communication occurs between units and individuals within and across the organisation, such as staff networks, memos, briefings, reports, committee hearings, party and government intranets, and letters between politicians. Communication design should take into account how the receiver may interpret it, barriers to internal communication such as deliberate filtering and challenges of communicating across different parts of government or a party organisation and the communication culture and language within the organisation. For example, UK Government Communication Staff (2014) discuss how using videos internally can help staff do their job better by providing instructional information on film, which makes it easier for them to decode the material. Moreover, communication comes in verbal, non-verbal and visual forms. Not just words, but also non-verbal communication forms an essential part of interpersonal communication, such as eye contact, facial expressions, body movements and gestures, touch, setting and time, and the style that written communication is presented in as well as the images used may also affect communication. Non-verbal communication also has an impact: a deputy minister (a civil servant) in Canada reported using hand gestures to emphasise their refusal to do something they thought problematic, ‘I banged my fist on the table and told the minister that I would never sign that because I was the one who would have to answer questions before the parliamentary committee. I told him to sign it himself if he really wanted it’ (quoted in Bourgault 2011, 524). Political parties use internal newsletters to communicate with their local staff, members and volunteers. For example, the Western Australia Labor Party’s (2008) State Secretary’s Newsletter kept members up to date on the month’s events and opportunities, including information on the month’s meetings and nominations, a letter from the Premier of Western Australia, events such as International Women’s Day, a report on the Rudd Government’s first 100 days in office and an advertisement for involvement in one of the Labor Party’s policy

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committee. The Ontario Liberal Party’s (2013) Northern Ontario Update newsletter includes an address from the region’s President and aims to keep their members engaged in politics with an article on the internal leadership race entitled ‘Leadership 2013: It starts with you’ explaining how members could learn more about candidates and vote. Horizontal communication between politicians is also important. An unusual form of this in the US House of Representatives are ‘Dear colleague’ letters: formal, written, member-to-member correspondence (Straus 2013). They have long been used to persuade others to co-sponsor, support or oppose a Bill. While they are part of the public record, they are rarely scrutinised by the media and thus offer members more freedom of expression. Members who hold ‘safe’ seats were more likely to send a greater number of dear colleague letters than their counterparts who are not as safe electorally because they can spend more time on legislation instead of constituency service. The majority of letters were focused on internal content and thus play an important role in internal communication, being used to elicit legislative co-sponsors, followed by seeking signatures on letters to executive and legislative branch leadership, inviting colleagues to Capitol Hill events and lastly to provide information and opinions on legislative issues. Similarly, politicians involved in managing Parliament in Australia talked of the importance of internal communication and relationship building across political parties, ‘working hard at good relations with the cross-bench is vital … I spend a lot of my time on sitting days – which give us more of a chance to get together – on the other side of parliament talking to the cross-bench’ (Dreyfus 2019). When still in government but without a clear majority after the 2013 election, they ‘set about contacting in a concerted way the new cross-bench senators.’ Communication in coalition governments is absolutely crucial. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Chief of Staff noted how he used to stress to political advisors ‘the importance of making sure that we don’t surprise Green and New Zealand First – that they know what’s coming up, they get advance notice of the papers, and they get the cabinet papers a week before they are lodged with the cabinet office. That their consultation is critical to the smooth running of the government’ (Munro 2019). It was also important to get key policies through: the ministerial advisor to the Climate Change Minister who worked on the Zero Carbon Bill noted that to deal with the coalition parties effectively meant briefing cabinet ministers offices and advisors early with any draft cabinet papers and relevant information: ‘We had to ensure that everyone who would be in involved in deciding whether a Cabinet Minister supported a Cabinet paper was well informed about what was happening. For example, if a cabinet paper was being drafted, I would send out an early copy to the political parties, to the political advisors in the offices, to Labour, Greens, and NZ First, as early as I could, for any political feedback about the policies presented in the paper. It would often be a very early draft paper, with just some of the policy principles on the basis that these could all change, but we just wanted to tease out any political issues that might appear … I would talk to the advisors on the phone, or meet with them, sometimes bring officials in and then we would do workshops and carry out briefings on the paper. Once we had settled the broader political concerns – this could take a couple of weeks – we then sent a completed draft of the cabinet paper to offices, we could go through almost the same process again. By that time I knew, and had generally dealt with, the political issues, so we would have amended our paper accordingly if necessary. And then we would have a draft of the paper and we would go through that process again; we would make sure all the relevant Ministers in Cabinet, in the parties, the PM’s

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office and the DPM’s office had been briefed and we had people sitting down with them and talking with them about it and making sure that were informed and feeding back any amendments to address any concerns, back into the papers.’ (Baker-Jones 2019) They also read every draft cabinet paper from other ministers to identify how action on climate change could be reflected in their policy, and engaged in ‘a lot of discussions with other offices and passing on information’ (Baker-Jones 2019). Getting information to people identified any issues that could be dealt with ahead of time and avoided any surprises. Ministers wanted to be sure they were informed and understood what was being proposed, otherwise they might push back even if they were not instinctively against it. At the same time they had to try to avoid information overload: ‘There is so much on Ministers’ plates, and so much activity with climate change being just one of a number of other things that was going through government. We had to just help ministers in processing the information so that they felt comfortable when making their decisions.’ (Baker-Jones 2019) In government, communication is also important to the relationships between the civil service and political offices. In the US, presidents need to share information with bureaucrats to ensure delivery of presidential policies (Gailmard and Patty 2013, 6). While presidential access to information gives them power, as they can use information to help persuade, the bureaucracy needs good information about proposed policies if they are to implement them as the president desires. There are significant barriers to internal communication given the vast scope of the federal bureaucracy, and the information given to officials can often be poor quality or highly variable, ‘policy-relevant information held by executive branch actors does not emerge from the ether’ (Gailmard and Patty 2013, 10). The nature of receivers is also important: the ability of staff to understand and interpret policy ideas will also be affected by their administrative and policy expertise. The potential tension between non-political and political practitioners is also evident in other countries. As one staffer commented ‘unless the political offices and the bureaucracy work hand in hand there is absolutely no point in us being here. And I’ve seen that relationship breakdown before and it’s not pretty’ (Campbell 2019). Thus civil servants working in the Australian PM&C note that recruit from different units within government to increase the networks for their staff and reach out to new advisors: ‘In terms of cross-organizational communication, one way we do that is by recruiting from those organizations, as those people then have the networks there – they know the people, they know how they operate, they know who to talk to. PM&C is the sort of place where people come in for couple of years and typically go back to other agencies … it does give you those connections … When [political advisors] are new to the role we typically have a meeting, sit down, talk about both how we operate and what the policy issues in the space are, so open a conversation: “please let us know what we can do to help you.” We make it very clear that we are responsive and our role is to assist and so forth. And building that trust by providing good quality advice, responsive, timely, accurate, adding value. Making those connections … ’ (Lloyd 2019)

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The Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services also sees increasing more direct communication as key to improving the perceptions of their unit: he adopted a non-hierarchical style where he ‘may go over my managers and reach into the organisation whenever I want to, wherever I want to’ (Stefanic 2019). This can make some people uncomfortable but: ‘in our environment, issues escalate quickly. To give an example, in a typical sitting there will be some IT issues. We had persistent issues with our web servers but the immediate ripple that happens is that there must be a cyber-attack. It just sort of escalates and all of a sudden you have a parliamentarian ringing my office. To satisfy myself I would ring the head of cyber security and they say no, there’s no issue. So, when the Speaker or the President ring, I can go yes, no issue.’ (Stefanic 2019)

5b. Use technology and organisational units to connect and support communication and communications staff Australian political parties use intranets to increase vertical internal communication between central and local levels of the party organisations which helped ensure that candidates remain organised and on message (Van Onselen and Van Onselen 2008). The offices of local candidates and MPs are given access to party databases, which means local party staff and volunteers get information and advice more quickly, but it also enables the centre to coordinate and communicate with local-level campaigners especially on emerging issues during campaigns. They can track who accesses the secure website, to what purpose and how often, helping to ensure that security is maintained but also making sure candidates are using the site. In 2004 and 2007 the Liberal Party intranet had a wide area network which allowed geographically dispersed usage, with private secure pages that allowed the user to access information from the secure server. The site was accessed by authorised users, such as politicians, candidates and campaign managers. The sites were populated by federal Party offices and government offices (ministerial offices and the PMO). Information included background briefing notes from ministerial offices during Parliament, briefing notes prepared by the federal Party secretariats and talking points about key issues uploaded each morning and updated throughout the day during campaigns. They also provided ‘shell’ campaign brochures and media releases which had centralised fixed message headings and policy details, but blank spaces for local content to be inserted by the local campaign and candidate. This created a resource for central Party operatives to exercise control over local campaigns even if the information provision was centrally driven and hierarchically conveyed. The organisation of communication in top party offices also needs to be managed. In the 2019 Australian Labor campaign, because of the massively increased digital content, the campaign chief of staff discussed how they introduce a new system: ‘Office 365 provided a functionally that meant material could be cleared using that online system. But you’re introducing a new IT system to a group of people who have never used it before to manage a highly sensitive process. With massive potential mess up consequences if things went out without being cleared and so forth. That in itself created some challenges that needed to be worked through during the campaign. But it has got impossible to manage a campaign now without the kind of technical back end because the amount of digital content was just massive.’ (Nash 2019)

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The office of the Australian Labor Party leader also uses technological tools to aid communication within that specific unit, ‘as well as emails there are comms tools we use for internal stuff and organizing work groups’ (Gartrell 2019). Governments have utilised technology to support the work of their communications staff. The Government of New Brunswick connects internal communication to integrative organisation and cross-boundary collaboration to support communications staff. It created a New Professionals Network to improve internal communication to help ‘eliminate the perceived silo effect throughout Government and to increase cooperation across Departments’ (New Brunswick Government 2008, 5). Similarly, the UK Government launched an award-winning online resource for internal communications professionals across government, the IC Space and an Internal Communications Standard Operating Model with common standards and operating principles, seeking to support communication staff effectiveness (UK Government 2015). The Alberta Government (2007) utilise three internal units: communications branches work with ministry management to ensure coordinated communications processes, the Public Affairs Bureau provides strategic advice and leadership on internal communications matters and help develop mechanisms and tools to enhance communications with staff, and Corporate Human Resources plays a key role in communicating information to employees. Internal communication tools used multimedia and electronic materials, and the intranet.

5c. Foster effective communication between politicians, non-partisan staff/civil servants and political staff Politicians also need to avoid engaging in external communication that might negatively impact on internal staff and morale and build up positive relationships with non-partisan staff. They often criticise civil servants during campaigns to get votes, but this then damages future internal communication, relationships and morale, and thus hinders organisational effectiveness, including policy implementation, relationships involved in program management and policy implementation (Garrett et al 2006). In campaigns, politicians talk about cutting fraud and stopping the waste of public funds, as well as putting out vague statements such as Ronald Reagan’s promise to get government ‘off people’s backs’ and Jimmy Carter’s pledge to ‘restore the confidence of our people in this nation’s governing institutions’. Reagan even likened the federal government to an evil empire. Focus groups in 2000 and 2001 with senior federal managers found that such statements create negative mental frames and political symbols about government which staff internalise, creating frustration amongst them and inserting hostility, animosity, suspicion and strain into the internal relationship between staff, politicians and political appointees. This lowers morale and recruitment, and ultimately reduces policy-making opportunities and the effectiveness of policy program management. Garrett et al (2006, 237) argue that there is thus ‘a fundamental communication gap between politicians, appointees, and senior managers’ and ‘more measured and complete communication’ would improve staff morale but also lead to more productive working relationships between politicians, appointees and career bureaucrats, and ultimately more effective policy implementation. The Canadian government has also found that co-operation between senior officials and politicians has an impact on departmental morale, recruitment and strategic management of governmental affairs, particularly in minority governments (Bourgault 2011). The effectiveness of communications and relationships depends on the minister’s existing attitude towards the senior civil service. One senior official suggested some ministers ‘believe you have to beat

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senior civil servants to get them to work right’ and one (non-partisan) deputy minister had not spoken to his minister in months before they were replaced (Bourgault 2011, 521). Deputy ministers therefore work hard to build good relationships with ministers. Regular communication is the key to this as well as paying attention to the minister’s specific concerns and expectations with respect to deadlines, results and resources. Deputy ministers also manage the minister and the department’s relationship with central units, especially given the centralisation of communications through the PMO and tighter control over ministers. It is also valuable to create informal opportunities for politicians to interact with political staff, both their own and those working for other ministers. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key (2013b) talked about having a good relationship with the Deputy Prime Minister due to early and regular communication, but also that they communicate with staff ‘it’s actually that our offices are extremely closely linked. So I’m just as likely to run into Bill’s main press secretary or his economic team on my floor as he would be to run into my people.’ In particular, communications advisors need organised access to, and a positive, trusting relationship with, politicians, to manage communications effectively (Schnee 2015). Communications staff have to know what the politician has on their mind, intends to do, or what policies are emerging in order to achieve communication objectives. Horizontal communications structures are also needed within media or communication units within political offices rather than letting information filter down vertically which may delay the information getting to junior offices and prevent them working effectively. If staff do not seem well briefed then the media will not trust them. In practice, internal communication relationships are not always that effective: in the office of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown there was a disconnect between operational and strategic levels, due to a lack of communications between media handlers and politicians. Sometimes communications staff were left in the dark when decisions were made. This made it hard for media relations staff to influence presentational decisions. At times, more junior media staff were left to wait for up to two days for a decision from the prime minister; whereas in contrast Tony Blair, Brown’s predecessor, ensured his staff had access via daily 8 am meetings with communications staff as well as the head of strategy to plan the day ahead.

Summary and a theory of political organising In summary, political organising involves understanding where power potentially lies, but that it is very constrained and rarely automatic, growing it where possible but using it carefully. It includes thinking about how best to organise people within parties, campaigns and government, with both formally distinct and differentiated designs and cross-functional task forces and czars focused on specific department-spanning policy issues having pros and cons. Political managers also need to reflect on when organisational development and change is needed, even when the organisation is enjoying success, such as after an election; to be proactive instead of reactive to changes in the environment. Leading change involves careful communication and long-term processes that draw on external drivers to create the motivation for change and ensure longlasting cultural as well as functional change. Lastly, organisations need to foster effective internal communication, using technology and organisational units where appropriate, but also using positive communication and interactions between politicians and their staff. Table 3.2 presents a theory of political organising. Chapter 4 on political human resources explores the recruitment and management of individuals in political organisations, such as politicians, political staff and party/campaign volunteers.

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TABLE 3.2 A theory of political organising

POLITICAL ORGANISING 1: CREATE AND UTILISE POWER Choose, use, grow and give power, authority and control prudently 1a. Understand that political power is dispersed, diverse, constrained and contested 1b. Increase formal authoritative power by exerting control centralising decision making and exerting control over other organisations and individuals 1c. Extend informal indirect power through staffing, new organisational units, communication systems and auditing 1d. Distribute power and control vertically down or horizontally across the organisation carefully given the variable impacts POLITICAL ORGANISING 2: ORGANISE AND CONNECT PEOPLE Organise people, their tasks and interactions into the most suitable linear or lateral organisational design 2a. Adopt more formal, rigid and differentiated organisation for specific areas such as skills, services, policies, issues, processes, tasks or a section of society to provide clarity and control 2b. Utilise informal, integrative, boundaryless and temporary organisation to encourage more collaboration and improve coordination POLITICAL ORGANISING 3: IDENTIFY NEED FOR IMPROVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT Understand, and identify the need for changes to the organisation and its culture and areas to develop 3a. Be proactive at recognising and identifying the need for development through environmental scanning, political market research and party reviews after elections 3b. Understand how the current culture works and impacts on the organisation, including existing internal traditions, norms and behaviours 3c. Appreciate that there are lots of challenges to changing the culture of political organisations as they are more cushioned from change or performance consequences POLITICAL ORGANISING 4: ENACT AND MANAGE IMPROVEMENTS Promote and support organisational development and innovation 4a. Leaders need to support and embody the desired change through formal statements and role modelling 4b. Politicians and political staff need to work with non-partisan staff 4c. Build the motivation to change and innovate using external drivers POLITICAL ORGANISING 5: FACILITATE EFFECTIVE INTERNAL COMMUNICATION Facilitate effective internal communication throughout the organisation 5a. Use effective internal communication to inform, connect and support staff and volunteers and help individuals within the organisation follow strategic plans 5b. Use technology and organisational units to connect and support communication and communications staff 5c. Foster effective communication between politicians, non-partisan staff/civil servants and political staff

References Primary sources Practitioner interviews Baker-Jones, M (2019) Former Ministerial Advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment in Auckland, NZ. 18 November.

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Burke, T (2019) Australian Labor and Party Manager of Opposition Business, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Campbell, A (2019) Former political staffer in the Australian Prime Minister’s Office under Malcolm Turnbull, currently Assistant Secretary, Priorities and Delivery Unit, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Dreyfus, M (2019) Australian Labor MP, and former Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House (2013–2019) and former Cabinet Minister, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 8 November. Erickson, P (2019) National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at Labor headquarters, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Gartrell, T (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Greiner, N (2019) Australian Liberal Party Federal President, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 29 October. Lloyd, R (2019) Assistant Secretary, Taxation, Financial Sector and Employment Branch Economic Division, Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at PM&C, Canberra, Australia. 28 October. Munro, M (2019) Former Chief of Staff to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 12 November. Nash, Y (2019) Chief of Staff for the Federal Australian Labor 2019 Campaign headquarters and Chief of Staff for opposition leader Bill Shorten, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Stefanic, R (2019) Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at Parliament House Canberra, Australia. 25 October.

Government documents Alberta Government (2007) Government of Alberta Communications Policy. 15 May. AB, Canada. Report retrieved from http://open.alberta.ca/dataset/61edaa20-a93b-4d8c-80d4-fb42c27d5274/resource/ 0ba86ad9-d3cc-4bba-99bc-e8dc6641f2cc/download/2007-Communications-Policy-May-15-07.pdf. Australian Department of Innovation Industry, Science and Research (2009) Innovation in the Public Sector: Enabling Better Performance, Driving New Directions – Better Practice Guide. December. Australia: Department of Innovation Industry, Science and Research. Report retrieved from https://www.ana o.gov.au/sites/g/files/net616/f/2009_Innovation_in%20the_public_sector.pdf. Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (2011) APS Innovation Action Plan. Australia: Australian Government. Report retrieved from http://www.industry.gov.au/innova tion/publicsectorinnovation/Documents/APS_Innovation_Action_Plan.pdf. Australian Public Service Commission (2003) The Australian Experience of Public Sector Reform. Barton, ACT, Australia. Report retrieved from https://resources.apsc.gov.au/pre2005/exppsreform.pdf. New Brunswick Government (2008) New Brunswick New Professionals Networks Proposed Plan of Action. Canada: New Professionals Network Executive. Report retrieved from http://www2.gnb.ca/con tent/dam/gnb/Departments/ohr-brh/pdf/np/new_professionals_action_plan-e.pdf. NSW Government (2011) Cluster Leadership Structure in 2011https://www.dpc.nsw.gov.au/tools-a nd-resources/machinery-of-government/cluster-leadership-structure/ accessed 8 August 2019. NSW Government, Premier & Cabinet (2013) NSW Public Sector Governance Framework. NSW, Australia. Report retrieved from http://www.dpc.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/158005/ NSW-Public-Sector-Governance-Framework-2013.pdf. Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet (2011) Project Management Guidelines. July. Hobart, Tasmanian Government, Australia. Report retrieved from http://www.dpac.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0019/147511/Tasmanian_Government_Project_Management_Guidelines_V7_0_July_2011.pdf.

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UK Government (2015) Government Communications Plan 2015/16. London, UK: Crown. Report retrieved from https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/GCS-Government-Communica tions-Plan-1516.pdf. Victorian Government (2007) The State of the Public Sector in Victoria 2007–08. VIC, Australia: State Services Authority. Report retrieved from http://vpsc.vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/89_ statevps200708.pdf.

Party documents IDEA (2013) Strategic Planning for Political Parties: A Practical Tool (extract). International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Retrieved from https://www.idea.int/sites/default/files/publica tions/strategic-planning-for-political-parties.pdf. Ontario Liberal Party (2013) Northern Ontario Update. March. ON, Canada. Report retrieved from http s://ontario.liberal.ca/files/2013/03/northern-ontario-march-2013-newsletter.pdf. UK Conservative Party (2016) Conservative Party Review 2016. London, UK: Conservative Party. Report retrieved from http://www.conservativehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Conserva tive-Party-Review-Report-1.pdf. Western Australia Labor Party (2008) State Secretary’s Newsletter. March. WA, Australia: Australian Labour Party Western Australia Branch. Report retrieved from http://walabor.org.au/download/a lp_0678_pdf_march_08_2_2.pdf?mode=text&mode=gfx&mode=print. Western Australia Liberal Party (2010) Branch Office Bearers Guide. West Perth, WA, Australia. Report retrieved from http://engage.wa.liberal.org.au/libmail/forms/Branch%20Office%20Bearers%20Guide.pdf.

Politician comments Cunliffe, D (2014) Comments on election night, 2014, quoted in ‘As it happened: New Zealand election 2014.’ The New Zealand Herald. Article retrieved from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11327781. Gillard, J (2014) My Story. Knopf. North Sydney Key, J (2013a) Interviewed in Tracy Watkins, ‘Key credits team for National’s success.’ 9 November. Article retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/politics/9382256/Keycredits-team-for-Nationals-success. Key, J (2013b) Interview with Corin Dann on Q&A, TVNZ. Obama, B (2016) ‘POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush interviews President Barack Obama on Iowa, 2016, and the choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.’ 22 January. Podcast retrieved from http:// www.politico.com/story/2016/01/off-message-podcast-transcript-obama-218167.

Practitioner comments Axelrod, D (2013) ‘Inside the Obama campaign – an interview with David Axelrod.’ 15 March. Interview with David Muir, IPPR, retrieved from http://www.ippr.org/juncture/inside-the-obama -campaign-an-interview-with-david-axelrod. Carson, J (2009) Executive Director and former Illinois State Director for Obama for America, 2007– 2008 quoted in K Hall Jamieson, Electing the President, 2008: The Insiders’ View. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 43–44. Cummings, D (2014) ‘The Hollow Men: What’s wrong with Westminster and Whitehall, and what to do about it.’ November. Address to the IPPR retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= GNaWPV5l4j4. Plouffe, D (2015) Quoted in N Irwin, ‘Why a Presidential Campaign Is the Ultimate Start-Up.’ 4 June. The New York Times. Article retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/upshot/why-a -presidential-campaign-is-the-ultimate-start-up.html.

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Shergold, P (2005) ‘Regeneration: New Structures, New Leaders, New Traditions.’ Australian Journal of Public Administration 64(2): 3–6. UK Government Communication Staff (2014) ‘Internal communications across government.’ 16 January. UK Government Communication Service video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=9w5l63YOBZ8.

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Gibson, R and S Ward (1999) ‘Party Democracy On-Line: UK Parties and New ICTs.’ Information, Communication & Society 2(3): 340–367. Heymann, P B (1988) The Politics of Public Management. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hopkin, J (2003) ‘Political Decentralization, Electoral Change and Party Organizational Adaptation: A Framework for Analysis.’ European Urban and Regional Studies 10(2): 227–237. Hopkin, J (2009) ‘Party Matters: Devolution and Party Politics in Britain and Spain.’ Party Politics 15(2): 179–198. Howell, W G and D E Lewis (2002) ‘Agencies by Presidential Design.’ Journal of Politics 64(4): 1095–1114. Huhtanen, T (2015) ‘Can political parties evolve if the political system does not?’ European View 14(1): 59–67. Ingraham, P W (1988) ‘Transition and Policy Change in Washington.’ Public Productivity Review 12(1): 61–72. Ingraham, P W (1997) ‘Play It Again, Sam; It’s Still Not Right: Searching for the Right Notes in Administrative Reform.’ Public Administration Review 57(4): 325–331. Ingraham, P W, et al. (1995) ‘Political Management Strategies and Political/Career Relationships: Where are we now in the federal government?’ Public Administration Review 55(3): 263–272. Jackman, M C (2014) ‘Parties, median legislators, and agenda setting: how legislative institutions matter.’ Journal of Politics 76(1): 259–272. Jackson, R (2005) ‘Achieving Strategic Change in Government.’ Public Manager 34(1): 40–50. Jackson, S M (2013) ‘Organization as an Impediment to Effective ICT Campaigning.’ Information, Communication & Society 16(1): 82–104. Karlsen, R (2013) ‘Obama’s Online Success and European Party Organizations: Adoption and Adaptation of U.S. Online Practices in the Norwegian Labor Party.’ Journal of Information Technology & Politics 10(2): 158–170. Kavanagh, D and D Richards (2001) ‘Departmentalism and joined-up government.’ Parliamentary Affairs 54(1): 1–18. Kim, P S and L W Wolff (1994) ‘Improving Government Performance: Public Management Reform and the National Performance Review.’ Public Productivity & Management Review 18(1): 73–87. Kolln, A-K (2015) ‘The effects of membership decline on party organisations in Europe.’ European Journal of Political Research 54(4): 707–725. Kumar, M J (2001) ‘The Office of Communications.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31(4): 609–634. Kumar, M J (2002) ‘Recruiting and organizing the White House staff.’ PS: Political Science and Politics 35 (1): 35–40. Langmaid, R (2012) ‘Co-creating the future.’ In J Lees-Marshment (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Political Marketing. New York: Routledge, pp. 61–76. Lebel, G G (1999) ‘Managing volunteers: time has changed – or have they?’ In B Newman (ed.) Handbook of Political Marketing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lees-Marshment, J (2001) ‘Marketing the British Conservatives 1997–2001.’ Journal of Marketing Management 17(9/10): 929–941. Lees-Marshment, J (2008) Political Marketing and British Political Parties. 2nd revised edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lees-Marshment, J and R T Pettitt (2014) ‘Mobilising volunteer activists in political parties: the view from central office.’ Contemporary Politics 20(2): 246–260. The LSE GV314 Group (2012) ‘New Life at the Top: Special Advisers in British Government.’ Parliamentary Affairs 65(4): 715–732. Maley, M (2010) ‘Australia.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 94–113. Maor, M (1999) ‘The Paradox of Managerialism.’ Public Administration Review 59(1): 5–18. Marland, A (2016) Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control. Vancouver: UBC Press.

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Matthews, F and M Flinders (2015) ‘The watchdogs of “Washminster” – parliamentary scrutiny of executive patronage in the UK.’ Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 53(2): 153–176. Metcalfe, L and S Richards (1984) ‘The Impact of the Efficiency Strategy: Political Clout or Cultural Change.’ Public Administration 62(4): 439–454. Miragliotta, N (2012) ‘Federalism, party organization and the Australian Greens.’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 58(1): 97–111. Onselen, P and W Errington (2005) ‘Shock troops: The emerging role of Senators in House of Representatives campaigns.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 40(3): 357–371. Pandey, S K and D Moynihan (2006) ‘Bureaucratic red tape and organizational performance: Testing the moderating role of culture and political support.’ In G Boyne, K Meier, L JO’TooleJr and R M Walker (eds) Public Service Performance: Perspectives on Measurement and Management. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130–151. Pfiffner, J P (2011) ‘Decision making in the Obama White House.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 41(2): 244–262. Pruysers, S (2015) ‘Two Political Worlds? Multi-level Campaign Integration in Canadian Constituencies.’ Regional and Federal Studies 25(2): 165–182. Quinn, T (2004) Modernising the Labour Party: organisational change since 1983. Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rockman, B A (1993) ‘Tightening the Reins: The Federal Executive and the Management Philosophy of the Reagan Presidency.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 23(1): 103–114. Rori, L (2008) ‘Party Politics and Campaign Strategies: Policy Making and Organizational Changes of the Greek Socialist Party During the 2004 Electoral Campaign.’ Journal of Political Marketing 7(3–4): 295–322. Rothstein, H and J Downer (2012) ‘“Renewing Defra”: exploring the emergence of risk-based policymaking in UK central government.’ Public Administration 90(3): 781–799. Savoie, D J (1983) ‘The Minister’s Staff: The Need for Reform.’ Canadian Public Administration 26: 509–524. Savoie, D J (2004) ‘Searching for accountability in a government without boundaries.’ Canadian Public Administration 47(1): 1–26. Schnee, C (2015) Political Reputation Management: The Strategy Myth. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, J (2009) ‘Campaigning and the catch-all party: the process of party transformation in Britain.’ Party Politics 15(5): 555–572. Smith, R and A Gauja (2010) ‘Understanding party constitutions as responses to specific challenges.’ Party Politics 16(6): 755–775. Stace, D and R Norman (1997) ‘Re-invented government: the New Zealand experience.’ Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 35(1): 21–36. Stehr, S D (1997) ‘Top bureaucrats and the distribution of influence in Reagan’s executive branch.’ Public Administration Review 57(1): 75–82. Stephens, G R and J Leslie (2011) ‘Parties, organizational capacities and external change: New Zealand’s National and Labour parties, candidate selection and the advent of MMP.’ Political Science 63 (2): 205–218. Stern, E K (2009) ‘Crisis Navigation: Lessons from History for the Crisis Manager in Chief.’ Governance 22(2): 189–202. Stewart, J and M Maley (2007) ‘The Howard Government and Political Management: The Challenge of Policy Activism.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 42(2): 277–293. Stilborn, J (2014) ‘The investigative study role of Canada’s house committees: expectations met?’ Journal of Legislative Studies 20(3): 342–359. Straus, J R (2013) ‘Use of “dear colleague” letters in the US House of representatives: a study of internal communications.’ Journal of Legislative Studies 19(1): 60–75. Taylor, M (2001) ‘Party Democracy and Civic Renewal.’ Political Quarterly 72(1): 18–26. Tenpas, K D and M J Dickinson (1997) ‘Governing, campaigning, and organizing the presidency: An electoral connection?’ Political Science Quarterly 112(1): 51–66.

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Thompson, J R (2006) ‘The Federal Civil Service: The Demise of an Institution.’ Public Administration Review 66(4): 496–503. Van Onselen, A and P Van Onselen (2008) ‘On message or out of touch? Secure web sites and political campaigning in Australia.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 43(1): 43–58. Vaughn, J S (2014) ‘The contemporary presidency: reconsidering presidential policy czars.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 44(3): 522–535. Villalobos, J D, J S Vaughn and D B Cohen (2014) ‘Public Management in Political Institutions: Explaining Perceptions of White House Chief of Staff Influence.’ Public Administration 92(3): 744–760. Walcott, C E, S A Warshaw and S J Wayne (2001) ‘The Chief of Staff.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31 (3): 464–489. Weller, P (2012) ‘Fight, Flee or Fulminate: Prime Ministerial Challengers, Strategic Choices and the Rites of Succession.’ Political Quarterly 83(1): 152–162. Wilson, P R (2015) ‘Minister’s Caucus Advisory Committees under the Harper Government.’ Canadian Public Administration 58(2): 227–248.

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4 POLITICAL HUMAN RESOURCES Appointing and utilising staff and volunteers in government, parties and campaigns

Introduction to political HR in government, parties and campaigns Political human resources (HR) is all about people: who are involved in parties, campaigns and governments, how they behave, and how managers can encourage them to work towards achieving organisational goals. Political HR is concerned with how volunteers, candidates, staff, party leaders and ministers are recruited and appointed to their role; oriented, trained and developed for it; and supported and motivated to perform to a high level both individually and within their group in the organisation. Organisations are made up of people, and thus political HR is extremely important to getting things done in parties, campaigns and government. As Maley (2010, 109) argued, the work of partisan ministerial advisers ‘is vital to modern political management.’ Political HR firstly includes identifying staffing needs and creating accurate job descriptions and selection criteria, recruiting and appointing those who meet the competencies and political loyalties the jobs require. Secondly, politicians, staff and volunteers also need orientating into their roles effectively, and training to develop their skills. Thirdly, managing people also involves understanding how people work and are motivated both individually and in groups and using this knowledge to encourage them to perform to a high level. As outlined in Chapter 1, the people involved in political management include volunteers, candidates, staff, party leaders and ministers working on campaigns, for political parties and in political offices in government. This chapter thus focuses on their roles and behaviour, and excludes non-partisan staff working in government (called civil servants, public servants, career staff or bureaucrats), apart from where the relationship between politicians/political staff and civil servants is relevant to political offices, political practitioners and partisan goals and the overall effectiveness of political management or political practitioners influence the behaviour of non-partisan staff. Of all the areas of political management, political HR has stood out as a major area of concern because there is very little formal HR in politics and it was the most common area interviewees mentioned when asked what most needed researching in political management. For example, comments included:

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‘Everyone kind of says you need to do it, you need to have an induction process’ (Campbell 2019). ‘I remember talking to Ministerial services about it, because they are the employment authority at parliament, and they are the ones who pay the salaries and write the job contract. I remember talking about the fact that there was just no template and no training, or manual if you like, for a political advisor’ (Munro 2019). ‘The political stuff [for getting a policy through parliament once elected] you don’t have a set process for doing that, but now I know how it works, it can be planned … [but] there’s no guidebook on that, and that’s a gap’ (Baker-Jones 2019).

The recruitment and management of political practitioners is challenging and does not – indeed, arguably, cannot – work in the same way as a business. As of 2016, an incoming US presidential administration needs to appoint around 4,000 new employees, of which about 1,000 require Senate approval (Centre for Presidential Transition 2016). Over 500 of these will be top appointees whom the president has to rely on to manage around 1.75 million civil servants in 15 executive departments, 60+ independent agencies, and 60+ lesser boards, commissions and committees (Wood and Marchbanks 2008, 375). There are approximately 1,700 employees in the Executive Office of the President, and most are politically selected; these political roles include policy, legal or other aspects and they are also managerial (Peters 2010). There has been a significant growth in political staff employed in governments worldwide (Peters 2010; Maley 2010; Fawcett and Gay 2010; Aucoin 2010; Eichbaum and Shaw 2010). This attracts a lot of debate and critique yet is a response to the growth in challenges facing politicians in government, such as development of 24/7 media, consumerist public, more complex electoral and party systems requiring greater parliamentary negotiation, decline in deference towards politicians, more turbulent campaign communication environment and more complex policy making that cuts across government organisational units. Ministers and advisors thus report that partisan staff help to ‘exercise tighter management of the policy process’, ‘ensure stronger political management of policy issues’ and make the government more responsive to the strategic plan (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010, 117). Yet despite the importance of political staffers, standard HR practices do not exist when it comes to their recruitment, selection and orientation, nor does it with candidates, MPs and ministers. MPs start their role at short notice and are expected to hit the ground running (Coghill et al 2008, 75). Ministers are also selected on factors other than skills, and both MPs and ministers choose their advisors for political connections rather than skills, a problem exacerbated by a lack of job specification for political advisors. There is little or no training, advice or mentoring for politicians and political staff who find themselves in the position of managing people in government and political offices. Given the importance of government in society, the lack of HR for those running it raises significant concern. This chapter explores such themes for government but also for parties and campaigns. Table 4.1 outlines the core areas of political HR.

Political HR 1: identify staffing needs The first step in HR is to research and analyse staffing needs and jobs to create accurate job descriptions and selection criteria.

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TABLE 4.1 Key areas of political HR

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Identify staffing needs Recruit appropriately Train and develop Learn how people work Motivate Encourage excellence

1a. Systematically research, understand and predict future staffing requirements Political managers should predict future employee needs through a range of potential activities, including: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Considering the organisation’s goals or strategic plan. Collecting and curating data such as a HR inventory on current jobs and employees skills and external and internal sources for future staffing. Conducting a job analysis of what jobs are needed to be filled and what they involve. Creating job specifications that outline the necessary qualities to carry them out.

No previous academic research on HR planning in politics was identified, only documents from government departments that discuss it, such as the US Department of Veterans Affairs (2005, 22) which notes the importance of workforce planning in ‘determining the kinds of employees and infrastructure required to accomplish the organization’s mission’ and discusses engaging in succession planning which involves ‘identifying the workforce’s developmental needs and determining workforce trends and predictions.’

1b. Conduct a job analysis to create and update job descriptions and selection criteria outlining the competencies necessary for the position Job analysis includes considering the relevance of a range of skills. There is little identification of job analysis being conducted in politics in previous academic research apart from reports on work done by organisational psychologist Jo Silvester with the UK Conservative and Liberal Parties that are discussed later in the chapter (Silvester and Dykes 2007; Silvester 2012). The Northwest Territories Government (2008, 73) Municipal and Community Affairs Department suggested that information can be gathered for a job description by reviewing the current specification, job descriptions from other organisations, interviewing current or previous people who did the job and occupational standards. In the US, projects such as the 2000 transition project (e.g. Kumar et al 2000; Kumar 2021a, 2001b), based on interviews with former White House Officials by the Presidency Research Group, provide valuable information, and work published by the likes of Kumar, etc as well as articles on advisors and politicians are used in this chapter. The Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese argued that political offices need to have clear roles written down, which creates clarity, and the benefits of which are ‘massive’, including leading to a ‘better use of resources, it allows proper

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delegation which means people are actually motivated and are building expertise, and generally reduces confusion and internal politicking as it sets out the ground rules: who does what, how they do it’ (Gartrell 2019). He uses the analogy of little kids’ soccer, which lacks the assignment of different positions on the field: ‘If you don’t have that role clarity then it just becomes a big swirling mess. I watched a bunch of kids playing soccer, like little ones, and under 5’s games are hilarious, because no one stays in position and everyone just chases the ball around. It is really funny, and hilarious to watch. And then they get tired and want to go home. And that’s a good metaphor for why you’ve don’t have everyone doing everything in the organizational world, particularly in politics where the ball moves a lot and it’s very bright and shiny and gets media attention a lot.’ (Gartrell 2019) Job descriptions should cover the purpose, scope, responsibilities and competencies. Competencies include knowledge, skills and attitudes. The skills required vary from one job to another, but common skills in politics include internal and external communication skills, information sharing, gate-keeping, advising, coordination, intellectual skills, relating to people/relationship building, people management, representing and advocating, leading and motivating, strategic thinking, policy expertise, policy management, decision making, adaptability and resilience. There are three broad types of management skills: technical, human and conceptual (Katz 1974). Adapting these concepts to politics, we can argue that technical skills in politics might include knowledge of parliamentary and campaign finance rules, and conducting and interpreting market research; human skills will include people skills and communication and conceptual skills leadership, research, analysis, strategic thinking, vision, planning and forecasting. Chiefs of staff for parties, campaigns or political offices will definitely need human skills, and more strategic or analytical roles, for example political advisors and campaign directors will need conceptual skills, whereas parliamentary officers, data scientists and operation directors in campaigns will need technical skills. Competencies are favoured over qualifications and experience because having a degree or several years of experience does not necessarily mean a person can do the job, and potentially excellent candidates can be blocked from applying if they do not meet the specific qualifications yet they may have the actual skills needed to do the job. Instead, candidates should be allowed to demonstrate they meet the competencies in the way that suits them, which may or may not include qualifications and experiences. This can help to bring people with fresh perspectives into an organisation, something the 2008 Obama campaign sought to do by hiring people who had not done the exact job before. As campaign manager David Plouffe said, this reduced complacency as staff had an incentive and need to prove themselves, ‘if you assemble a bunch of grizzled veterans, you’re not going to get that sense of inventiveness, and the culture will be one that is not terribly conducive to good ideas emanating from everywhere’ (quoted in Irwin 2015). Job descriptions should also discuss working conditions. For example, the call for applications for the Organizing for Action (2015) Fellowship Program makes clear the fellowships are unpaid and the program will be challenging, ‘OFA’s fellowships are unpaid, volunteer programs. Change isn’t easy – and neither is this fellowship. Apply today to join the ranks of action takers willing to do the hard work required to make a change in your community’ (p. 1).

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In politics, competencies also include partisanship, political conviction and political loyalty in the selection of candidates both by a party and staff working for an elected politician or leader. There are different types of roles such as interpersonal, figurehead, informational (Mintzberg 1983, 93–4). Interpersonal roles include liaison positions that create and maintain a network of external contacts who can be helpful to the organisation. In politics these include the director of the office of public liaison, press secretary who works with the media, tour logistics coordinator, outreach officer, community liaison officer, and director of legislative affairs who works with those involved in Parliament and Congress. Figurehead roles are also interpersonal and include symbolic roles, such as the role of the Irish President who is directly elected but has very constrained specific and formal powers (Gallagher 2012). For example, the Irish President has the power to withhold the granting of a dissolution (and thus an election) to the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in certain circumstances. This would have such major political consequences that the President cannot exercise it without due caution as it would seem undemocratic. Other roles are informational in nature, such as communication staff who are disseminators of information, spokespersons who include press secretaries and ministerial advisors, and those who monitor the internal and external environment, such as directors of market research and chief operating officers. Decisional roles include top level negotiators such as foreign ministers and trade representatives, entrepreneurs such as directors of strategy in campaigns and directors of innovation in government, disturbance handlers who address crisis of unforeseen issues such as government natural disasters manager, director of issues management and director of rapid responses in campaigns. A summary of the different types of political jobs is now presented, created by synthesising existing research especially that which interviewed or surveyed anyone previously in a role.

Prime minister The job of prime minister in countries such as the UK is already defined to a considerable extent because it is made up of essential tasks such as appointing and dismissing ministers in and outside cabinet, making top level and major appointments in the civil service and foreign service, albeit on advice from government officials, chairing cabinet meetings and cabinet committees, including agenda setting, answering prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons, attending international meetings and determining general election dates (King 1991). However, King quotes former prime ministers such as Asquith who said the job ‘is what its holder chooses and is able to make of it’ and concludes it is malleable and variable by the leaders themselves. In practice, of course, there are many more aspects of the job, including giving speeches, meeting the public, managing their party, campaigning for policy and in elections, honouring people, managing crisis and setting the vision, setting priorities and showing leadership.

Politicians/candidates As Coghill et al (2008) note, ‘there are no defined qualifications or criteria for their role’ for MPs. One example of job analysis in political parties is analysis undertaken by an organisational psychologist for the UK Conservative Party that fed into the design and validation of an assessment centre for selecting prospective parliamentary candidates (Silvester and Dykes 2007; see also Silvester 2012). The Party identified the knowledge, skills, abilities and other

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attributes that are required to be a candidate and perform the role of an MP effectively. Role analysis included conducting semi-structured critical incident interviews with representatives of key stakeholder groups within the party, such as current MPs, prospective parliamentary candidates, members of the shadow cabinet, past MPs, senior Party members, Party volunteers, association members and Party agents, which were analysed to identify positive and negative behavioural indicators. Focus groups were then conducted to group and categorise the behavioural indicators into six competencies. MPs have to effectively run a small business in terms of managing a political office (Coghill et al 2008) and also play a key role meeting with, helping and representing people in their electorate, riding or constituency (Franks 2007, 28). The competencies for MPs are set out in Table 4.2.

Chief of staff The chief of staff in a political office, party or campaign is the highest political staffer role and is vital because it is fundamental to the effective operation of that organisational unit. There is a degree of functionality in the role in terms of making sure the trains run on time (Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne 2001, 487), but the rest of the role is complex, involving assembling a team of staff, keeping to the strategy, liaising with a range of other actors and institutions, representing the politician, and integrating policy and politics. Most people only last two to three years because ‘the position is difficult to hold’ (Kumar et al 2000, 761). Yet practitioners argue that prior political experience is essential, ‘this is no place to have on the job training in politics … they’ve got to have some political instincts’ (former chief of staff, quoted by Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne 2001, 469).

TABLE 4.2 The competencies for candidates and MPs

Communication skills

Intellectual skills

Relating to people Leading and motivating

Resilience and drive

Political conviction

Capacity to communicate messages clearly and persuasively across a variety of audiences and media contexts, including in public, Parliament and government, ability to advocate for their constituents, projects and party policies, also good at listening, including to concerns or complaints from constituents and citizens. Critical thinking skills: understands, learns and prioritises complex information quickly, presents ideas in a transparent manner, is intellectually curious and open to new ideas, able to be involved in policy development, can master multiple and complex subjects across topic divisions, and process issues on behalf of constituents. An ability to relate easily to people from all backgrounds: demonstrates tolerance, approachability and a capacity to inspire trust in others. A capacity for leading and motivating people through recognition of their contribution, involving them, and providing support when required, including managing their political office and staff. Makes decisions and accepts responsibility for outcomes. An ability to cope effectively and positively with pressure (e.g. high work volume, long hours and work–home balance) to meet high expectations, to remain persistent in the face of challenge, setbacks and criticism, and work in a complex and challenging environment. A commitment to Conservative Party principles and public service, including the need for integrity and courage in securing opportunities to disseminate and defend beliefs, as well as general motivation.

Source: synthesised and adapted from Silvester and Dykes (2007), Coghill et al (2008) and Franks (2007).

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Research on this position in the White House or PMOs draws on interviews and round table workshop discussions with former staffers from the US White House and Australian PMO staffers (see, in particular, Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne 2001; Rhodes and Tiernan 2014; but also Villalobos, Vaughn and Cohen 2014; Kumar et al 2000, 761). A synthesis of skills needed by a chief of staff are set out in Table 4.3. On gatekeeping, the Australian Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff argued that they need to have open doors: ‘You are there to help them make the best possible decision they can make, based on whatever political and policy interest they have. And a lot of that is making sure they can hear a range of views on typical issues. Narrowing the number of voices they hear on a particular issue I don’t think is sensible. If you pick a challenging issue for example say relations with China at the moment and all countries in the Asia Pacific region will have various issues around that, but I think it’s incumbent on somebody in my role to ensure that the PM hears from a range of people and perspectives of issues … It’s very easy in the political world where you have very smart ambitious people with pointy elbows to seek to close off all alternative sources of advice, and I don’t think that’s particularly sensible most of the time.’ (Kunkel 2019) And in the area of personnel management, a party leader’s chief of staff noted that they also work on things such as ensuring staff take leave and maintaining ‘team morale and team health’ (Gartrell 2019).

Political advisors in political offices and government As with chiefs of staff, political advisors must adapt to who they work for but also where they work, and their roles focus on generic political/strategic issues, communication or policy. Political or strategy advisors Political advisors obviously focus on the pure politics of government. As with a chief of staff, they provide support and offer constructive advice to politicians but do not have the same personal or office management aspect to their role. They are more strategic than operational and help politicians to manage the political environment and get things done, see Table 4.4. In interviews with political advisors to heads of government in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK practitioners noted the importance of foresight, ‘you need extremely good political antennae; you need to be able to see what’s coming way, way ahead, so when it actually reaches you can deal with it’ (quoted in Esselment, Lees-Marshment and Marland 2014, 364). On honest advice, another explained that ‘to be useful, you have to be prepared to tell them the truth. It’s a pretty easy thing to hang around a politician and tell them what they want to hear, but you’re not adding much value at that point’ (Esselment, Lees-Marshment and Marland 2014, 364). Thus as one advisor to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: ‘That was always my argument to Gordon [Brown] when I came in. He said they have a picture of me as kind of indecisive and inconclusive. And I said it’s not because of the

TABLE 4.3 The competencies for a chief of staff

Organisational management

High level management skills

Personnel management

Adaptiveness

Gatekeeper/brokering

Relationship building and maintenance

Advise, support and extend the politician

Political savvy

Resilience

Provide a central coordinating point in a complex government and political organisation Manage the people, paper and information that goes into the politician Manage resources, such as budgets Day-to-day organisation and management of the office that gives the politician what they want when they want it Create or maintain an effective structure and routine in the PMO, including regular meetings Keep the politician’s activities, including daily schedule and speeches connected to their goals and strategy Help to identify and coordinate priorities and policy initiatives Try to control and shape the agenda Manage crisis and issues Design the structure of, and roles within, a political office Select and oversee staff, creating or maintain a clear division of responsibilities, delegations and leads for each area (e.g. strategy, policy, communications and government business) Set the tone of how the office will be run Adapt to the politician’s management and leadership style, personality, preferences in terms of briefing style and of course policies Respond to changes in the needs of the role over time Manage and filter the people, paper and information that go to the politician Seek views prior to presidential/prime ministerial decisions to help build consensus Represent different views and sides appropriately Build and maintain an effective relationship with multiple stakeholders in Congress/Parliament, interest groups, media, political staffers and politicians in other offices, government departments, the Party and civil servants:  engage in regular meetings and communication  spend time keeping the colleagues on side  manage conflict  negotiate  act as ‘a crucial node’ in the political network Provide political and policy advice to the politician to ensure decisions made are informed and thought out Brief them on their daily schedule and significant issues Be loyal to the politician Manage the politician: ensure they get rest and a break, handle their stress (mix of problem-solving and therapy) Represent the politician in meetings and negotiations with stakeholders Communicate the government’s narrative Be responsive to the political context (e.g. partisanship, public expectations, other elite players) and other key political actors Harness and leverage internal and external resources and overcome obstacles and challenges Draw on connections to party and experience in government Able to deal with long hours and constant pressure Take the blame when needed Be in control without being self-interested

Source: synthesised and adapted from research in Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne (2001), Rhodes and Tiernan (2014), Villalobos, Vaughn and Cohen (2014) and Kumar et al (2000).

TABLE 4.4 The competencies for political advisors

Strategy

Advisory

Internal communication

Coordination

Surrogate/proxy minister

Political skills and relationship building

External communication

Adaptive

Use political foresight or political antenna to see what is coming:  assess political circumstances  help with strategic management, collectively ensuring that the government remains manifesto driven Offer honest and truthful counsel on a variety of subjects Suggest, assess and question proposed courses of action and options Provide personal and emotional support to the politician Keep the minister informed on key local issues Communicate and discuss the politicians political priorities with stakeholders include non-partisan civil servants Direct the department towards the politician’s political priorities May influence or give input into answers for parliamentary question time, questions in the House, speeches and Official Information Act requests Engage in both vertical and horizontal communication especially providing a bridge between official and political dimensions of the department Help coordinate and liaise with different organisational units such as government department, cabinet and PMO, the caucus and the Party organisation both informally and formally Connecting the politician’s or minister’s initiatives to the government executive as a whole Communicate and clarify the minister’s preferences and priorities to government departments and other stakeholders Act on behalf of ministers at meetings Defend and further their minister’s interests Convey the government’s views and their minister’s thinking to political parties especially, for example, for policy reviews Assist with coalition consultations and management Help build relationships in a multi-party/coalition government environment Garner support for the government’s policies amongst parliamentary support parties Manage parliamentary tactics and implications of legislative actors for the minister’s/government’s policy agenda Negotiate deals, policy agreement and legislative coalitions Utilising pre-existing networks Build and maintain relationships with different parts of the party organisation and government, attending party functions and maintaining contact with party members Manage and foster relationships with stakeholders such as interest groups and their lobbyists at national, regional and local level and in specific policy communities Keep the door open to possible appointments, commissions and invitations to special events or ceremonies Adapt to minister’s place in the cabinet hierarchy and the overall context Adapt to the specific department/policy/issue a politician works in or focuses on

Source: adapted from Savoie (1983), Connaughton (2010), Fawcett and Gay (2010), Aucoin (2010), Maley (2010), Esselment, Lees-Marshment and Marland (2014), Eichbaum and Shaw (2007 and 2011).

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newspapers, it’s because of you, and the way you turn that around is by being decisive. It’s not an ad campaign that does that. It’s going to be [the prime minister’s] behaviour that does that.’ (quoted in Esselment, Lees-Marshment and Marland 2014, 364–5) They also have to adapt to the politician and their leadership style – some will want regular contact, but with others you have to aim for weekends due to the limitations on their availability. The New Zealand Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff commented on how different ministers have different preferences: ‘some just want to make sure their advisors are putting their papers in front of them and getting parliamentary questions answered and official information requests answered and their diaries are being run capably. Others want a more political adviser, who is giving good political advice, and being a lot more strategic in their thinking about how the Ministers’ use their time.’ (Munro 2019) He also added another role which is highly relevant to political management – keeping ministers on track with organisational strategy, ‘They need to make sure the Minster is focused unerringly on priorities. Ministers do get distracted and they do veer off course and have pet projects. So, the advisor’s role is to whip the person back into line’ (Munro 2019).

Government communication advisory roles Key communication roles in political offices include communications directors and press secretaries. Communication directors or strategists are more strategic and proactive, seeking to drive the agenda (Kumar 2001a). Key tasks include:      

Communicate the president’s positive achievements to the media and public. Strategic planning of communication messages, initiatives, speeches and events. Relationship building and maintenance with internal staff especially the president, chief of staff and press secretary, but also departmental officials. Convey the positive impact or difference presidential policies have had on people’s daily lives. Adapt to the needs of the individual president – the role may vary in size and strategic scope. Negotiation with other political actors, e.g. governors in relation to key events.

Despite the resources available in top political offices, effort has to be made to make things work. For example, Bill Clinton’s communications director Don Baer recalled the effort to set up an event where the President appeared at the National Governors Association, ‘you’d have to have a lot of work and negotiation with them over what the governors were willing to hear from him versus what we wanted to do and say there … It was complicated’ (quoted in Kumar 2001a, 614–15). Press secretaries, on the other hand, are more reactive and responsive to the media, providing information in a honest way whether informally or formally through declarations, official information about presidential initiatives and appearances (including press releases), briefings, press conferences, speeches, and meetings and conversations with journalists (Kumar 2001b; Savoie 1983). For a summary of this role, see Table 4.5.

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TABLE 4.5 The competencies for a press secretary

Communications management

Information conduit Persuasive communication

Internal communication

Administration/office management Relationship building

Work under pressure

Reactively respond to daily news Manage the politician’s interviews and interactions with the media Develop lines, stories and answers for the media Give out information to the media, either official/formal or informally Set the agenda, e.g. announce five key things at press briefings Promote the politician to the media and thus the public Identify departmental activities and proposed initiatives to see if anything could generate positive media attention Meet the politician daily, liaising with other staffers in the office and departmental public information officers Liaise with local MPs and relevant ministers connected to ministerial trips and initiatives Check details of announcements with departmental officials Manage the press office, media affairs Build trust with the president, staff members, and members of the press Maintain credibility Cope with the 24/7 media environment

Source: adapted from Kumar (2001b), Savoie (1983) and Maley (2010).

Policy advisors in ministerial offices The role of partisan ministerial policy staff is to develop and support policy ideas for political benefit, work with non-partisan civil servants in government departments to develop them, but also steer policy proposals through the complexity of government and Parliament. The typical job requirements for policy advisors in ministerial offices are summarised in Table 4.6 from research by Maley (2015; see also Maley 2010). As with chiefs of staff, their role includes internal communication and relationship building.

Campaign managers As with chief of staffs in government, campaign managers play a significant management role. Irwin (2015) quotes a range of practitioners who reflected on their role. David Plouffe, the manager of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, noted that ‘decisions need to be made, and there are new challenges every day, while at the same time you’re trying to hire a lot of people and scale an organization’, and Ken Mehlman, who headed George W Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign said: ‘I viewed my job as being the C.E.O. of a company that in the beginning was a start-up, and was ultimately a very large company [...] My underlying thesis is that my job wasn’t to be a political genius. My job was to take best management practices and apply them to politics.’

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TABLE 4.6 The competencies for policy advisors in political offices

Policy strategy

Department management

Ministerial surrogate

Relationship building Policy management and marketing

Policy skills

Adaptive

Create politically beneficial policy ideas and innovations that fit the ministerial strategy Recognise policy opportunities in government – make links between ideas, interests, and opportunities Decide which policy proposals from government departments to review Get involved in drafting guidelines for new programs and pilot projects Ensure political benefits are achieved from policy delivery Work with civil servants on developing policy proposals, across government departments Seek policy advice from public servants Direct the department to focus on and work on the minister’s or government’s agenda, interests, goals and policy proposals Filter access and information to the ministers, e.g. read and comment on official’s advice before it reaches the minister Monitor and review departmental progress on policy Try to influence the department’s initial policy formulation in the interests of their minister Take minor decisions on the minister’s behalf Extend the ministers influence on government departments by conveying policy priorities and overseeing policy implementation Build relationships with other government staff Put new policy ideas on the agenda Supervise and support a policy through government processes and potential blockages Sound out the views of other ministers on policy proposals Build consensus for new policy, negotiating and persuading other politicians and staff to support it Manage policy conflict in government, neutralising opponents. Connect and link multiple stakeholders, e.g. interest groups, policy specialists, departmental officials, cabinet ministers Knowledge of relevant policy content Specialist policy knowledge Technical expertise Adapt to ministerial focus and preferences in terms of policy area, level of activity, conflict management, involvement in involved in policy implementation, and which stakeholders to work with

Source: synthesised and adapted from Maley (2015), Savoie (1983), Eichbaum and Shaw (2007, 2010, 2011) and Craft (2015a).

Campaign consultants Johnson (2002) argues that there are three potential aspects to the role of political consultants who work on campaigns:   

Strategists who develops strategy and message, and includes general consultants, the pollster, media firm, and direct mail firm. Specialists who provide key services, e.g. opposition and candidate research team, the telemarketing firm, the fund-raisers, media buyers, speech writer, and voter contact firm. Vendors who provide website development, campaign literature, voter files, or campaign software.

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Volunteers in government The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (2006) produced a guide to developing and managing volunteers in government. The guide advises spending at least six months to create a volunteer program to ensure it focuses on ‘what tasks are not getting done because of staffing shortfalls’ and ‘do a needs analysis to identify possible volunteer roles to fill tasks to be done; establish job descriptions; recruit, place, train, supervise and evaluate the individual volunteers; and evaluate your volunteer program’ (FEMA 2006, 3.2). The guide lays out how to do the needs analysis, see Table 4.7.

Political HR 2: recruit appropriately Political and government organisations need to recruit and select staff and volunteers who meet the competencies and political loyalties the jobs require. As the President of the Australian Liberal Party said when interviewed, ‘if you don’t have competitive quality people in the senior paid positions, which we didn’t have in the previous elections, and if you don’t have the paid people in Canberra, or Sydney, or Brisbane or whatever on the same page, you don’t need to go to Harvard to work out that that’s not an optimal thing’ (Greiner 2019).

2a. Be proactive about the recruitment of prospective employees, candidates, members and volunteers, including identifying the potential benefits to offer them There is only a small amount of evidence of proactive recruitment in political management. Academic research offers ideas about what incentivises members to join political parties, such as party policies, supporting a potential candidate or to influence party policy (Young and Cross 2002). Events such as leadership and nomination contests also help stimulate joining a party, as over 80% claimed to have originally joined a party for this reason, thus

TABLE 4.7 Needs analysis for creating a volunteer program for FEMA

Step 1: Needs analysis Firstly, determine the needs of your agency or organisation: what functions do you need volunteers to perform within your agency? Consider the agency’s mission, and assess current staffing resources and areas of shortfalls where volunteers may be able to help, e.g. what tasks are consistently relegated to the back burner because there is never enough time or personnel to do them? What portions of the agency’s mission could be accomplished better if more resources were available? Step 2: Describe the tasks Describe the tasks that need to be done, the skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary to do the tasks and additional resources (e.g. equipment, office space) needed. Step 3: Make it attractive to potential applicants Integrate understanding of volunteers’ needs, including the desire to contribute and make a difference, social needs to interact with other people, an interest in (and the ability to perform) the job itself, and desire to learn new skills. Make the potential volunteer job attractive such as by making the hours flexible and including resume-building opportunities are two ways to make a job more attractive to potential volunteers. Source: adapted from excerpts from FEMA (2006, 3.4–3.5).

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parties should prepare membership recruitment campaigns around these events. In Canada, the Liberal Party was most proactive about recruiting members using relatives, friends, neighbours and candidates for the party’s nomination, while the NDP was more likely to make use of recruitment by co-workers and groups. The Organizing for Action (2015) initiative for the US Democrats utilised an understanding of incentives for volunteers outlined by Granik (2005) when recruiting volunteers for their Fellowship Program, see Table 4.8. Governments have also sought to be proactive about volunteer recruitment. FEMA (2006, 6.4) advises those recruiting volunteers to investigate the marketplace of potential volunteers in your community and create recruitment ads based on what they know about the volunteers they are trying to reach, which specifies both what the organisation needs and how doing this job will benefit the volunteer. Similarly, the Northwest Territories Government (2008, 101, 109) Municipal and Community Affairs Department suggests that recruitment should include advertising the position in professional and trade publications, local radio stations and online, but also attending career fairs and making direct contact with people. Historically, there was little management of the recruitment process for politicians. A study in the 1980s suggested that direct recruitment by either major party organisation at any level (national, state and local) was low key and not institutionalised: most candidates described themselves as self-starters or coming through involvement within the party (Kazee and Thornberry 1990). A more recent study suggested that potential candidates are influenced by their prospects for success, and the perceived benefits of the role, as well as the costs of running for office (Maisel and Stone 2014). In particular, strongly qualified potential candidates will be hesitant to run where they have little chance of winning and thus parties need to consider how they can best support their best candidates. The research suggested that interpersonal contacts are important in encouraging individuals to run for office, both at the national and local levels, and the recruitment activities of parties’ Hill committees have become much more strategic over time. TABLE 4.8 Organizing for Action’s (2015) use of incentives in its recruitment of volunteers for its

Fellowship Program Incentives

Quotes from the recruitment call

Values

Progressive change makers Fellows will work on issues that matter, such as climate change, the economy, health care, and women’s rights Fellows will emerge highly skilled in the tools community organisers use every day Fellows will have the opportunity to dig deeper on a specific skill, such as digital organising or management, or design and execute a project They will learn the ropes from some of the most effective grassroots organisers in the country Fellows will graduate knowing how to take action on national and local issues and can use that knowledge to launch a career in the progressive movement. Elite fellowship program None of this will be done alone Fellows will be able to connect to other fellows across the country through special online tools and conference calls

Understanding

Career Enhancement Social

Source: analysis of material in Organizing for Action (2015) against criteria adapted from Granik (2005).

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Recruitment for political advisors in campaigns, parties and government came up as a major theme in interviews with practitioners. The Liberal Party President argued the party was successful in their recruitment for the 2019 Australian campaign, ‘they did a good job of recruiting people, paid people, contracting people, and volunteers from elsewhere in the Minister’s offices … a superb job of talent recruitment both in the leadup but particularly for the central campaign headquarters which I think on any basis was exemplary’ (Greiner 2019). Often recruitment is done through word of mouth and existing networks – as the Chief of Staff for the 2019 Australian Labor campaign said, ‘because you work intensely with the people you kind of know who is good. There is also very high attrition – if you’re not good you don’t last long in politics’ (Nash 2019). Where there were skills gaps, such as in digital communications, the party went external to ‘outside contractors who had no affiliation or allegiance to the party’, but overall most staff came from existing offices at different levels such as state organisations. Qualifications are not as important as recommendations for those who have experience, ‘you don’t look for someone who has a degree in public policy management, that would be pretty funny to do that to find a political staffer as it has an absence of reality’ (Nash 2019) so ‘you tend to go out to recruit people who had worked previously in the building as advisers’ (Munro 2019). Chiefs of staff working in political offices note that recruitment is challenging and also done through word of mouth: ‘I always found that the most challenging part of the job, actually. It is very hard to find the right fit of personnel sometimes for political adviser roles … It can be quite a tough one to define and it can be quite hard to get out and actually recruit people … It comes down to reputation, word-of-mouth, referrals, looking around for people with political antennae and political skills that can get into the roles as quickly as possible … It’s not satisfactory but most governments do succeed in putting together a stable of people together to do the job.’ (Munro 2019) ‘You’ve got particular skill sets and knowledge you are after – you are after people who are interested in politics and understand it, who understand the Labor party and the Labor movement so you’ve got a reasonably big pool to work from.’ (Gartrell 2019)

2b. Use professional selection for party leaders, leadership and committee positions, candidates, volunteers for parties, campaigns or government programs In most organisations, a range of selection devices can be used depending on the job criteria such as application forms, written tests, performance-simulation tests, interviews, references and background investigations. However, in politics, often the selection process for jobs and volunteer positions is not run professionally. Political candidates and ministers are selected on factors other than skills and experience (Kerby 2009). Congressional party leaders in the US House of Representatives make appointments to internal leadership positions for partisan reasons at least partly in response to the external political environment (Heberlig and Larson 2007). Party leaders need to use any available resources to help their party win elections to create a majority in Congress, and resources include the allocation of positions of power. When their control of the House is weak, they award these positions to members who redistribute campaign funds to the party.

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Alternatively, when they have a solid majority they can consider representational concerns and support those who make the party more representative of key voting groups such as females and minorities. Analysis of data on campaign money redistributed by House incumbents and extended leadership appointments from 1990 to 2002 showed that the parties changed their selection strategies following the GOP takeover of the House in 1995. Partisanship even influences the selection of ministerial appointments to public bodies. Parliamentary committees allow scrutiny of ministerial appointments to public positions in organisations such as the Chair of the BBC Trust, Statistics Authority, Chairs of Electoral Commission, Statistics Board, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, Chairs of Natural England, Office of Rail Regulation, and Care Quality Commission. Interviews with potential candidates found that inappropriate questioning occurred, including off-topic questions and aggressive cross-examination, which works against diversity. Politicians also seemed unprepared and the process was amateurish. Parliamentarians did not seem competent to assess the professional competence of candidates, and one appointee asked ‘[t]hey are not trained in employment process, they do not have the right to hire you or fire you and therefore why would they have the right of veto?’ (Matthews and Flinders 2015, 172). Party leaders – some of the most powerful positions in politics – are also not selected according to their ability to meet job criteria, at least not formally. Leaders are selected according to internal rules, processes and convention. This can include consideration of skills informally such as parliamentary debating skills and thus Thatcher’s 1975 campaign against Heath promised accessibility to backbenchers, and her ability to demonstrate effective combat in debate was also important, with pledges for Thatcher increasing by a third after she strongly attacked the Finance Bill presented by the Labour chancellor (McSweeny 1999). The selection of party leaders also includes consideration of their ideological position, affiliation to party factions and public popularity as observed by research into Australian parties in particular (e.g. see Bennister and Heppell 2016). There are some more formal uses of professional screening practices. FEMA (2006, 6.5–6.6) uses interviews which screen potential volunteers for skills and motivation for volunteering, screening out any undesirable candidates, and matching the applicant with a position. A rare case of effective political HR is when academic expert Jo Silvester worked in partnership with a political party, and employee selection theories were utilised by the UK Conservative Party in the design and validation of an assessment centre for selecting prospective parliamentary candidates (Silvester and Dykes 2007, 15–16). This was part of an overall program of applied occupational psychology research designed to improve the selection, development and performance of UK politicians. The assessment centre used role-related exercises in a typical multitrait-multimethod matrix directly designed to match different aspects of the actual job of being an MP. They included a group exercise, a competency-based interview, a public speaking exercise and an in-tray exercise. Applicants also completed the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, which tested inference, recognition of assumptions, deduction, interpretation and evaluation of arguments and thus requires reasoning and critical thinking skills important to a politician’s ability to work through competing arguments and deduce potential solutions. Participants were observed and rated by assessors who were current MPs and representatives from the voluntary side of the party and were trained in how to observe, record and evaluate participant behaviour using the competency framework and behavioural indicators.

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2c. Seek political staff who will help maintain control, bring fresh energy and ideas, understanding of external stakeholders and thus help achieve organisational priority goals The selection of political staff and appointees attracts significant debate and is of the larger areas of work in existing literature. In the US, presidents are responsible for political appointments to the executive branch which includes two to three million civilian employees in 15 cabinet departments and 55–60 independent agencies (Lewis 2012; Wood and Marchbanks 2008). Presidents need to fill political positions as quickly as possible to build an image of competence and ensure influence on policy, especially in areas of priorities. Any problems in nominations distract from the president’s planned agenda, and they lose control of the public/media agenda, and can damage first impressions of the president – as well as limit the president’s actual ability to achieve desired policy outputs. Political staffers make a huge difference to the overall effectiveness of a campaign, party or government. The official employer, provision of HR, orientation and training, and regulations for political staff are generally different to non-partisan civil servants and between countries. In Australia, Ministerial advisers are employed by the Department of Finance under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984. In the UK, special advisors are appointed directly by the minister who they work for. In New Zealand, a section of the Department of Internal Affairs, called Ministerial and Secretariat Services, formally hires political advisors. In Canada, ministers’ political staff are exempt from the statutory requirements governing the staffing of the public service and are appointed by ministers nominally under a competitive and open process after an amendment to the Public Service Employment Act introduced by the Harper Conservative Government in 2007. In all countries, their roles end with the resignation or dismissal of their minister or politician (Maley 2010; Aucoin 2010; Fawcett and Gay 2010). When selecting political staff and appointees, despite the often common lack of formal selection criteria, in practice a range of skills are sought – including political loyalty as this helps political leaders and organisations exercise control and influence. Partisanship is therefore not instead of skills, but part of the desired skill set. Leaders want to know they have team players working under them. The UK New Labour Government under Tony Blair favoured loyalty over skills, seeing a strong personal and long working relationship as creating trust (Fawcett and Gay 2010, 37). Thus in the US the president’s selection of executive staff considers a range of political factors, including loyalty/ideology to exert control over the bureaucracy, geographic and demographic diversity to convey representativeness of society, and congressional preferences, as well as competence (Lewis 2009, 2012; Kim 2009). The Reagan administration placed great emphasis on philosophical commitment to the president, whereas Bush and Clinton were less focused on ideology (Wood and Marchbanks 2008). Advice from former practitioners is that the White House chief of staff needs to get ‘one’s own people’ so they end up with staff who have ‘loyalty, energy, dependability, temperament, and work style’ who will pursue the president’s agenda not their own (Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne 2001, 468). The desire for competence has to be balanced with the need for potential control from partisan inclined staff. The presidential personnel office may have to manage people who have a political claim for a job because of campaign work or connection to a key political official (Lewis 2012, 586). However, selection often includes patronage – giving jobs to those recommended by the party such as the politically active, those who worked on the campaign and donors – to hold

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party factions together and maintain the motivation of campaign volunteers. This is particularly an issue for government roles as campaign staff often lack government experience and take time to learn how to do their role, especially if they are relatively young (Pfiffner 1987; Aucoin 2010; Peters 2010; Lewis 2009; Villalobos, Vaughn and Cohen 2014; Fawcett and Gay 2010; 34). Rhodes and Tiernan (2014, 119) quote a Labor backbencher as saying a chief of staff for the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd lacked experience, ‘he has never managed people before, yet now he is effectively co-running the country. It’s a joke.’ Similarly, President Clinton prioritised campaign workers but they had limited experience in government, which harmed the administration’s effectiveness (Wood and Marchbanks 2008). An increase in political appointments during the Administration of George W Bush was cited as a problem in the problematic federal government response to hurricane Katrina (Vaughn and Villalobos 2009; Lewis 2007). Politicians increasingly seek to influence the selection of civil servants also. For example, in Canada, politicians can influence the placement of deputy ministers who are officially neutral/non-partisan (Aucoin 2010; Bourgault 2011). Civil servants thought to be more supportive of proposed changes are more often appointed especially there is a minority government as they need to take charge fast – their power is less secure. Bourgault’s research found that minority governments have replaced a fairly large proportion of deputy ministers in the first six months. Changes are made strategically, focusing on positions at central agencies or areas of key focus to the new government. The Harper Government moved the Deputy Minister of Finance into the top position at the Department of the Environment to implement a new environmental approach after the 2006 election.

2d. Understand and draw on the political management benefits of non-partisan staff such as civil servants, career staff and bureaucrats There is a big debate in the literature about the positive and negatives of politically selected staff in government. Political staff have grown in response to capacity and capability considerations about the complex and demanding nature of government and external environment, including the need to manage the 24/7 media, focus more on delivery of policy, and greater public expectations of the public service (Fawcett and Gay 2010, 41; Eichbaum and Shaw 2010, 212–3; Maley 2010, 99–100, Heatley 1996, 60, Heclo 1988, 48). As Maley (2010, 100) puts it, such forces ‘demand firm political management and executive coordination for success.’ Yet nonpartisan civil servants bring benefits also. Table 4.9 synthesises the pros and cons of political and non-political staff. Thus some scholars argue that there needs to be a balance between partisan and non-partisan staff for effective management (Lewis 2012, 591), and some research has reported both that staff value each other (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010; Pfiffner 1987), and that politically appointed staff are not always partisan (Eichbaum and Shaw 2007) – they just work towards political goals once assigned in their role. Overall, political advisors play an important role alongside non-partisan staff. Maley (2010, 100) thus argues that: ‘Partisan advisers can be seen to provide three types of help to Australian federal ministers. First, they help ministers to perform their jobs, enabling political leadership. Second, they help ministers to steer policy. Third, they help the ministry to coordinate and support the work of Cabinet. All this help is vital to modern political management.’

TABLE 4.9 Political management benefits and disadvantages of politically appointed staff versus non-

partisan civil servants Political management benefits

Political management disadvantages

Politically appointed staff

 Gives political leaders/the new government more control as they are there at the behest of politicians  More likely to share the leaders agenda and goals and stick to the strategy  Stronger understanding of, and greater responsiveness to, political stakeholders including voters as they are elected/appointed by elected politicians or officials  Has existing trusting relationships with politicians and parties  Brings fresh energy and ideas  Less risk-averse and inhibited by the past practices or conventional thinking  Changes in staffing opens the door to doing things differently so may ease delivery of the new government’s policies  They help the department to understand politicians’ priorities, negotiate the political context and facilitate policy advice becoming more practical  Help ministers deal with a complex and challenging political, media and public environment to steer policy through and get it implemented

Non-partisan civil servants (or bureaucrats/career staff)

 Have program, policy and technical knowledge and expertise  Can design programs to implement political goals  Work to ensure there is a nonpartisan implementation of the laws  Recruited and promoted on the basis of performance  Tenured with well-established networks  Public management skills, competent at managing large public organisations with thousands of employees and large budgets  Overall help political appointees succeed

 Lack of political/government experience which can lead to managerial mistakes  A lack of required skills reduces their effectiveness and that of the government overall  Short time in role adds instability and prevents them seeing things through and getting things done  Lack long-term perspective – have a greater temptation to sacrifice long-term goals for immediate policy objectives  Not there long enough to learn from mistakes and master their role  Little payoff for them to be concerned with the broad issues of personnel management  Politicising appointment decisions can lead to vacancies and reduce organisational effectiveness  Lack policy knowledge and can block good policy advice for politicians  Can lack managerial experience  Can reduce the effectiveness of government  Protected by procedural rights and appeals so difficult to change/manage  Less responsive to political change  Lack pragmatism, e.g. policy expertise lacks understanding of the political reality

Source: Lewis (2007, 2012), Bourgault (2011), Villalobos, Vaughn and Cohen (2014), Kim (2009), Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne (2001) Aucoin (2010), Shafritz (1992), Vaughn and Villalobos (2009), Wood and Marchbanks (2008), Pfiffner (1987), Heclo (1988), Fawcett and Gay (2010), Eichbaum and Shaw (2007, 2010, 2011, Maley (2010, 2015), Heatley (1996), Peters (2010).

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2e. Create cultures and practices that encourage diverse recruitment and thus organisational effectiveness Just like any other area in society, political organisations need to create cultures and practices such as recruitment and selection systems that encourage a supportive environment for diversity. Management theory argues that for organisations to select the best staff and improve their effectiveness, they need to be aware of the factors that can shape and distort perception and create bias. These include stereotyping, where people attribute to an individual the characteristics they believe typical of the group the individual belongs to, on racial, gender, age, profession and ideological lines, or the mini-me bias, where those selecting others naturally favour those who look and appear to be like them. Gender and politics research has demonstrated that there is a significant lack of diversity in politics and government, not just in who is involved, but also in who gets the best seats to contest as candidates, promoted to top staffing positions in parties and government, and selected to be minister – let alone prime minister or president. For example, the recruitment of candidates is most commonly decided by local party organisations, but there is a diversity problem there: the profile of party members is still overwhelmingly white, old and male, and party selection can fail to recruit people based on appropriate skills and/or strong community links (Taylor 2001). This, in turn, affects who becomes an MP and then who is available to be selected as a minister. However, proactive efforts to improve selection processes can make a difference. As already noted, the UK Conservative Party introduced more professional assessment processes for candidates, which included consideration of actual competencies required for the MP role, under the guidance of an organisational psychologist Jo Silvester (Silvester and Dykes 2007, Silvester 2012). Silvester encouraged selection of diversity amongst candidates by focusing on generic skills relevant to the tasks MP would have to perform, following more typical HR guidelines used in non-political organisations. The selection process was also tested so that it reduced potential bias against women and ethnic minority applicants. Potential candidates who wanted to get onto an approved candidate list for the 2005 general election were given a full-day assessment through observation during exercises. This was carried out by trained assessors who used the competency framework and behavioural indicators and were also trained to be aware of, and avoid, bias such as stereotypes. Analysis of the competencies of the first 415 participants revealed no differences on exercises or dimensions in performance between male and female candidates. There was also no significant difference between male and female performance in the 2005 UK general election. However, there remained a gender imbalance in applicants: out of 415 participants 81.2% were men and only 18.8% were women. Thus parties need to be proactive in their efforts to recruit applicants in the first place. Offering non-partisan training and support can improve the gender and racial diversity of political candidates. The Center for American Women and Politics’ New Jersey Ready to Run Diversity Initiative offered a unique campaign training program designed to help women of colour overcome many obstacles in politics (Sanbonmatsu 2015). It included workshops begun in 2007 before an annual Ready to Run nonpartisan campaign training. Different training was designed for different groups: women who are running for office, women who might run in the future, women who work on campaigns, and women who are seeking appointive office. Current and former women public officials of colour and politically active women of colour, women working in government, community leaders, lobbyists and interest group members participated in the training. The program empowered women to seek

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office, gave them a ‘roadmap’ for their campaigns, strategic advice, mentoring, fundraising tools and networking opportunities, building their skills, self-esteem and confidence. It worked hard to advertise to key communities and organisations and encourage women of colour who may be civic or philanthropic leaders in their communities to think about electoral politics. Political leaders can also make a difference. When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed a gender-equal cabinet, it attracted significant media attention as it was the first in Canadian history with equal numbers of men and women. Trudeau said ‘it is an incredible pleasure … to present to Canada a cabinet that looks like Canada’ (Trudeau 2015). Similarly in 2015, President Obama made headlines when he appointed the White House’s first openly transgender staff member, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan (see Holmes 2015). For the 2019 election the Australian Labor Party deliberately ran processes to improve diversity, being aware that the traditional way of recruitment is to pick who you know to be leaders who then pick people they know can ‘lead to people who might like to work on a campaign being excluded’ (Nash 2019): ‘On this occasion we actually did an extensive expressions of interest process. Staff were told at numerous staff meetings that we had an expressions of interest process and if they wanted to be involved in the campaign they needed to complete a very brief document which outlined their key skills and experience and which teams they were interested in working in. Having gone through that process, I am not sure we ended up with a very different group of people than would have happened with the traditional process anyway. I literally identified three people who were in campaign headquarters as a result of that process as distinct from the usual process … [but] they should be able to apply through expressions of interests for the junior positions just as a matter of equity and fairness, and I think it’s probably a better way to ensure you get more diversity, and we certainly had more diversity in the campaign as a result of that process even if it was just around the margins.’ (Nash 2019)

Political HR 3: train and develop Political HR also involves developing and encouraging effective and high performance amongst individual staff in the organisation, which helps overall organisational performance. This includes orientation – supporting new employees to fit smoothly into their job, work unit, and the organisation; and training and development – one-off or ongoing training to help employees perform their current and future job more effectively. In practice, this is an area of political management that is mostly lacking.

3a. Ensure there are effective orientation programs to help staff, politicians and volunteers understand the organisation, its goals, their role and performance expectations In politics, orientation is often limited, restricted to rules and procedures as opposed to how to carry out all aspects of the job effectively to achieve organisational and individual goals. Governments or parliaments offer orientation to government staff, political advisors and politicians, but it tends to be rules focused.

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The Australian Parliament’s Department of the Senate offered an induction program specifically for politicians focused on resources, rules and procedures rather than skills (Coghill et al 2008). Additional ongoing training was provided through consultative oneon-one sessions with the parliamentary officers of the Senate. It is tailored to the requirements of the senators and their party. In 2001, an experiential component was introduced in which new senators were provided with the opportunity to practise parliamentary procedures in the Chamber when the Gallery was closed and Hansard reporters were absent, with experienced senators role playing. This made the training andragogically appropriate and related to real life scenarios. Nevertheless it did not cover a range of pertinent issues such as managing a political office, ethics, sexual harassment or equal employment opportunity because the Department of the Senate is required to maintain impartiality. The focus therefore remains on making senators aware of procedures rather than skilled in political management. The Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services confirmed this: ‘Going back to the inductions, there is always the stuff that we educate parliamentarians on in terms of being a good member. Both from the procedural point of view and you know what the resources they have access to discharge their jobs. It a fairly narrow sort of learning that they get, and they have obviously come from all walks of life. We don’t actually teach them how to manage an electorate office, or how to engage with the minister … [and] we don’t educate ministers in how to be minister, there’s no real guide book, and again there is an assumption that you spend a number of years as a parliamentarian; you learn, you trade, your craft, and then you eventually progress once you understand how the Executive works.’ (Stefanic 2019) Newly elected politicians take up the position with immediate effect, and thus need orientation more than most professions as they are expected to be up and running and instantly skilled in governance. Yet there is no professional supporting body to do this which has ‘created both a perceived and a real skill gap’ (Coghill et al 2008, 74). On the whole, therefore, politicians and staff are left to learn on the job, by observing others or getting advice. Thus those managing parliaments note that although there are books they can consult on parliamentary rules on things such as standing orders, they mostly learn how to use these rules for political advantage by paying attention and watching others, relying on the fact that often ‘very few people in the room understand the procedure’ (Burke 2019). FEMA argues that training should be provided to its volunteers because it helps volunteer performance and retention, and that effective training can also save lives, protect property, reduce suffering and diminish vulnerability to lawsuits (FEMA 2006, 3.27–3.31). Orientation to the agency should go over the mission of the agency and the agency’s relationship to the community and other community agencies. Job-specific orientation might cover job responsibilities, who the immediate supervisor is and their expectations, authority and accountability (i.e. what the volunteer can and cannot do without explicit direction) and other team members’ roles and resources available to do the job. Training should then be given in areas such as communication, team building, problem solving and decision making, leadership and supervision, and stress management.

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3b. Offer training, professional development and mentoring to improve and extend their skills Training and development is also lacking for politicians and political staff, although there are more efforts made by political parties to train volunteers so they can help parties and candidates campaign more effectively. Training and development for political staff is highly limited, despite there being more of a need than other professions given the high pressured environment that politicians and their staff work in over incredibly long hours. In Australia, although parliamentary services receive ‘occasional requests from parliamentarians about certain training needs … we say it’s actually not in our area or responsibility’ yet they know ‘that what ministerial parliamentary services provides is quite narrow … .we have not structured some sort of formal education about how to be running their offices or conducting politics’ (Stefanic 2019). The Integrity Commissioner in the Canadian province of Ontario examined political staffing in 2015 and reported: ‘Staffers told me they were welcomed to the job, shown a desk and a computer, and left to sink or swim … There might be task-oriented training, such as how to prepare briefing notes according to an accepted format, but there was little more. The expectations are general: make sure there are no surprises for your boss, be available 24/7, and do it all for less pay than the private sector, and no job security.’ (Office of the Integrity Commissioner of Ontario 2015) Similarly, there is a lack of professional development for MPs. A politician’s career ladder is not straightforward: it includes moving from back bencher to committee member, committee deputy chair, committee chair, parliamentary secretary, junior minister, senior minister and ultimately prime minister (Coghill et al 2008). Each politician needs development training in more specialist skills for higher level roles up the career ladder such as committee chair, parliamentary secretary, and minister, especially media skills for when their public profile increases, and strategic planning and analysis for when/if they move into higher level decision making roles. The training should take a facilitative and guidance approach, use practitioner perspectives to ensure it is relevant, and be delivered flexibly, including in Parliament or parties or on demand. Coghill et al (2018, 92) report that ‘when asked what type of on-going or additional training would be beneficial to develop a parliamentary career, a majority (58%) supported the provision of training in how to be a parliamentary secretary or a chairman of a committee.’ Parties develop skills by sharing experiences and ideas across countries through campaign management seminars. Campaign management seminars for European Center-Right political parties within the European Democrat Union (EDU) in the 1980s helped to encourage the development of campaign methods by spreading ideas and experiences (Notaker 2009). They used case studies, discussions and expert lectures. For example, in 1989, Ronald Reagan’s celebrated pollster Richard Wirthlin was an invited speaker at an EDU campaign seminar in London. It helped to create a network covering both Europe and the US and foster a sense of community. More recently, parties have increasingly expanded their volunteer training programs. The Ohio Republican Party (n.d.) Nuts and Bolts guide for county central committee members recommends training volunteers before conducting a voter registration drive, to make it clear

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what the party wants them to do and how much time it will take. The training session should explain what is to be accomplished and how to fill out the cards, explain voter registration requirements, including how to fill out voter registration forms, and go over the precinct survey script so that people become familiar enough with it that they will not need to read it (Ohio Republican Party n.d., 11–12).

Political HR 4: learn how people work Political HR should take into account individual motivations and how people work in teams and groups as this can then lead to more effective management.

4a. Understand what motivates politicians, staff, volunteers and donors, including values, working conditions, roles and benefits Understanding what motivates politicians, staff, volunteers and donors is really important when encouraging them to work effectively to reach organisational goals. Generally, motivations in politics and government are value-led. A UK advisor to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Phillip Gould, said ‘Political consultancy is a cause more than a profession’ (Gould 2011). Party activists and campaign volunteers want to discuss policy, be involved, and see positive change, and thus instructions and training should point to the bigger picture such as getting voters on side in a way that works and gets the party into government to do the big ideological things activists care about. MPs respond to incentives such as committee allocations and office space and have a desire to feel part of a team, but also consider their policy motivations when deciding whether to toe the party line in Parliament. Ministers are motivated by the desire to influence policy and intrinsic rewards such as challenges. Political staff are often motivated by the chance to play a role in important work. Political leaders also need to understand politicians’ motivations to maintain unity within their parties (Wilson 2015). MPs decide whether to toe the party line or dissent according to the formal or informal incentives and disincentives on offer, socialisation and norms, and policy preferences. Incentives include appointments, advancement, office space, travel, photo ops and granting a party leader visit to their riding, all of which can impact on their career advancement and re-election. Sociological factors also play a part: MPs are socialised into norms such as loyalty and party solidarity and duty to the party and its policies from before they enter Parliament and once they get there. Political context is also influential – such as how the party is doing in opinion polls, issues on the agenda, whether party is in opposition or government and the size of majority/minority. MPs also want to pursue their own policy preferences, and leaders can respond to this by consulting government MPs about policy ideas in advance and enabling them to express their views in the caucus room and maybe modify proposal before they are finalised. Prime Minister Stephen Harper forced Canadian ministers to consult with their backbench colleagues before taking policy proposals to cabinet through a system of minister’s caucus advisory committees because giving MPs a greater say in policy helped garner support for final policy decisions. A survey of current/former ministerial advisers to New Zealand ministers since 1990 (excluding press secretaries) found three major motivations for doing the role – see Table 4.10 – which all speak to wanting to make a difference.

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TABLE 4.10 Motivations of New Zealand ministerial advisers

Motivation

% citing as a motivation

Qualitative comments

1st

Influencing policy

62.1%

2nd

Intrinsic rewards such as challenges

51.7%

3rd

Contribute to government policy

48.3%

 Being at the centre of policy and political developments  Making a contribution to better public policy outcome  Day-to-day excitement, challenge and ‘buzz’ of the environment  Chance to gain new career experiences  Develop new skills  See the government’s manifesto implemented  Influence worthwhile agendas

Source: adapted from Eichbaum and Shaw (2007, 98–9).

Motivations for US political appointees include a sense of public spirit, the solidary benefit of being part of a group working towards a common purpose, being party loyalists and career incentives such as gaining experience and contacts that will provide future monetary rewards in the private sector (Wood and Marchbanks 2008). They can find it hard to fulfil the motivation to achieve, however, because of the many challenges of working in government. Multivariate analysis of Office of Personnel Management records from January 1982 to August 2003 found that the time political appointees spent in their position was affected by material benefits, the relative difficulty of administrative service, resources at their disposal, and the state of the economy/opportunities in the private sector. Thus presidents can respond to this by providing budgetary resources and support for their preferred direction. Party managers can also utilise the understanding of what motivates party members in how they communicate with and respond to them (Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014). Motivational tools draw on their values and desire to be involved in creating positive change. For example, they can involve party activists in the process of developing the party’s campaign messages, make a value-based argument about the need for power to achieve moral goals, explaining why the party or candidate cannot do everything they want, linked to what the party can actually deliver in power and communicate progress and the policy and value-based achievements in government. Brad Lavigne, National Director of the Canadian NDP recalled using the motivation of potential achievements in government: ‘We say to the base … to those who embrace our Social-Democratic vision for the country … focus on achieving electoral results so that we can put our ideas into practice … We have a moral obligation to govern, or have our ideas adopted, otherwise we’re not helping the very people that we believe so deeply in helping. Whether it be the unemployed, whether it be eradicating poverty, justice for first nations, equality issues, human rights, social policy issues; none of those things get advanced if we don’t govern, or if we don’t influence in a greater presence within parliament.’ (quoted in Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014, 256) The NDP also made it clear to their volunteers the direct outcomes and benefits from the party gaining increased influence, such as preventing $4.5 billion in corporate tax cuts and investing it into transit infrastructure, First Nations housing and education instead – so

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‘people can see – wow this is what can happen when we have more seats, more responsibility, or more authority within the government’ (quoted in Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014, 256–7). In campaigning, goal setting helps people to direct energies to the most relevant activities, and tight deadlines make people work more quickly. The Obama 2008 campaign set volunteers clear goals to achieve by a certain date, with reminders and easy downloadable resources and training to help them succeed, and records of what they achieved. Campaigns also draw on potential motivations of donors as well as their income in the way they design their direct mail (Hassell and Monson 2014). They send significantly more appeals based on ideology and intangible solidary factors (e.g. status, social) to respondents in the highest income bracket, and more appeals related to material needs (e.g. self-interested, tangible, financially related) to those in the middle income bracket.

4b. Understand the importance of informal relationships, resources and role distinction in group effectiveness Political HR also includes understanding how individuals work together in groups or teams, including informal as well as formal groups. It considers how groups develop and what affects their satisfaction and effectiveness, such as external conditions, resources, role definition, size and norms. President Barack Obama (2015) reflected on the importance of people working together in the US White House: ‘The principle of team building in the White House is really no different than the principle of team building anywhere, on a sports team or a well-run business. Do they put team ahead of themselves? Do you make sure all the pieces fit together? Because just having the best athletes, if they’re knocking heads and nobody’s doing rebounding and everybody wants the ball, it isn’t always going to work.’ For example, informal relationships between political staff working for different ministers significantly aid horizontal communication and are crucial for government to function. Political parties can strategically utilise less obvious resources such as state-funded parliamentary resources for partisan benefit; use their senators to build support for future candidates for MPs; and help their candidates by sharing central party data and coordinating activities. Tensions can emerge if new behaviours or roles develop that go against existing norms, such as partisan policy advisors encroaching on neutral deputy ministers in Canada, or prime ministers appointing partisan practitioners in previously neutral positions such as the principal private secretary. However, adding partisan staff can help bridge the gap between policy making and political realities. More positively, norms in the House of Lords help maintain party unity and cohesiveness.

Informal groups Informal groups are more social and unofficial, including informal planning, strategizing, negotiating, networking and deal-making behind the scenes. Interviews with practitioners suggest this is a crucial part of effective political management, because a dominant theme was the importance of building internal relationships and communication in a way that does not fit existing formal mechanisms.

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For example, informal relationship-oriented relationships between political advisors are crucial to government functioning. A study of Australian ministerial staff during the Keating Government (1991–1995) found that their advisers’ horizontal relationships and interactions with each other were significant and central to their role and also valued by other staff such as ministers and public servants (Maley 2011). Advisers used the term ‘networking’, to describe relationship-building to help convey information, gather information, consult, lobby, negotiate, bargain, communicate and coordinate. They make repeated informal but strategic connections to help achieve goals, including phone calls, dropping in to see someone, coffee meetings and dropping a paper off on behalf of ministers. As one noted when interviewed, they saw interoffice relationships as ‘exceptionally important’ (Maley 2011, 1472). Senior non-partisan public servants also valued this, noting that they help communication between ministers’ offices and departments and keep government moving in one direction, more quickly. How well the advisers worked together as a group affects the cohesion and harmony of the government. Advisors in the three central offices (PMO, finance minister’s office and treasurer’s office) play a role as central coordinators and use informal power and interpersonal relationships to help to manage advisers’ interactions with each other. Their authority to do this was then formalised by the creation of government staffing committees. One issue in government is the relationships between political and non-political staff. A former political staffer in Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office said that ‘if I could do one thing better, as a staffer, it would actually be making that relationship work better earlier on … and that’s both sides. Both the bureaucracy being more open and the ministerial staff more open … it takes two to tango’ (Campbell 2019). To help, civil servants need to understand how political offices work: ‘The APS needs a better understanding of how offices work and how ministers work … One of the things I found really really useful as an advisor was when there was someone that started in the bureaucracy in an aligned area that I was dealing with was I’d invite them up the parliament house, show them around the Cabinet Office, show them the chambers, so when I was kind of on the phone with them and saying “Hi, I am just running down the chamber with the boss”, they know what I am asking is a pretty urgent request.’ (Campbell 2019) Similarly, the Secretary of parliamentary services in Australia emphasised the importance of building positive relationships with politicians so that there is more trust and any problems can be raised sooner rather than later in formal scrutiny mechanisms: ‘As our relationship as a department has developed over time senators have certainly become more at ease. In our last Estimates, the previous week was the shortest since I’ve been here and probably one of the shortest on record. The issues that are now mainly political and personal in nature, and note really as a result of missteps of the Department itself … I’ll attribute some of that to the relationships that had been built up but also the relationship with the Speaker and the President as my ministerial equivalent. If I don’t have a relationship with them, then things can go awry. I lean on them heavily; if something has gone wrong, they will often speak to the members or senators to resolve the issue. If I don’t have a relationship with them, then they would rightfully leave me to swim.’ (Stefanic 2019)

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Group development over time Group dynamics change over time, from their initial forming, through conflict over how to operate, then the establishment of norms about expected behaviour. Norms are important to hold a group together particularly through challenges. Campaigns in particular are unusual, as the 2019 Australian Labor campaign chief of staff noted: ‘Campaigns, because they bring different groups of people together from all over the place who have not necessarily worked together before, in the same circumstances, then you’ve got to go through this process of building the group and building that team. That norming, storming, forming.’ (Nash 2019) USAID’s (2012, 25–6) guide to building teams discusses forming, storming, norming and performing, and provides suggestions for managers on how to best handle each stage and facilitate development. The guide explains the honeymoon period in the forming stage, and advises focusing on communicating the vision and letting people socialise. For example, in the storming stage when tensions and conflicts emerge, it suggests they need to assert their leadership and consider reviewing individual roles and goals, noting that ‘the key is not to let disputes continue to block team cohesion. Use the stage to develop new methods for collaboration and addressing conflicts.’ The focus should be on tasks during the norming stage as rules and norms develop and collaboration increases. Leaders can step back at the stage at which the group is performing effectively, engaging in more delegation, but still aiming to sustain achievement and motivation. The guide provides a group formation management checklist with core goals and functions for each stage.

Resources Parties are able to use state resources provided to politicians once elected for non-partisan purposes (Bolleyer and Gauja 2015). Such resources are both financial and non-financial and include using parliamentary/electoral office allowances (e.g. travel, postage, office costs and staff), free postage services, electoral rolls made available through party registration, parliamentary facilities such as the research department and library, government advertising budgets and government special advisors/political advisors. In the UK such resources are called ‘short money’, and in 2010–11, the Conservatives received £2,841,498, the Liberal Democrats received £889,762, and Labour received £3,702,558. While work carried out by parliamentary staffers in the constituency office for local citizens is classified as parliamentary business, work done on policy is effectively party policy and thus in the partisan interest. In Australia, the cost of commercially printing, communicating and distributing information for parliamentary or electorate purposes is covered by the state to enable MPs to fulfil their duties as an elected representative of their constituents. Restrictions prevent this resource being used for party business, which is defined as material that contains how-to-vote or asks for donations. But this is a very narrow definition – a lot of communication which will benefit the party falls beyond that. Indeed, a 2009 report on parliamentary entitlements by the Australian National Audit Office found the printing entitlement was clearly used for election campaigning in the period leading up to, and during, the 2007 election campaign, including material promoting the party or critiquing others, which was strategically coordinated in terms of both message and imagery in line with campaign messages and themes.

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Australian parties also make strategic use of senators and senatorial officers for partisan goals and campaigns (Onselen and Errington 2005). Party organisations strategically locate their offices and staffers in marginal seats or where the opposition MP is elected, and expect them to allocate their energies and resources on specific areas, called ‘duty electorates’, so that they can represent local voters. This helps to maintain a party presence in the area, and builds support for future candidates for MPs, by creating media coverage and building a reputation in the community for the overall party brand. Whilst the specific arrangements vary between parties and also the geographical size of the area, all parties expect their senators to support the party in this way as ‘duty senators’. Parties also draw on resources outside those statutorily defined as party resources or part of the formal party organisation, including party-connected committees, party members’ personal campaign committees, leadership political action committees (PACs) and supportive interest groups (Herrnson 2009). This expands the resources at their disposal and helps them adapt to their political environment and compete in election campaigns. Parties often share personnel, members and information and coordinate activities with party-connected committees and allied interest groups to pursue similar goals, such as federal PACs, 527 committees and 501(c) organisations which were created with new regulations. Interest groups help with fundraising, providing endorsements and getting membership support; for example, for the Democrats: labor unions, environmental groups, organisations advocating women’s right; for the Republicans: prolife groups, the national, state, and local affiliates of the Chamber of Congress, religious groups, and conservative ideological groups. Think tanks help to develop policy ideas and proposals. They provide such assistance not just during elections, but also to help legislation get through. Such interaction is aided by overlapping personnel between the parties and interest groups, which builds networks and helps transmit information and ideas. Parties also use the resources at their disposal to help individual candidates win, providing campaign contributions, campaign management and marketing services and fundraising assistance as well as factual, strategic, and tactical information. They also provide supportive communication: for example in 2004 the Republican Party spent $45.8 million on ‘hybrid ads’ in support of President George W Bush, and the Democrats spent $24 million in support of their nominee Senator John Kerry.

Role distinction within groups Tasks within groups can be defined in different ways, which also impacts on group and thus organisational effectiveness. Looser definitions can make it harder to get things done. Although previously under Keating roles between ministerial advisors had been informal, later, under the Howard Government, roles and authority amongst staff became more formalised. This enabled coordination and centralised control of relationships between ministerial offices ‘a key factor in political management of the cabinet process’ (Stewart and Maley 2007, 289). A lack of distinction between roles can also cause issues. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair created a new partisan post of chief of staff which clashed with the existing neutral role of principal private secretary, the most senior post that a neutral civil servant can hold at Number 10 (Fawcett and Gay 2010). The co-existence of the two roles created uncertainty in terms of who was actually in charge of what in Number 10. In practice, the chief of staff became in charge of Number 10, leading the press office and policy unit, with the principal private secretary role reduced to the private office, the Garden Room, awarding of honours

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and appointments and also the day-to-day management of Number 10. The change created ‘discomfort’ in the civil service, by putting a partisan staff member in charge of public relations rather than just advising on them, which was added to by partisan special advisers influencing policy decisions, with press secretary Alastair Campbell getting involved in the Northern Ireland peace process and Jonathan Powell arguably taking over negotiations from the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam. The organisational structure became more political and delivery focused. When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007, he merged the chief of staff and principal private secretary roles and gave the new position to a non-partisan civil servant however, with the deputy chief of staff being filled by a partisan staff member. One larger-scale tension in role definition in government is that historically and theoretically there is expected to be a big distinction – and divide – between non-partisan government staff (described variously as public servant, bureaucrat, civil servant, career staff) and politically appointed staff (e.g. political advisor, ministerial advisor, special advisor), with the former focusing on non-partisan policy making and the latter on partisan politics. For example, the creation of the role of partisan policy advisors in Canada in the mid1970s led to tension, as non-partisan deputy ministers regarded themselves as the principal policy advisors to ministers and did not want to share that: one deputy minister interviewed commented that ‘he and his assistant deputy ministers can provide all the policy advice his minister requires … when it comes to departmental issues we are the experts’ even whilst conceding that the partisan policy advisor might advise on the politics of a policy proposal (quoted by Savoie 1983, 517). Partisan advisors were also, at that time, excluded from departmental meetings and cabinet committees. In current practice, however, there is increasing blurring between the two. This is because political staff working in a political organisation need to be involved in policy making, and so any job is political. A survey of 1,000 senior executives in the US found that political staff spent more time interacting with other political figures or ‘political liaison’, such as explaining the merits of policies to White House staff than neutral staff (82% of political versus 43% of career staff); meeting with interest groups; and interacting with the Office of Management and Budget (Dolan 2000). However, both non-partisan and partisan staff ‘explain, advocate, and negotiate with political actors inside and outside government’; the difference is just that political executives do so more frequently. There is little difference between the two in terms of their responsibilities and involvement in policy matters. Research on political staff in Canada also suggested they influence policy making. Political staff are involved in policy coordination horizontally and vertically, and internally and externally, for example, liaising with political and policy staff from other ministerial offices and stakeholders outside government. Tasks include a range of political management tactics, including process management, steering, coordinating, bargaining, negotiating and consulting (Craft 2015b). Political staff within Canadian ministerial offices are increasingly influential because of the reality of political environments and thus in reality ‘ministers view virtually everything from a perspective of political strategy and/or tactics aimed at generating public support for their governing party’ and thus ‘political expertise will trump policy expertise’ (Aucoin 2010, 83). The division between policy/technical and political is not as clear, with policy expertise now combined with political understanding (e.g. of public opinion, the views of key stakeholder groups), and may be short or long term, reactive or proactive, strategic and wide ranging or single issue focused, and about the overall public interest or

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partisan interests, highlighting ‘the irrelevance of these older political vs administrative distinctions’ (Craft and Howlett 2012, 92). Additionally, official government communications via the media can also become influenced for partisan advantage even whilst it has a potential neutral public service function – ‘the line separating the two is often not clear’ (Aucoin 2010, 77). Ministerial advisers in New Zealand seek to influence policy formation through agendasetting, linking ideas, interests and opportunities, mobilising, bargaining and delivering, working both horizontally and vertically and within and across executive boundaries (Eichbaum and Shaw 2011). For example, they raise and/or debate new policy initiatives with their minister, request reports from neutral public/civil servants, and get involved in budgeting. They attend cross-unit meetings, including those on intra-governmental policy coordination. They are also involved in internal communication between ministers and departmental civil servants, such as conveying the minister’s policy expectations to public servants and providing the minister with opportunities to test, clarify and probe policy and political ideas, and seeking and filtering advice or reports from departments on specific issues. The filtering is carried out from a political perspective. Moreover, not all civil servants see political advisors as threatening – instead, they note that partisan staff help civil servants to get their job done, by aiding the passing of policy by helping them understand ministerial preferences and the wider government context (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010). In Australia, research has noted that ministers value practitioners who move between neutral civil servant and partisan advisor roles, and the involvement of political advisors in policy making was accepted both by ministers and public servants (Maley 2002).

Group size Group size can affect interaction and effectiveness. Smaller teams (2–9 members) tend to have more interpersonal interaction and morale than larger teams, but larger teams (10–16) tend to have more resources and be more innovative, though can attract social loafing and lower individual effort. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe (2016) argued that campaigns need to sort out decision making processes and create a smaller group: ‘You do need to make sure that it’s not a conference call or a meeting of ten equals … I think that you do need to figure out whether it’s one voice, two voice … There’s the big call, and the big meeting, and then there’s the real meeting and the real call. That’s a little bit flip, but you can’t make decisions with ten people. I mean, it’s actually impossible, whether you’re in politics, business, or family, it’s impossible.’

Norms Norms affect whether individuals deviate from the group, or conform too much leading to group think, and thus affect the cohesiveness and unity of groups. In the UK House of Lords cohesiveness is derived from psychological factors such as social identity within party groups (Russell 2014). Party leaders in the House of Lords do not have many disciplinary methods at their disposal, yet the organisation is characterised by high levels of party voting cohesion and low levels of dissent. Only 4% of members feared disciplinary action if they cast dissenting votes, whereas they were concerned that such behaviour ‘would “upset” other members of the party group, or “damage” the group’. Other cultures within the group promoted loyal

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voting according to the party line, such as those who felt more involved in decision making and those whose group membership was important to their sense of identity.

4c. Appreciate how non-disciplinary factors influence group unity such as decision-making positions, processes and rules Political management includes managing unity within groups, and while discipline is one way to do this, there are a whole range of other influences on behaviour. For example, key decision makers such as a chief of staff and director of communication need to be put in place within political offices, especially for new governments, as they affect how all other staff at other levels communicate. Governments can adopt systematic and methodical decision-making processes to select final decisions to ensure potential impacts are anticipated as well as how to implement solutions. Political managers also need to be aware of the potential influence of party factions within legislatures on the passing of legislation and support for presidential candidates as they can co-operate, force adjustment or veto proposals. They can also draw on conflict resolution methods, policies and processes and may also utilise outside practitioners such as pollsters and communication strategists in campaigns and tsars in governments.

Group decision making Group decision making can help to create acceptance and unity and ease implementation, but takes more time, can marginalise minorities, be influenced by group think, hinder organisational responsiveness, especially in a crisis, and prevent leadership. In political offices, key decision makers can influence the nature of behaviour in that office. For example, chiefs of staff are highly influential and important positions within presidential offices and PMOs, not least as they filter who and what flows to the political leader. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key (2013) said that his Chief of Staff Wayne Eagleson was New Zealand’s most ‘influential unelected’ official and there were few decisions he made without Eagleson at his side, ‘He is pretty much always [there]. There are some decisions in the end we just make and he doesn’t come to Cabinet but every piece of paper I see, pretty much he sees.’ Decision making at the beginning of new governments is also a particularly significant issue. Certain staff need to be in place early in the US presidential transition because they set the tone and direction for operations, but also heavily influence the political appointment process, staff orientation and potential perception of the administration, which in turn affect the effectiveness of the whole administration (Kumar et al 2000). The chief of staff is crucial to effective group functioning as many other aspects flow from the chief of staff: the selection of other staff, political strategy and diary planning, but also processes such as how decisions will be implemented and the style of how the White House functions. It is best to get the head of the office of presidential personnel in place at the start of the transition to prepare the selection of appointees; this helps to smooth the transition to post-inauguration and avoids wasting any time. The head also needs to stay in post at least a year and a half to be of maximum benefit, and needs to be someone the president is able to trust to identify appropriate candidates, and thus backs the president’s decisions, giving them authority. It will also stop others trying to play games to get alternative outcomes. The assistant for legislative affairs also need to be in place early to smooth the path for nominees to executive branch positions,

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as does the counsel to the president to establish and guide the vetting process for presidential nominees to executive branch positions and also advise the president on potential legal actions such as executive orders and legislation in terms of what they can and cannot do. The press secretary needs to be in place to manage media requests and public desire for information about the administration and appointments, reducing expectations for quick decision making, laying foundations for a positive relationship between the president and news organisations through informal meetings. The Office of Management and Administration also needs to plan salaries and allocation of offices to staff as these are very significant factor in staff morale and thus need sorting out before the inauguration.

Group conflict management Effective management of inevitable conflict can improve performance if it is functional rather than dysfunctional, with strategies including avoiding conflict, accommodating it, forcing your needs over another, compromising and collaboration. Conflicts over tasks tends to be positive and constructive, but relationship conflict reduces understanding and is problematic. Conflict about processes can also create uncertainty and increase workload. One way to maintain party unity within the US Congress is through factions (DiSalvo 2009). Factions are sub-units within political parties which share a common identity (e.g. ideologically) and are mostly informally organised with occasional formal organisations, such as the Democratic Study Group or the Conservative Opportunity Society, but mostly in the House. They seek to gain power, influence the agenda, shape legislators’ policy preferences and the party’s image by voting collectively on key issues and influencing committees, subcommittees, formal and informal rules and outside groups in the legislative process, and thus the distribution of power within the party and its overall direction and positioning. Factions also engage in external communication to aid their cause, developing communication networks and appealing to attentive publics during legislative debates. Individual politicians join factions to increase their own power and then have incentives to follow it. However, just as factions may help to maintain unity, they may also defy the overall party leadership strategy. Examples are when the New Right faction began within the minority Republican Party of the 1960s and 1970s and dedicated itself to an ideological realignment of the parties. The faction created a network of organisations externally involving think tanks, publications and donors, as well as within Congress through a Conservative Opportunity Society in the 1980s led by Newt Gingrich. It did, however, result in electoral success: New Right Republicans captured the House in 1994. Similarly, the new Democrats emerged within the Democratic Party in the mid-1980s after the loss of subsequent presidential elections, arguing that only a more centrist policy agenda would be successful, and this culminated in Bill Clinton running successfully as a New Democrat candidate in 1992.

Using individuals from outside the formal organisation Governments and parties also bring in external consultants into internal teams. For example, under Tony Blair’s leadership, tsars were appointed in the UK Government to tackle high profile issues, such as drugs and homelessness, as well as unpaid advisers such as Lord Birt who acted as Tony Blair’s Strategy Adviser between 2001 and 2005 and completed reports on London, drugs, health, education, transport and crime (Fawcett and Gay 2010; Prince

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2012). Parties also employ outside political consultants for their campaigns, involving ‘designing in’ outside consultants, being employed as independent contractors to complete a defined project to help parties to achieve their goals (Kolodny and Dulio 2003).

Political HR 5: motivate A key part of political HR is to motivate staff and volunteers to engage in behaviour which supports the organisation’s strategic plan and helps retain them. Given the resources put into effective recruitment and development, it is important to retain staff and volunteers, and keep them motivated so they continue to perform highly in their roles and help achieve political goals. High staff turnover works against an organisation achieving its goals, as departing staff take with them everything they have learnt, and the organisation has to pay the cost of attracting and supporting new staff, as well as managing the lack of staff between someone leaving and their replacement arriving, and the resources needed to get them up to speed. In politics, turnover is also particularly high with presidential political appointments, which ultimately reduces political control anyway, reducing organisational effectiveness (Ingraham 1988). It is also high when it comes to political staff both in parties and government, as practitioners noted when interviewed: 



‘We are going through a period in the organisation of unprecedented turnover which means that you are losing an enormous amount of corporate memory and experience … there is a risk in political parties … [where] lack of permanence then leads to lowest common denominator stuff where standards drop because there aren’t the fixtures and norms that you would have in any other organization … you can end up with people cutting corners, or not necessarily having the example to work to. Because they might not have seen someone perform the job they are now doing to a particular set of standards or requirements’ (Erickson 2019). ‘There’s high turnover. Political advisers are mostly young and they may have come from the media, or somewhere else and not have a lot of political experience’ (BakerJones 2019).

Wood and Marchbanks (2008, 392) argue that early exit by presidential political appointees loses momentum, undermines team work, makes it harder to achieve presidential goals and to get things done. Managers in political organisations can offer a range of incentives, including salary, promotions, transfers and development opportunities in order to increase job satisfaction – however, they should be aware that financial benefits are not the most appropriate, while discipline does not work as smoothly in politics as other organisations.

5a. Offer opportunities to make a difference and recognise their contribution In politics, financial compensation and benefits are not as powerful, as the salaries are lower, but also of course volunteers are not paid and thus managers have to look at non-financial benefits and incentives. Interviews of high-level US federal executives from 1970, 1986–1987 and 1991–1992 found that staff are motivated by the potential to make a difference, ‘in short, they are in it, not for the money, but for the chance to play a role in accomplishing important things and to work

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with outstanding people while doing so’ (Aberbach 2003, 392). Thus performance management systems should emphasise the service aspects of the role rather than compensation. Similarly, party members need to be offered the opportunity to act on their values, good socialisation and recognition of their work. Using marketing and management literature as well as political science, Granik (2005) identified that the benefits of political party membership which create incentives for participation. She identified that two key aspects from organisational behaviour literature are relevant to parties: socialisation and job satisfaction. Socialisation includes the process by which individuals acquire skills, social knowledge and behaviours to participate. While participation is not a job as such, the concept of job satisfaction is still relevant, and Granik argues that in a party context it is an overall feeling about the work members do for their party (Granik (2005, 73). Building on this, Granik applied a framework used in studies of non-profit organisations called the volunteer functions inventory, which measures functional motivations underlying volunteering, see Table 4.11. Granik researched party members in a left of centre nationalist party in Wales – Plaid Cymru – using a survey. The results indicated that of these benefits, functional values was the most important, followed by job satisfaction, understanding benefits, social benefits, enhanced benefits and protective benefits. Material benefits – career – were ranked as least important. Analysis of relationships between variables indicated that a sense of belonging to a political party is also important. Parties therefore need to provide members with the opportunity to act on their values, help socialise them and ensure they feel that they and the work they do for the party are important and needed. The 2008 Obama campaign showed awareness of the need for intangible incentives (Irwin 2015). They created relatively rigid pay bands and avoided salary negotiations, giving a take it or leave it offer, and thus many people working on the campaign did so for less than they could make elsewhere, but did so because they believed in the campaign. However, one potential tangible incentive was the potential for getting a job at the White House or a top government agency after the campaign. Practitioners who worked on the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns noted the importance of having volunteers who identified with and shared the same values as the campaign. Similarly, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz noted how values helped motivate staff to take much lower paid jobs on his campaign:

TABLE 4.11 Benefits to try to offer party members

Category

The benefits that participating provides

Purposive incentive Material

Functional values

Solidary incentives

Job satisfaction Enhancement Protective Social Understanding

Career

Enables individuals to be able to act on their beliefs and express their own values, serving a cause they care about Acquires new skills or makes new contacts which benefit their professional life Creates a positive feeling about the work they do for their party Makes the individual appear needed and important Provides relief or escape from negative feelings Gains social approval from others Helps volunteers learn about the cause or organisation

Source: adapted from Granik (2005, 73–5).

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‘In our campaign, one of the things that was inspirational is people were sacrificially joining the campaign. A number of the people on the campaign were away from their kids, were taking huge pay cuts, and were at the office at midnight, not because I’m sitting there with a whip and a time clock – but because they were fighting to save the country. We paid people a fraction of what other campaigns paid, and they worked harder because they believed in the cause, not the candidate.’ (Cruz, 2016)

5b. Be aware that discipline and dismissal for poorly performing staff/politicians is complex In politics, discipline processes are often lax or difficult to implement. FEMA (2006) provides guidelines for disciplining volunteers and notes that corrective action may include additional training or supervision, reassignment, suspension and termination. It states that ‘termination should be reserved for instances when other measures have failed or when there has been gross ethical misconduct. Volunteers should be made aware of grievance procedures to address complaints that cannot be resolved with their supervisors’ (FEMA 2006, 6.8). In the US, checks on political staffers are variable. Congressional staff interviewed between 1995 and 1998 reported that there were very few formal mechanisms for routine performance review, or direct feedback, especially positive review (Romzek 2000). The 1996 Congressional Accountability Act led to more codification of office practices, job descriptions and performance evaluations in political offices, but hierarchical measures to address staff mistakes do not always work in a political environment. One staffer explained that in order to prevent a lack of follow-up after a staff meeting, they implemented a procedure whereby all staff had to write follow-up memos after each meeting. However, it turned out that such a procedure already existed but had never been used in practice ‘because the work does not lend itself to that kind of structure’ (quoted by Romzek 2000, 431). Whilst staff are very aware of potential accountability for their actions, politicians are not quick to give feedback. Staff are left to self-evaluate, which can lead to self-delusion until there is a case of poor performance. Staff may receive coaching and teaching in some offices, others are given warnings, whereas others operate on the principle of one big mistake and you’re gone. Alternatively, problematic staff may simply be kept out of the loop, while favoured staff are given more involvement with decision making and opportunity to interact with members of Congress. Staff know they are doing well if they get given more responsibility. Overall, this reflects the fluid and informal nature of review practices in government. This is ineffective political management which is made worse by the relative young age and inexperience of many political staff who come to the Hill or Parliament straight out of university and have to learn what is acceptable behaviour by trial and error, or be left to be guided by senior staff. As for politicians, the public can ‘dismiss’ a party from government in elections. Impeachment is another tool to dismiss a president but is rarely used. Party leaders may also be encouraged to leave if they become unpopular, as measured by opinion polls and election performances. As Bynander and Hart (2007, 47–8) note, ‘however good and powerful they may be, all leaders of political parties have a limited “sell by” date. They get old, weary and sick. They get out of tune with the times, or anaesthetised by their own power.’ Analysis of leadership successions in four countries between 1945 and 2005 found that electoral performance and internal challenges are the most significant causes for leaders to exit. The data also

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suggested the exit is more likely to be voluntary (34% entirely voluntary, 31% after consultation and urging by members of the incumbent’s inner circle). Australian leaders get challenged and replaced more frequently than do other leaders, but they are also forced to combat more internal rivalry than their counterparts elsewhere. Ministerial resignations are often due to political not managerial logic. In Germany, research found that cabinet ministers have to resign whenever the prime minister perceives the political costs of a minister staying in office to be higher than the benefits of keeping the status quo (Fischer, Kaiser and Rohlfing 2006). Analysis of resignation events in Germany in the period 1969 to 2005, using detailed data collection – with 111 resignation events, i.e. serious public discussions about a cabinet minister’s future, only 14 of which ended in resignation – found that resignation events do not follow a managerial logic. Ministers do not lose office because of their performance errors but due to ‘extrapolitical’ issues such as misdemeanours.

5c. Encourage more effective performance by adapting to suit individual attitudes, values and beliefs, and personality Managers can potentially encourage more effective performance by adapting to suit the individual nature of different people, considering attitudes, values and beliefs, and their personalities and the relationship of this to their work. Very little existing literature was found that discusses individual characteristics in politics and government, suggesting this is an area which needs more research. No political documents were found in this area either. The one piece of relevant research was on creating activist-centred structures in political campaigns (Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014). This involved understanding what will incentivise activists, segmenting them because different people will want to volunteer in different ways, and moving away from the one size fits all approach towards adapting to the needs and wants of prospective supporters. The US Democrats under first the chairmanship of Howard Dean and then when Barack Obama became the nominated presidential candidate created more volunteer-centred structures, utilising online methods to enable volunteers to help the party in the way that suited them. A Democrat staffer, Parag Metha, noted what this meant for the volunteer: ‘now I don’t have to go 25 miles away to some Obama campaign office or even to another state and volunteer there. I can volunteer from my own home. I can download a list of those people, their names, their addresses, their age, and their telephone numbers; I can print a script of what to say, I can print flyers with information about Barack Obama’s position on issues. I can then go outside my door and walk to 25 houses and talk to my neighbours.’ (quoted in Lees-Marshment and Pettitt, 2014, 253–4) Another staffer, Kamlesh Karia, who worked for the UK Labour Party explained that the change in approach responded to the reality that everyone is busier now and thus emphasising set weekly meetings does not work so well and they tried to change organisational thinking, ‘we’re trying to get parties to break this cultural thinking, where they have to do monthly meetings, keep the agenda, take the minutes, check the minutes’ (quoted in LeesMarshment and Pettitt 2014, 254).

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Political HR 6: encourage excellence Lastly, political HR should also seek to develop an effective work environment that nurtures highly committed, engaged and satisfied staff so that they have high levels of job satisfaction and will then perform to the best of their ability. Historically, little attention was paid to this in politics: employment in government was for life, and parties made do with whoever volunteered. But as one prime minister’s chief of staff put it, ‘ideally, part of the management task is to make sure that people just treat each other with respect, and again, don’t take things too far, recognising that in politics it’s a really high stakes game and people have strong views’ (Kunkel 2019).

6a. Facilitate organisational commitment, satisfaction and positive morale Political managers need to encourage commitment to the organisation or passion for a candidate’s campaign, supporting staff to find meaning in their work, be satisfied with their work and try to ensure good working conditions. One of the challenges is that working conditions for MPs themselves are poor. Surveys with longitudinal cohorts of 136 UK MPs assessed the impact of work-related changes over which they had either a higher or lower level of control: working hours reform and the expenses crisis (Weinberg 2015). The surveys found that politicians’ psychological strain was related to feedback they received on work-based decisions and pressure they experienced balancing work and home life. Long hours and a poor work–life balance has a negative impact on MPs’ psychological health, and, ultimately, their ability to function effectively. The expense affair created negative images for politicians and thus MPs need access to psychological support facilitated by the Occupational Health Service of the House of Commons. Given that their performance and decisions have potentially profound ramifications for people’s lives, organisational changes were brought into the House of Commons to improve MPs’ work experiences and brought benefits for some and disadvantages for other national politicians in terms of health, performance and work–life balance. Weinberg (2015) recommends that the potential impact of workplace factors on the psychological health of employees needs to be considered not only for MPs, but also for political employees. Problematic office culture and work–life balance is also a challenge for political staff. The Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party leader emphasised the need to maintain a supportive culture, morale and make sure people take their leave: ‘I make sure there’s good comradery, that people look after each other, bringing people together for a bit of a de-brief and keep sharing information, that can also be a little bit of team building … I’ve got two deputies, so the three of us, we talk a lot about team morale and team health. When we have catch ups with our executive team which is all of the unit heads the team health check is on the agenda – how is everyone travelling, is there anyone we are worried about, are people taking their leave … You’ve got to try and keep an eye on leave balances. If I find people have big leave balances they get a talking to. You don’t want them around because they’re normally fatigued and also there will be a morale issue. And partly because their personal life starts to get problematic for them because they’re not spending time with their loved ones.’ (Gartrell 2019)

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Campaigns need to build positive morale to succeed in the very intense and high pressurised time period. Ideally: ‘campaigns actually provide a foundation for a good government or opposition because they actually build those networks across the organisation. You basically chuck together a group of people who don’t know each other well, and after 6 or 8 weeks, they come out the other end with life-long relationships and friendships forged in the heat of battle.’ (Nash 2019) In the 2016 Australian election campaign, which was longer than normal, a senior staff member from the Labor campaign recalled how she would: ‘walk into the campaign every morning into the campaign office and say happy whatever day of the week is was, so happy Monday, happy Tuesday, happy Wednesday, happy Thursday. And for week one everyone was really annoyed. Week 2 it was “are you going to do this every day?”. And I said “Yep!” By week 8 it had become a thing – and it was a basis for humour’ (Nash 2019) Thus ‘those sorts of tricks, for want of a better word, are an important part of the tool kit’ (Nash 2019). Even a police raid did not damage morale – ‘that is the key management task: not allowing a crisis to derail the campaign, either emotionally for people or practically’ – and it was used in ‘a positive way rather than a negative way in a morale sense’ to strengthen the team (Nash 2019). Whereas in the 2019 Australian Labor campaign: ‘the Morrison Government behaved like they were in opposition and spent a lot of the campaign attacking our policy announcements, everything. So it felt very much like we were on the defensive constantly and that changed the dynamic as well. And a lot of that was being fielded through the comms team, and how the comms team feels about the campaign can have a lot of impact on the whole campaign. It did feel like we were under attack a lot more, and we were defensive and we were more at risk.’ (Nash 2019)

6b. Develop staff and volunteer engagement Empowering people within organisations can help them to perform more effectively. In politics, parties can design pro-activist internal cultures to mobilise members that involve them in creating party policy, messages, organisational structures that make it easy for them to get involved, and create opportunities for non-member volunteers to participate in key activities such as policy forums and primaries for candidate selection. Extensive interviews with professional party managers working in the central offices of political parties revealed how parties mobilised volunteers through three broad approaches: enlisting activists in creating the party message, creating activist-centred campaign structures and encouraging activists through training and leadership (Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014). The practitioners who were interviewed felt that involving the party activists in more than just campaigning, for example, through discussions on policy and topical issues, helped to build up a more trusting internal culture. Online forums were

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used to create new forms of internal debate in the UK Labour Party and the US Republican Party. The e-marketing director for the US Republicans noted how they had created a website where anybody could tell us what they thought the Republican Party should represent, and the Party integrated individuals’ comments into their official written platform. Thus someone from South Dakota might make a comment about wind energy and it would go into the energy section of the platform. Giving power and leadership positions to volunteers also changes the culture. One practitioner from the US Democrats reflected how ‘for so many years the Democratic Party has taken them for granted and used them for electioneering, but then not used them for leadership’ (quoted in Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014, 255). They empowered local volunteers, giving them resources including voter data and training, and the room to make decisions. The US Republicans also managed and trained volunteers to get the messages out and get the vote out on election day, with their staff explaining how the party ran training on campaign management, campaign finance and campaign field schools ‘so you’ve got activists who know how to go door to door, who know how to do a survey, who know how to print out a phone survey and get on the phone, do the phone survey and enter it right into voter vaults’ (quoted in Lees-Marshment and Pettitt 2014, 255). Additionally, parties increasingly move beyond formal membership to develop participatory opportunities for non-members through supporters’ networks. Parties have created new forms of involvement beyond formally defined membership, strategically adapting their membership offering to attract citizens, resources and legitimacy (Gauja 2015). Research identified past initiatives such as: 





Linked activities (such as donating) to a sense of organisational belonging. For example, the UK Conservatives offered three ways in which to ‘join’ the Party: as a friend, member or donor, and the Australian Labor offered three options to ‘join’: as a member, by providing contact details to stay up to date and by volunteering for the Party. Creating formalised supporters’ networks, such as the British Labour and Conservative Parties; the German Social Democrats (SPD); the Christian Union in the Netherlands; and the ‘Italy of Values’ Party (IDV), ‘People of Freedom’ (PDL) and the Democratic Party (PD) in Italy. Volunteers could join as ‘supporters’ or ‘friends’ rather than members. The Canadian Liberal Party’s constitution also recognised supporters as a formal category of affiliation, and describes it as a new, more flexible opportunity for engagement with the party. Parties varied in the amount of membership rights bestowed to supporters. Creating on and offline, short-term participatory opportunities for non-members such as policy forums and open primaries for candidate and leadership selection. In 2010, the Australian Labor Party established ‘Labor Connect’ to create a new place for supporters and the wider community to connect with each other and participate in policy debates, and in 2013, UK Labour launched an online policy hub entitled ‘Your Britain’ to which anyone could contribute ideas and experience short-term engagement with the Party.

Similar approaches can be used in campaigns. Jon Carson (2009), Executive Director and former Illinois State Director for Obama for America 2008, noted that they learnt how to take advantage of ‘super volunteers’ and ‘what we really ended up having was an extra layer

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of staff out there … we empowered them … we actually gave volunteers log-ins to our databases, access to all the other volunteers in their area, and told them to get the job done.’

6c. Shape and reinforce positive behaviour Shaping aims to guide staff learning in graduated steps, reinforcing each successive step through positive reinforcement (e.g. reward for desired behaviour) and negative reinforcement (withdraw something negative once desired behaviour is shown). Internal organisational cultures can foster operant conditioning and social learning, where leaders and peer observation influence how individuals learn the desired behaviour. Former UK advisor Dominic Cummings argued that HR in government has significant deficiencies when it comes to reinforcing effective behaviour: ‘In organisations that work very well in the world you see people that care and they try hard. In large parts of the civil service the whole HR system encourages the opposite. Almost nobody is every fired, but more important than that, everything pushes against a culture of responsibility and excellence. Failure is absolutely normal. It is not something to be avoided … and the HR system reinforces that.’ (Cummings 2014) However, in parties, political managers can use a mixture of positive reinforcement and social learning to encourage desired behaviours and maintain unity. They offer career advancement opportunities and in the long term they rely on discipline and social pressure and socialisation to limit dissent, which is unpopular with voters (Kam 2009). Social learning theory approaches are apparent in the informal expectations that loyalty will be rewarded with advancement. Advancement is promised to loyal MPs in the form of recruitment channels that lead to the cabinet/shadow cabinet and which offers policy influence and office perks but is dependent on good relations with party leaders developed through supporting the party leadership. Other benefits offered include the chief whip asking the prime minister to give them something, or just using social pressure to their better nature and telling them they may win the next one. This approach has limitations in that there are not enough opportunities available to meet politicians’ desires for advancement, especially in opposition but even in government where not everyone can be in cabinet. Furthermore, party leaders also have to consider representational issues such as gender, region and party factions. MPs who know they will not be promoted then have little incentive to follow the party line. There are negative reinforcement tools open to party leaders to maintain unity, including declaring free votes or brokering policy compromises to conceal internal divisions. Formal disciplinary sanctions available include the withdrawal of the party whip or expulsion, but formal discipline can attract public attention and show disunity anyway, and threatens small majorities or coalition governments. Informal tools such as threats of phone calls or withdrawing support for reselection tend to be used more. However, discipline is a last resort – the aim is that MPs are socialised into loyalty. Parties in Germany have succeeded in maintaining a high level of party discipline in Parliament (Patzelt 2003) through socialisation. MPs choose to be unified in response to rules: their behaviour is shaped by parliamentary rules and structures as well as guiding, monitoring and intervening activities by the party group’s executive committee. Rules,

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conventions and norms include that politicians want to get elected to positions in party groups, and to get elected they need to have helped party cohesion – if they are seen as offensive or fail to cultivate caucus cohesion, they put their re-election at risk. There is also a desire to maintain unity in public, and politicians are expected to help maintain this by supporting their party line even if only after increased bargaining. They only threaten disunity in exceptional cases, such as matters of deep political convictions or personal conscience, otherwise the politician will be seen as a selfish troublemaker. Opposition party members are also expected to support their party’s position, not vote with the government, though abstention can be acceptable. Such discipline is made easier because room is made for internal discussion and consultation within party groups that focus on particular policy fields. When a politician wants to initiate a motion, they are required to consult and to find a way of coordinating action, thus developing trust amongst party colleagues. Intra-party group structures and associated expectations also support unity. Each politician is on at least one formal, standing and specialised working group, and they offer additional room for discussion. All policy views, especially dissenting ones, are first discussed in the respective working groups before the executive committee or the party group’s plenary. There is thus significant room for discussion, debate, deliberation and consultation before final voting. Additionally, informal sociological groups help retain loyalty, such as regional groups that bring together MPs from the same Land in the Bundestag or from the same region in a larger Landtag, which make politicians feel part of the team. Leaders also engage in repeated communication within party organisations so that nobody ever feels omitted. Shaping, rather than discipline, is carried out through ‘softer’ means, including giving or withholding support on policy and career issues, and considering their behaviour when distributing resources such as offices, caucus financial support and party-supported business trips.

Summary and a theory of political HR Political HR is complex and challenging, involving drawing on very different sources of influence to business to encourage elected politicians, paid political staff and unpaid volunteers to act in a way that helps organisations to achieve their goals. In practice, many of the standard business HR practices do not exist – such as job analysis and clear job descriptions – which then makes it even harder to run professional selection processes and create effective orientation for practitioners coming into their job for the first time. Training and development for even those in the highest and most important positions, including chiefs of staff and ministerial roles, is severely lacking. This means we do not get the best people into these positions and do not support them to perform to the highest possible level. When asked what the most important area of political management to research was, practitioners said political HR, especially for political staffers. Not only is the lack of proper HR in politics and government a problem for the individuals working in the roles, but it also hinders overall organisational effectiveness. There are, however, elements of effective practice, and the core principles we need to reflect on in future research – and practice – are presented in a theory of political HR in Table 4.12.

TABLE 4.12 A theory of political HR

POLITICAL HR 1: IDENTIFY STAFFING NEEDS Research and analyse staffing needs and jobs to create accurate job descriptions and selection criteria 1a. Systematically research, understand and predict future staffing requirements. 1b. Conduct a job analysis to create and update job descriptions and selection criteria outlining the competencies necessary for the position POLITICAL HR 2: RECRUIT APPROPRIATELY Recruit and select staff and volunteers who meet the competencies and political loyalties the jobs require 2a. Be proactive about the recruitment of prospective employees, candidates, members and volunteers, including identifying the potential benefits to offer them 2b. Use professional selection for party leaders, leadership and committee positions, candidates, volunteers for parties, campaigns or government programs 2c. Seek political staff who will help maintain control, bring fresh energy and ideas, understanding of external stakeholders and thus help achieve organisational priority goals 2d. Understand and draw on the political management benefits of non-partisan staff such as civil servants, career staff and bureaucrats 2e. Create cultures and practices that encourage diverse recruitment and thus organisational effectiveness POLITICAL HR 3: TRAIN AND DEVELOP Orientate, train and develop politicians, staff and volunteers 3a. Ensure there are effective orientation programs to help staff, politicians and volunteers understand the organisation, its goals, their role and performance expectations 3b. Offer training, professional development and mentoring to improve and extend their skills POLITICAL HR 4: LEARN HOW PEOPLE WORK Understand individual motivations and effective work teams and groups 4a. Understand what motivates politicians, staff, volunteers and donors, including values, working conditions, roles and benefits 4b. Understand the importance of informal relationships, resources and role distinction in group effectiveness 4c. Appreciate how non-disciplinary factors influence group unity such as decision-making positions, processes and rules POLITICAL HR 5: MOTIVATE Motivate and retain an effective workforce 5a. Offer opportunities to make a difference and recognise their contribution 5b. Be aware that discipline and dismissal for poorly performing staff/politicians is complex 5c. Encourage more effective performance by adapting to suit individual attitudes, values and beliefs, and personality POLITICAL HR 6: ENCOURAGE EXCELLENCE Develop an effective work environment that nurtures highly committed, engaged and satisfied staff 6a. Facilitate organisational commitment, satisfaction and positive morale 6b. Develop staff and volunteer engagement 6c. Shape and reinforce positive behaviour

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References Primary sources Practitioner interviews Baker-Jones, M (2019) Former Ministerial Advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment in Auckland, NZ. 18 November. Burke, T (2019) Australian Labor and Party Manager of Opposition Business, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Campbell, A (2019) Former political staffer in the Australian Prime Minister’s Office under Malcolm Turnbull, currently Assistant Secretary, Priorities and Delivery Unit, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Erickson, P (2019) National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at Labor headquarters, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Gartrell, T (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Greiner, N (2019) Australian Liberal Party Federal President, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 29 October. Kunkel, J (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 1 November. Munro, M (2019) Former Chief of Staff to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 12 November. Nash, Y (2019) Chief of Staff for the Federal Australian Labor 2019 Campaign headquarters and Chief of Staff for opposition leader Bill Shorten, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Stefanic, R (2019) Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at Parliament House Canberra, Australia. 25 October.

Government documents Northwest Territories Government (2008) Community Government Human Resources Development System. June. Canada: Municipal and Community Affairs. Report retrieved from http://www.maca.gov.nt. ca/school/tools/CGHRDS%20Manual%20.pdf. Office of the Integrity Commissioner of Ontario (2015) A Report on a Consultation into the Role of Ministers’ Staff at Queen’s Park by Lynn Morrison Integrity Commissioner. 10 March. Report retrieved from https://www.oico.on.ca/docs/default-source/default-document-library/ministers-staff-consulta tion-report.pdf?sfvrsn=2. US Agency International Development (USAID) (2012) USAID Team Building Module Facilitator's Guide. Boston, MA, USA. September. Report retrieved from https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/ files/documents/1864/Team-Building-Module-Facilitators-Guide.pdf. US Department of Veterans Affairs (2005) Human Resource Strategic Plan: 2005–2010. USA: Human Resources and Administration. Report retrieved from http://www.va.gov/ofcadmin/docs/HRA_Stra tegic_Plan.pdf. US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (2006) Developing and Managing Volunteers: Independent Study. February. Emmitsburg, MD, USA: US Department of Homeland Security. Report retrieved from https://training.fema.gov/emiweb/downloads/is244.pdf.

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Party documents Ohio Republican Party (n.d.) Nuts and Bolts. OH, USA. Report retrieved from http://www.luca scountyrepublicanparty.com/DOWNLOAD/Nuts%20and%20Bolts%20ORP.pdf. Organizing for Action (2015) Organizing for Action (OFA) Fellowship Program. USA. Report retrieved from http://sgpp.arizona.edu/sites/sgpp.arizona.edu/files/OFA%20Program%20Fellows%20spr16.pdf.

Politician comments Cruz, T (2016) ‘POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush interviews Ted Cruz.’ Podcast retrieved from http:// www.politico.com/story/2016/07/off-message-transcript-ted-cruz-225655#ixzz4JwKxmr5B. Key, J (2013) Interviewed in Tracy Watkins, ‘Key credits team for National’s success.’ 9 November. Article retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/politics/9382256/Keycredits-team-for-Nationals-success. Trudeau, J (2015) Quoted in T MacCharles, L Whittington and B Campion-Smith, ‘Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveils diverse cabinet in touching ceremony.’ 4 November. The Star. Article retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/11/04/trudeaus-cabinet-prospectsfound-for-rideau-hall.html.

Practitioner comments Carson, J (2009) Executive Director and former Illinois State Director for Obama for America, 2007– 2008 quoted in K Hall Jamieson, Electing the President, 2008: The Insiders’ View. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 43–44. Cummings, D (2014) ‘The Hollow Men: What’s wrong with Westminster and Whitehall, and what to do about it.’ November. Address to the IPPR retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= GNaWPV5l4j4. Gould, P (2011) The Unfinished Revolution: How New Labour Changed British Politics For Ever. London: Abacus. Obama, B (2015) Quoted in B Simmons, ‘President Obama and Bill Simmons: The GQ Interview.’ November. Retrieved from http://www.gq.com/story/president-obama-bill-simmons-interview-gq-m en-of-the-year. Plouffe, D (2016) Quoted in ‘POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush interviews.’ http://www.politico.com/ story/2016/02/off-message-david-plouffe-2016-219942.

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Coghill, K, P Holland, R Donohue, K Rozzoli and G Grant (2008) ‘Professional Development Programmes for Members of Parliament.’ Parliamentary Affairs 61(1): 73–98. Connaughton, B (2010) ‘“Glorified gofers, policy experts or good generalists”: a classification of the roles of the Irish ministerial adviser.’ Irish Political Studies 25(3): 347–369. Craft, J (2015a) ‘Conceptualizing the policy work of partisan advisers.’ Policy Sciences 48(2): 135–158. Craft, J (2015b) ‘Revisiting the Gospel: Appointed Political Staffs and Core Executive Policy Coordination.’ International Journal of Public Administration 38(1): 56–65. Craft, J and M Howlett (2012) ‘Policy formulation, governance shifts and policy influence: location and content in policy advisory systems.’ Journal of Public Policy 32(2): 79–98. Cross, W and L Young (2002) ‘Policy Attitudes of Party Members in Canada: Evidence of Ideological Politics.’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 35(4): 859–880. DiSalvo, D (2009) ‘Party Factions in Congress.’ Congress & the Presidency 36(1): 27–57. Dolan, J (2000) ‘Influencing Policy at the Top of the Federal Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Career and Political Senior Executives.’ Public Administration Review 60(6): 573–581. Eichbaum, C and R Shaw (2007) ‘Minding the minister? Ministerial advisers in New Zealand government, Ko-tuitui.’ New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online 2(2): 95–113. Eichbaum, C and R Shaw (2010) ‘Conclusion.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 198–221. Eichbaum, C and R Shaw (2010) ‘New Zealand.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 114–150. Eichbaum, C and R Shaw (2011) ‘Political staff in executive government: conceptualising and mapping roles within the core executive.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 46(4): 583–600. Esselment, A L, J Lees-Marshment and A Marland (2014) ‘The nature of political advising to prime ministers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK.’ Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 52 (3): 358–375. Fawcett, P and G Oonagh (2010) ‘The United Kingdom.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 24–63. Fischer, J, A Kaiser, I Rohlfing (2006) ‘The Push and Pull of Ministerial Resignations in Germany, 1969–2005.’ West European Politics 29(4): 709–735. Franks, C E S (2007) ‘Members and Constituency Roles in the Canadian Federal System.’ Regional and Federal Studies 17(1): 23–45. Gallagher, M (2012) ‘The Political Role of the President of Ireland.’ Irish Political Studies 27(4): 522–538. Gauja, A (2015) ‘The construction of party membership.’ European Journal of Political Research 54(2): 232–248. Granik, S (2005) ‘Membership Benefits, Membership Action: Why Incentives for Activism Are What Members Want.’ Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing 14(1–2):65–89. Hassell, H and J Monson (2014) ‘Campaign Targets and Messages in Direct Mail Fundraising.’ Political Behavior 36(2): 359–376. Heatley, A (1996) ‘Political management in Australia: The case of the Northern Territory.’ Australian Journal of Public Administration 55(2): 54–64. Heberlig, E S and B A Larson (2007) ‘Party Fundraising, Descriptive Representation, and the Battle for Majority Control: Shifting Leadership Appointment Strategies in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1990–2002.’ Social Science Quarterly 88(2): 404–421. Heclo, H (1988) ‘The In-and-Outer System: A Critical Assessment.’ Political Science Quarterly 103(1): 37–56. Herrnson, P S (2009) ‘The Roles of Party Organizations, Party-Connected Committees, and Party Allies in Elections.’ Journal of Politics 71(4): 1207–1224. Ingraham, P W (1988) ‘Transition and Policy Change in Washington.’ Public Productivity Review 12(1): 61–72. Johnson, D W (2002) ‘Perspectives on Political Consulting.’ Journal of Political Marketing 1(1): 7–22.

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Kam, C J (2009) Party discipline and parliamentary politics. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Katz, R L (1974) ‘Skills of an effective administrator.’ Harvard Business Review (September): 90–102. Online at https://hbr.org/1974/09/skills-of-an-effective-administrator. Kazee, T A and M C Thornberry (1990) ‘Where’s the Party? Congressional Candidate Recruitment and American Party Organizations.’ Western Political Quarterly 43(1): 61–80. Kerby, M (2009) ‘Worth the wait: determinants of ministerial appointment in Canada, 1935–2008.’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 42(3): 593–612. Kim, P S (2009) ‘A case for performance management for political appointees.’ Public Personnel Management 38(4): 1–18. King, A (1991) ‘The British prime ministership in the age of the career politician.’ West European Politics 14(2): 25–47. Kolodny, R and D A Dulio (2003) ‘Political party adaptation in US congressional campaigns: why political parties use coordinated expenditures to hire political consultants.’ Party Politics 9(6): 729–746. Kumar, M J (2001a) ‘The Office of Communications.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31(4): 609–634. Kumar, M J (2001b) ‘The Office of the Press Secretary.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31(2): 296–322. Kumar, M J, G CEdwardsIII, J P Pfiffner, T Sullivan (2000) ‘The contemporary presidency: meeting the freight train head on: planning for the transition to power.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 30(4): 754–769. Lees-Marshment, J and R T Pettitt (2014) ‘Mobilising volunteer activists in political parties: the view from central office.’ Contemporary Politics 20(2): 246–260. Lewis, D E (2007) ‘Testing Pendleton’s Premise: Do Political Appointees Make Worse Bureaucrats?’ Journal of Politics 69(4): 1073–1088. Lewis, D E (2009) ‘Revisiting the administrative presidency: policy, patronage, and agency competence.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 39(1): 60–73. Lewis, D E (2012) ‘The contemporary presidency: the personnel process in the modern presidency.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 42(3): 577–596. Maisel, L S and W J Stone (2014) ‘Candidate emergence revisited: the lingering effects of recruitment, ambition, and successful prospects among house candidates.’ Political Science Quarterly 129(3): 429–447. Maley, M (2002) ‘Australian ministerial advisers and the Royal Commission on Government Administration.’ Australian Journal of Public Administration 61(1): 103–107. Maley, M (2010) ‘Australia.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 94–113. Maley, M (2011) ‘Strategic links in a cut-throat world: rethinking the role and relationships of Australian ministerial staff.’ Public Administration 89(4): 1469–1488. Maley, M (2015) ‘The policy work of Australian political staff.’ International Journal of Public Administration 38(1): 46–55. Matthews, F and M Flinders (2015) ‘The watchdogs of “Washminster” – parliamentary scrutiny of executive patronage in the UK.’ Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 53(2): 153–176. McSweeny, D (1999) ‘Changing the Rules Changed the Game: Selecting Conservative Leaders.’ Party Politics 5(4): 471–483. Mintzberg, H (1983) Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organisations. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Notaker, H (2009) ‘Access and Allies: European Center-Right Parties and the Collective Development of Campaign Management in the 1980s.’ The International Journal of Press/Politics 14(1): 21–39. Onselen, P and W Errington (2005) ‘Shock troops: The emerging role of Senators in House of Representatives campaigns.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 40(3): 357–371. Patzelt, W J (2003) ‘Party cohesion and party discipline in German parliaments.’ Journal of Legislative Studies 9(4): 102–115. Peters, B G (2010) ‘The United States.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 180–197.

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5 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP Using diverse power sources to exert influence in government, parties and campaigns

Introduction to political leadership in government, parties and campaigns Political leadership is an exercise much less in using authority and power and much more in creating power and using it prudently. Even those in the highest positions in government, such as presidents and prime ministers, have to work with and in response to other players, processes and public support. As President Obama said when reflecting on his time in office, ‘a lot of the work is not just identifying the right policy but now constantly building these ever shifting coalitions to be able to actually implement and execute and get it done’ (Obama 2015). None of the different organisational units, leaders and players can control the other; instead, there is what Heymann (1988, 10) called ‘a complex web of powers’. Parties are complex organisations with multiple layers and units, each with its’ own goals and views, and campaigns have to be both strategic and responsive to other candidates and unpredictable events. Presidents are there at the behest of the public, and prime ministers their parties, which are in turn also influenced by the public. As the Australian Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff noted: ‘Broadly authority comes from political success and while your judgment is seen to be good – and part of that I think is being able to identify very clearly what the mood of the nation is on various issues, and a lot of that is something that relies highly on a political leader’s instincts, whether it is John Howard or Scott Morrison or whoever. Ultimately it comes down to the judgment and instincts of leaders: their capacity to judge both the political context, the broad coalition they need to keep on side, how they manage the media – it’s all just the different arts of political leadership that go towards building up political capital. And then the question becomes from a policy point of view perhaps how bold do you want to be in spending that political capital. It can dissipate very easily.’ (Kunkel 2019) Leaders have to work with the demands from politicians within their own party as well as the opposition to get anything passed in legislatures to achieve actual action in government,

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TABLE 5.1 Key areas of political leadership

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Develop skills Be authoritative Be transformational Persuade Collaborate Delegate Adapt

which ‘constrains what you take to an election necessarily, but it certainly constrains what you’re able to do immediately after election if you are in power’ (Kunkel 2019). Political management is therefore about leaders getting multiple individuals and groups to support your plan, using both internal and external sources of power which are indirect and informal as well as official. There are a range of approaches and tools that political managers can use to influence others in organisations. This includes their own skills, more traditional authority and formal, legitimate powers, but it also includes transformational leadership that inspires others to work with them to achieve the mission, as well as persuading colleagues to get others on board with them, collaborating in decision making and delegating power to others. Moreover, adaptive leadership utilises the approach likely to be most effective depending on the willingness of others to follow the leader. Table 5.1 outlines the core areas of political leadership.

Political leadership 1: develop skills 1a. Develop effective competences in personnel management Effective political management requires personal skills. US executives in the major domestic departments and agencies in the 1984 Reagan administration said when surveyed that personal skills were considered important (Benze 1987). The Reagan management style was perceived as highly personal, while freeing up his staff to work, reserving him for the bigger decisions. As Reagan himself said, ‘The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things’ (Reagan n.d.). In contrast, the early years of the Bill Clinton Presidency were seen as chaotic and disorganised, and his first Chief of Staff Thomas F (Mack) McLarty was perceived to not have enough authority and influence internally by staff who worked with him (Villalobos, Vaughn and Cohen 2014). The New Zealand State Services Commission (2009) also prescribes that leaders should have ‘strong interpersonal skills’ and use a range of communication skills to inform, listen, include, engage, persuade and influence others, including colleagues and the organisation’s social and political communities (p. 4). Indicators for personal and interpersonal communication in terms of managing relationships point to the importance of internal relationships, with skills including connecting and establishing rapport with a wide range of people, reaching negotiated positions without damaging relationships and employing effective influencing strategies that are compelling and fit-for-purpose (New Zealand State Services Commission 2009, 8).

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1b. Develop political skills and understanding of internal politics Political practitioners at all levels of an organisation need political skills: an understanding of and ability to navigate the political environment the organisation operates in, as well as the internal politics and relationships within the organisation. Over 85% of US executives in the major domestic departments and agencies in the 1984 Reagan administration thought that political skills such as the ability to understand political realities, including the potential responsiveness of Congress, time initiatives, maintaining public trust and selling programs, as important for effective management (Benze 1987). Understanding internal politics is also important. The US Department of State Office of Civil Service Personal Management (2006) presents a leadership competency framework which discusses each competency in terms of what it means and why it is important. One competency is political savviness, defined as identifying ‘the internal and external politics that impact the work of the organization … with a clear perception of organizational and political reality’ and potential ‘impact of alternative courses of action’ (US Department of State Office of Civil Service Personal Management 2006, 35). It notes this is important in helping to achieve goals and objectives, and involves being sensitive to how people and organisations function, knowing how to get things done both through formal and informal channels and manoeuvring through complex political situations effectively. Similarly, the New Zealand State Services Commission’s (2009, 5) Leadership Capability Profile discusses the importance of organisational positioning skills, arguing that leaders need to ‘understand the political and organisational context within which they work’ and be ‘sensitive to political processes and anticipate risks and how others may respond’ so ‘they can manoeuvre through complex political situations effectively and quietly whilst maintaining Public Service standards of political neutrality.’ Staff need to ‘know how to get things done within the political and organisational context and understand the origin and reasoning behind key policies, practices and procedures.’

1c. Engage in effective crisis management, including task competence, interpersonal skills and external political communication Crisis competence is a mixture of task competence and interpersonal competence, crossing administration and politics. On the one hand, there are background staff involved in the more systematic management and leadership of responses to crises, as well as crisis prevention. On the other hand, in politics there is also the need for symbolic and more personal leadership in a crisis, particularly in government when leaders and parties are held responsible for any issues that develop affecting the whole country. Political leaders such as prime ministers and presidents need to be heavily visible in crises. President Bush suffered from not responding to hurricane Katrina; New Zealand Prime Minister John Key benefitted from getting involved in the Christchurch earthquake right away. Some years later, he reflected on how important it was as a leader to be there: ‘I went to Christchurch an awful lot and people would come up to me all the time and say “It’s great that you’re here” and they took comfort that if I were there it was safe for them to be there … or just that they knew we were committed, that was good enough just for them to know that we still knew they were there and that we were working for

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them. It was a bit of an example to me that leadership is really important in those times, just being there speaks volumes for them.’ (Key 2012) Political offices often become involved in the process or systematic aspects of crisis management. In the UK 2002–2004 firefighters’ dispute crisis, day-to-day management of the dispute was centralised in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which kept the dispute moving beyond the control of central government (Dinan et al 2006). They also ran ‘Operation Fresco’ – the plan to keep services going when firefighters were on strike – within the Cobra nerve-centre, under the auspices of the Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat. This secretariat, created in response to previous fuel and foot-and-mouth disease crises, was a highly centralised system which provided political authority to coordinate the military, ‘retained’ firefighters and police who were to provide the cover. The contingency plans and calls to the public to help reduce the chance of fire during this period were communicated via a centralised public information campaign. Local solutions were also allowed within the set plan, by delegating authority over day-to-day coordination of military operations by a brigadier and a lieutenant general based in the Ministry of Defence. They were given full delegated responsibility for decisions on how to deploy vehicles and personnel to emergency calls. There was surprisingly little internal infighting, even between central and devolved governments, and central direction and control was maintained. There are also significant political and communication aspects of crisis management. The firefighters’ dispute had major implications for public safety and the reputation of the Blair Government and thus they used communication tools such as agenda management, spin and negatively branding the firefighters, and strategically evading detailed decisions until later to enable dispute resolution (Dinan et al 2006). The government attempted to manage the agenda, using language to portray the union as anti-modernisation and the strikers as villains who were endangering public safety compared with the heroic members of the armed forces who were risking their lives to provide emergency cover. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown stated quickly they would not go back to the inflationary days of the mid1970s, any significant pay increase needed to be alongside modernisation, and he was not prepared to risk the economy to appease the firefighters. They also used official statistics effectively, noting that when 38,000 full-time firefighters went on strike they were able to covered by just 18,600 armed forces personnel who worked with non-striking ‘retained’ firefighters and the police, which suggested that the fire service was over-manned. They also presented the interests of the firefighters as individualistic and selfish, with ministers repeating the exceptional nature of the Fire Brigades Union’s 40% pay claim compared with more muted claims by other unions. In effect, they negatively branded the strikers. Strategic evasion was also used by saying that some of the more problematic details of the modernisation aspects of the package would be negotiated at a later date. The final settlement of the dispute was based on staged pay increases conditional on implementation of ‘modernisation’ measures. How political leaders respond after a crisis is crucial to how they will be perceived (Boin et al 2010, 706). People often want to blame someone, and the incumbent leadership or team is a key target. In political terms, whether a leader is formally and legal responsibility for a crisis or not is not so important: blaming others can make the leader appear to fail to take responsibility or seem not to care. When the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson continued to blame multiple other actors for the problematic response to the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004, there was a backlash towards him, whereas the Norwegian government’s

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TABLE 5.2 Tactics leader should/should not take in a crisis

Aim for

Avoid

Taking responsibility/ blaming others

 Accept responsibility where possible  Be seen to acknowledge the issue and problems

Setting up an inquiry or review

 Support/create genuinely independent and/or bipartisan legislative inquiry  Appoint independently minded officials with positive repu-

 Don’t stonewall – avoid shirking, averting, spinning, being confrontational  Defend, deflect, evade responsibility  Blaming someone else – systems, processes, units, other officials/staff  Deny any problems in the government response  Don’t constrain public inquiries  Restrict the terms of reference of the investigation, time frame and resources available  Hand-pick ‘friendly’ chairpersons as it will lead to criticism there was too much government interference in the inquiry

tations to chair the process

Responding to results

 Co-operate and provide access  Provide good resources for the review  Assign wide terms of reference  Avoid interfering in post-event reviews or investigation  Responding with significant reform being open

 Don’t rebut criticisms

Source: adapted from Boin et al (2010, 708–10).

acceptance of responsibility for their problematic efforts to assist their citizens caught up in the crisis enhanced their political legitimacy. Similarly, when hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast in 2005, although there were problems in the response at all levels (local, state, federal) and roles (politicians, administrative staff, institutions), President George W Bush tried to deflect blame on the grounds of the crisis being unforeseeable or the responsibility of state and city officials, while multiple images appeared in the media suggesting people were not being cared for after the crisis: ‘It was the image of people deserted on cut-off bridges and overpasses for days, exposed to the baking sun without water or medical care, that dominated – and still does – public perception of the disaster response … The pictures of increasingly desperate people in the Superdome, awaiting rescue as food and water failed to materialize, informed the image of a response failure on a massive scale.’ (Boin et al 2010, 711) Bush continued to claim the response to the crisis was acceptable and nothing more could have been done, which created an image of a leader who was out-of-touch, uncaring and insensitive. He also failed to visit New Orleans and the people affected by the disaster, only flying over it. Bush and the federal response was held to blame, even though official postcrisis reports noted failures at all levels of government. Political leaders need to be seen to be there so the public is reassured that they do understand what people are going through and trust what they say on other aspects of the issue. In contrast, having learnt from hurricane

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Katrina, Bush was seen to respond more effectively when hurricane Rita began moving towards the Gulf Coast weeks later, communicating how the president was deeply involved in ensuring that relief efforts were more effectively coordinated. Leaders also need to set up and support independent inquiries and respond carefully. George W Bush responded to the House committee report on hurricane Katrina by issuing the report The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned in February 2006, but this still only accepted limited blame for the outcome and no major organisational or policy reforms were initiated. Table 5.2 outlines potential tactics to take or avoid in a crisis.

1d. Draw on traits such as character, integrity, confidence, self-management, intuition and drive The traits that leaders have individually can impact on the effectiveness of their leadership, though of course in politics and government it is not clear which traits are most effective. For example, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd drew on a small inner circle and tried to control and interfere too much in government, whereas Julia Gillard, on the other hand, exercised skilful management of a minority government and managed to pass several key policies through Parliament such as national disability insurance (Bennister and Heppell 2016). Character is also an issue, yet is not easily teachable (Gergen 2011). Honesty is mentioned in a range of sources. The US National Background Investigations Bureau (n.d., 26) specifies integrity/honesty as one of the fundamental competencies for the executive. Staff are expected to behave in an honest, fair and ethical manner, showing consistency in words and actions and modelling high standards of ethics. Expert leaders are those who promote a climate of openness and honesty. Similarly, the New Zealand State Services Commission (2009, 4) talks of courage and honour/integrity. Staff are expected to be people who can ‘be counted on to step up when times are tough, and in the face of political tensions and public scrutiny. They do not shirk personal responsibility … they are willing to take the lead on controversial issues.’ In terms of honour and integrity, leaders ‘promote and advocate the highest standards of personal, professional and organisational behaviour, and evaluate the performance of the organisation and staff against those standards and values. They deliver on their promises and are direct and truthful in their dealings with others’ (New Zealand State Services Commission 2009, 4). Charisma, drive and energy are other attributes discussed. The New Zealand State Services Commission’s Leadership Capability Profile lists energy as a key personal attribute – leaders are expected to be ‘energetic’ (New Zealand State Services Commission 2009, 4). Confidence was noted by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe (2010), who said, ‘you have to provide confidence because if people see shakiness and a focus on a problem rather than a solution, then you will see deterioration in your organization.’ Former presidential advisor (to Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton) David Gergen argued that ambition is one of the top three qualities of leadership, ‘if you look at almost any leader in history who has really made a difference, there was a burning fire inside that person about wanting to make a difference’ (Gergen 2011). Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark reflected on how it was her desire and ability to lead that led to her success in a top position in the United Nations: ‘When I saw the position advertised, my first reaction was “well, maybe they’re looking for someone whose spent their life working in international development,” and certainly

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the way these jobs are advertised you’d be put off if you didn’t have that experience … But it seemed to me that what these top positions in the UN need is leadership. Our organisation has so many people who are development experts and those who back them – that’s been their career, their life and that’s a very important one … But that has to be led, it has to be advocated for, it has to be communicated about, and those are different sorts of skills. So my pitch was “this job needs a leader, and I am that leader”.’ (Clark 2014) The New Zealand State Services Commission’s Leadership Capability Profile also lists drive as a key personal attribute. Leaders are expected to be ‘highly motivated’ and model ‘a high level of drive and ownership for achieving challenging organisational goals (e.g. displays a high level of ambition for what their organisation can achieve, pushes self and others to achieve, driven to excel in whatever they take on). They are ‘motivated to lead (i.e. seize opportunities to lead without being given the responsibility or direction)’ (New Zealand State Services Commission 2009, 4).

Political leadership 2: be authoritative Leaders can use coercion to direct behaviour, use limited formal powers tactically, and grow their own power.

2a. Use authoritative or coercive approaches to direct behaviour Leaders can exert influence over their staff and colleagues coercively, by critiquing them privately or publicly, withdrawing political support for them, intervening in their work, threatening them, demoting them, exerting pressure on them and expelling them. The prime minister sees the government as a whole and thus may intervene in any department if needed, not least as the prime minister is held responsible for anything that goes wrong in every ministerial office (King 1991), for example, the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office intervened in the departmental business of ministries (Heffernan 2003). As noted in Chapter 3 on political organising, leaders can also extend power through communications control and regulation, such as the UK Blair Government subjecting communications to checks by the Strategic Communications Unit in Downing Street and the chief press secretary, and in Australia the Government Members Secretariat unit grew in prominence and communicated to parliamentarians the need for discipline and coherence (Bennister 2007). The Blair Government issued a new ministerial code of conduct in 1997 which specified three paths of approval for politicians wanting to engage in external communication:   

major interviews with, and appearances in the media, had to get approval from the Number 10 Press Office; major speeches, press releases and new policy initiatives had to be approved by the Number 10 Private Office; the policy content, timing and form all major speeches and announcements had to be cleared with the Number 10 Press Office.

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Parties use a range of coercive tools to manage party dissent, such as the UK Conservatives over European integration (Lynch and Whitaker 2013), including intervening in candidate selection and exercising discipline. Parties’ control is, however, affected by other factors such as the leaders’ popularity, policy success and popularity, and size of the dissent. Lynch and Whitaker’s empirical research found that intervening in national candidate selection had limited effectiveness in managing dissent on Europe because Prime Minister/ Party leader John Major could not rely on constituency associations to deselect MPs who rebelled on European integration, given that Party members were themselves Eurosceptic. Only one MP was deselected on these grounds. In Parliament, parties can remove the whip and expel members. Writing in 2013, before the Brexit referendum, Lynch and Whitaker (2013, 333) fortuitously warned that a direct referendum was risky, ‘dissent is temporarily depressed once a referendum is pledged but intensifies prior to the campaign and, although requirements of party loyalty are then suspended, this may prove a temporary cessation of hostilities if the outcome is indecisive’, and this obviously came true with the Brexit referendum in 2016. Presidents can use limited powers to act unilaterally strategically to influence government by creating administrative agencies through executive action using executive orders, department orders and reorganisation plans (Howell and Lewis 2002). Examples of agencies created by executive order include the National Security Agency and the Peace Corps, and reorganisation proposals include the creation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This can be a more effective way of gaining influence than legislation. The bureaucracy is important: administrative agencies translate vague congressional laws into concrete policy. Presidents also gain influence by the control they exercise over these agencies, tending to place them within the Executive Office of the President or the cabinet and also ensuring they had less restrictions for their ability to appoint and fire who heads the agencies. In effect, presidents can use the agencies to make policy without going through the challenges of Congress, which includes committees as well as blocking Bills in the chamber. Congress can of course refuse to fund the agencies, but the president needs to secure only a simple majority to get funding approved, whereas legislation requires a supermajority. Agencies can also be created and be up and running before Congress has to choose whether to give additional funding. Congress also has to consider what to focus its attention on, and it may leave smaller agencies and their budgets alone. The creation of agencies can be a useful tool when Congress is in gridlock.

2b. Use formal authority and legitimate sources of power tactically Political management also involves using good old-fashioned authority – based on rules, policies, laws, etc – tactically and in less obvious and direct ways to exert influence. Legitimate sources of power for political leaders include the ability to appoint ministers and set the agenda at, and chair, cabinet meetings, using rules and regulations to affect policy implementation in legislatures, exerting influence through communication via signed statements, public proclamations, executive orders, public criticism of other players, directives to influence the bureaucracy, inferring power, and late interregnum rulemaking to leave a legacy.

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Prime ministerial powers UK prime ministers have tangible powers such as appointing and dismissing ministers, allocating and reallocating ministerial portfolios, and delegating powers and responsibilities to ministers and departments through the use of Crown prerogatives (King 1991; Heffernan 2003; 357; Bennister 2007, 330). They also get to organise a de facto prime ministerial department, manage the cabinet system, organise central government, allocate and reallocate portfolios, make treaties, declare war, deploy armed forces on operations overseas, use royal prerogatives to summon, prorogue and dissolve Parliament and call a general election. They also chair the cabinet and major cabinet committees, which enables them to influence agendas and discussions. Prime ministers use these powers to serve different ends – Macmillan used it to try to restore and sustain his personal image, Wilson to try to maintain party unity, Heath to make his government like-minded and competent, and Thatcher as a generalised system of punishments and rewards and to place supporters in positions in key ministerial areas (King 1991). The Australian Prime Minister John Howard exerted power by chairing cabinet committees such as the key Expenditure Review Committee, which influenced the overall size of the budget, and the National Security Committee (Bennister 2007).

Utilising legislative rules tactically to support or block policies Political managers need to exercise strategic foresight to identify, predict and manage supporters and opponents of a Bill in Parliament and devise steps to get policy through. Formal rules in parliaments can be used, but tactically. Heymann (1988, 144) argues that: ‘Management of politics is understanding and handling the forces that assemble a strong hand for the long-term support of particular policy positions or for the accumulation of personal or organizational political resources … Tactics, with its fascination and diversity, is a game played in the shadow of the management of politics.’ They also need to understand, and use, the rules and process in legislatures. In the US, practitioners need to consider whether to put the proposal through the authorisation process which goes through committees or through the appropriation process. Unusually high budget cuts were pushed through under Reagan in 1981 by using the authorisation stage, setting very low and therefore binding ceilings on expenditures, despite objections from appropriations committees which formally had the primary responsibility for setting spending levels. Congressional leaders also use choreographing of Bills to influence the result. Party leaders (whether floor leaders or sub-committee chairs) use strategic coordination in Congress in the way they sequence Bills between the two chambers to achieve their policy goals (Taylor 2008). Through inter-cameral communication and coordination, they allow the chamber with the majority whose ideal point is furthest from the president’s to pass its version of the Bill first, as it is more likely to pass. They also use a range of agenda control powers beyond just floor scheduling to hasten or delay Bill passage in their chamber. MPs who have played the role of Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the Australian Parliament discussed a range of ways to use formal authoritative and, even what you would call, archaic rules to achieve goals which are both internally functional and externally tactical:

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‘There are two tasks. One is real; the other is positioning. The one immediate is to use process that’s available to you to try to prevent things you oppose from happening … the second thing is positioning: you’re positioning how the government is going to be viewed and how you are going to be viewed.’ (Burke 2019) Thus they noted that they ‘can bring the House to a halt in an instant by moving repeated censure motions, by calling qorum – there are all sorts of irritating things you can do that will effectively bring the business of the house to a grinding halt and the standing orders permit it’ (Dreyfus 2019). This creates the impression of a government that is unstable. Knowing the rules and how to use them can enable politicians and parties not in power to block legislation, as another practitioner recalled: ‘The Medivac legislation only made it through the House of Representatives because we knew what we were doing with respect to all of the procedural rules. When a message comes from the Senate for example, there is only a brief window where you can deal with it because once you get to the next item, whether it’s an adjournment debate or things called 90-second statements or whatever it is, once you get to the next item, it falls off the day’s paper again and can only be brought back on by the government. So, knowing the rules and really forcing things through is the reason people who are sick on Nauru now get medical treatment.’ (Burke 2019) In another case, a point of order not used for over half a century was employed to delay a Bill: ‘One of the funny ones was at the end of last year when there was a case of energy policy legislation that Angus Taylor had charge of and one of our arguments against it was that the Minister didn’t even know what was in his own legislation. And there is a procedure where it’s presumed under the standing orders that each bill will be dealt with clause by clause, but leave is normally given for the bill to be treated as a whole – we get to debate the whole bill at once. When we got to this section, the speaker said “I understand it is the wish of the House that the bill be treated as a whole”, I just stood up and said “No Mr Speaker, leave is not given for that, that’s not agreed, we’d much rather take it clause by clause” and sat down. There was this long pause that lasted for minutes. But ultimately the bill didn’t come back after the election. Apparently no one had taken that point of order for 80 years! It completely changes the time required and also that Minister needs to be able to explain every single clause which not every Minister would be prepared to do.’ (Burke 2019) In Australia, opposition parties can also use their formal right to decide topic of the debate after question time to lead and place issue on the agenda (opposition), ‘about half of the caucus stays in for those speeches, they get some attention, they often run quite big on social media, but they are effectively the opposition’s chance to put down markers on the range of policy issues’ (Burke 2019). Another way to influence public debate is to use Parliament for motions because ‘when private members’ motions are put on the notice paper, they result in speeches on a Monday, which is effectively then used for social media, or letting stakeholders know what we’ve said relevant to their interests’ (Burke 2019). Similarly, rules are used to impact external environment by using amendments and suspensions ‘to be able to position

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the government as having voted against an issue a number of times.’ Australian Labor wanted to place the Liberal leader Scott Morrison as having voted multiple times against a banking Royal Commission into the issue of the public being overcharged: ‘Now you have to work hard to make sure there are that many votes. So, that then goes to one of the particular items before the House, you are making sure that you have an amendment on that same issue, making sure that you suspend standing orders on that same issue. When they want to process with a bill that does the opposite to something, you don’t give leave at different stages where the opposition could normally give leave because that forces an additional vote and then everything that you do forces an additional vote. So, we ended up at the last election the PM having voted in favour of the penalty rate cuts six times and against a banking royal commission 26 times. There is a fair bit of work during the course of an entire term, making sure you don’t miss opportunities to bring something to a vote that you think ultimately government members may regret having voted in that way.’ (Burke 2019)

US presidential formal powers Presidents can draw on power from formal authorities and constitutional provisions, statutory grants from Congress, judicial decisions and even national emergencies (Fisher 2015). Formal presidential powers in articles I and II of the constitution are often constrained, such as their veto power being subject to being overridden by Congress and the power to nominate and make treaties requiring Senate support leading to multiple disputes and court cases. However presidents have utilised Article II of the constitution which grants the president power to manage the executive branch. Presidents have used this to create crossagency task forces, stimulate discussion on issues such as poverty or illegal immigration and issues executive orders and directives to make agencies follow particular policies (Krent 2015, 1102). Examples include:    

President Truman used executive orders to spark the government’s fight against segregation by ordering that the military be desegregated. President George W Bush created the Department of Homeland Security. President Obama outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the federal workforce. President Obama deferred deportation of certain categories of illegal immigrants through a presidential memo.

Presidential power from indirect or inherent sources Presidents also have legitimate power sources which are indirect – what they can infer, claim as inherent to the office, and obtain support for from the courts (Fisher 2015). Implied or inherent powers are often acknowledged by federal courts and not checked by the other branches of government. They include ministerial and discretionary powers such as a department head acting to carry out the president’s will or officials and subordinates carrying out ministerial acts. Presidents can also interpret rules such as the president’s prosecutorial discretion, sole-organ doctrine or executive prerogative broadly in their interests.

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In June 2012, President Obama claimed prosecutorial discretion to unilaterally grant deferred action for undocumented aliens who arrived in the US as children (deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA) and were not a risk to national security or safety to request temporary relief from deportation proceedings and apply for work authorisation. When talking about why he felt he needed to take executive action on immigration, President Obama (2014) explained that: ‘I continue to believe that the best way to solve this problem is by working together to pass that kind of common sense law. But until that happens, there are actions I have the legal authority to take as President – the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me – that will help make our immigration system more fair and more just.’ Another example is when President Barack Obama signed a statement objecting to a Bill that defunded certain ‘czar’ positions that were not confirmed by the Senate in 2011. This drew on the president’s authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch and the right to advise Congress to help it carry out its constitutional responsibilities. In specific terms, the president does not have the authority to create and fund White House positions; only Congress does. A White House (c. 2013) progress report on reducing gun violence details 23 executive actions President Obama announced to reduce gun violence, including issuing memorandums, directing the attorney general, proposing rules, publishing a letter, releasing a report, reviewing standards and launching a campaign and a national dialogue. An earlier example is when on his second day in office in 2009 President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13492 to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, but he later found that realising the closure would require building a very costly alternative facility to house the detainees which required Congress to issue an appropriation and thus he could not implement this just through unilateral action (Fisher 2015). While implied sources give power to presidents, they are also very limited. After announcing the new immigration policy to cover about four to five million undocumented aliens after Obama was re-elected in 2014, it was challenged in the courts in 2015 on the grounds that the president’s words were just words. This can lead to a gap between what a president says and what actually happens in practice, because government requires action and support – even if just through a lack of opposition – from multiple actors.

Exerting influence through communication via proclamations, executive orders, signed statements and criticism of other players Despite promising to reduce statements when he was a candidate, once President, Barack Obama, like those before him, used the signing of statements to increase presidential power (Crouch, Rozell and Sollenberger 2013, 884). One example is when he refused to sign into law provisions of HR 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. Before this, he engaged in lengthy negotiations with Congress over provisions such as the one that forbade the use of appropriated funds to transfer Guantanamo detainees to be tried in US federal courts and threatened to veto the legislation unless Congress removed

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problematic provisions. When Congress passed both Bills without making enough changes, Obama refused to sign them into law and claimed he could strike out the offending provisions. Nevertheless, he often complied with statutory provisions he objected to. Presidents can also use executive orders, drawing on formal authority to direct action and boosting the impression of presidential power. Presidents use these tools to target specific constituency or voter groups they have received support from, or want to get support from, with positive comments, appeasing and appealing to them in high level but low-cost ways (Rottinghaus and Warber 2015). For examples, see Table 5.3. Their influence can run into campaigns: the Obama administration used executive orders to ban federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discussed their compensation and requiring federal contractors to submit compensation paid to their employees by gender and proclaimed Equal Pay Day. Equal pay then became a campaign issue in the 2014 midterm elections. They also symbolise that presidents are connected to key concerns of these groups – for example, George W Bush connected with religious constituencies by signing his first two executive orders to begin pursuing his faith-based and community programs agenda nine days after his inauguration in 2001. They also signal the president’s strategic direction, and initiate and convey action or delivery. Data indicates that presidents are more likely to issue more executive orders when they are new to office. Whilst the proclamations and executive orders in themselves can be issued unilaterally, effective action may require careful management just like proposed legislation (Rudalevige 2015, 343). For example, Obama announced in his state of the union address in 2014 that he would issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour (Fisher 2015). Attorney General Eric Holder supported him by testifying in support of inherent powers, given the president’s responsibility to run the executive branch, although in fact Congress had passed legislation providing presidents authority over federal contractors and thus Obama would therefore be acting on statutory authority. The actual executive order noted the authority under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act, with the money coming from Congress.

TABLE 5.3 Examples of presidential proclamations

President Bill Clinton

President George W Bush

President Barack Obama

National Health Care Month National AIDS Awareness Month Women’s Equality Day National Family Week National Charter Schools Week National Character Counts Week Equal Pay Day National Hispanic Heritage Month National Caribbean-American Heritage Month Irish-American Heritage Month Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month Small Business Week National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.

Source: adapted from Rottinghaus and Warber (2015, 292–3).

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Presidential influence over the bureaucracy or public service through regulations and directives Presidents can try to influence government by directing the bureaucracy to achieve policy goals to avoid dealing with an oppositional Congress (Kagan 2001). Bill Clinton’s team focused on using administrative actions including regulations, guidance, enforcement strategies, formal directives to executive agencies, reports and appropriation (asserting ownership of what an agency had done). These were designed and announced to both convey and advance presidential policies. The staff also implemented mechanisms and practices which increased presidential supervision and thus had an impact on the policy direction of agencies. Such actions drew on a broad interpretation of legitimate powers belonging to the president’s authority to direct administrative actions. The formal directives were often issued through memorandums and instructed agencies to propose a rule of other action within a set time, and announced publicly by the president to connect the action with the leader. An advisor to Clinton reflected that ‘it’s a broader way of thinking about the Presidency … not just what you can do legislatively, but the full panoply of what you can do with the office’ (quoted by Kagan 2001, 2296). One example is when Clinton proposed a rule to restrict the advertising of cigarettes to teenagers in order to reduce youth smoking in 1995. This opened up public consultation required for regulations, and not withstanding changes to the final rule, the heart of the regulatory proposal succeeded through to regulation. Whilst the formal final rules did not mention the president, as rules rarely do, Clinton announced the issuance of the rule in a Rose Garden ceremony. This helped to communication his role. Another is that Clinton announced in his yearly commencement addresses that he would direct the Secretary of Labor to issue a rule to allow states to offer paid leave to new mothers and fathers through the unemployment insurance system. Six months later he appeared with the Secretary to announce the plan for the proposal rule, even before the public consultation had begun, and then another six months later after review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), he revealed the final Department of Labor regulation in his weekly radio address. Another method was appropriation: Clinton publicly asserted ownership of action an agency had done, publicising and announcing reports, grants, regulatory waivers, rulings, guidance and regulations publicly through communication vehicles such as major speeches, public ceremonies, news conferences and radio addresses. Often called ‘deliverables’, Kagan (2001, 2300) asserts that ‘in event after event, speech after speech, Clinton claimed ownership of administrative actions, presenting them to the public as how own – as the product of his values and decisions’ even if he and his White House had not had much involvement. Attention was also paid to delivery on the ground. White House staff monitored government agencies to ensure officials complied with any new rules and to cement new behaviours. Directives are proactive, enabling the president to lead rather than just check the bureaucracy, set the agenda to ensure it reflected his policy and political preferences, and when they are publicly communicated they help to convey action and delivery. Announcing new actions on salient issues helped to get media attention, claim credit for action, and increase public support, more so than just communicating the president’s policy views. For example, in health care, Clinton issued a directive to the Secretary of Labor to propose regulations requiring health plans regulated under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to meet better standards when handling appeals against denial of benefits and to the administrator of the

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Office of Personnel Management to contract only with insurance carriers that complied with the model bill of rights, as well as other orders to Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Defense. When such actions were carried out, Clinton announced this publicly in radio addresses and events, symbolically placing himself in the position of a department head. He also got involved where policies crossed individual departments/multiple agencies, drawing on expert power by being at the centre and having a whole of government view.

Public criticism and pressure tactics Presidents use pressure tactics to call out the behaviour of other political actors. This was conveyed in a progress report from the White House (c. 2013) under Obama. Drawing on their legitimating authority to sign executive orders on reducing gun violence, the president also demanded Congress to address this issue, pressuring them to take action by criticising them for previously blocking attempts at legislative gun safety reform. The report mentions how ‘President called on Congress to pass legislation that would expand the background check requirement to most private gun sales (with the exception of sales between families and friends)’ (White House c. 2013, 2) although it was blocked by a minority in the Senate. It goes on to note that: ‘the President called on Congress to make gun trafficking a federal crime, eliminate restrictions that keep the ATF from doing its job, and keep 15,000 cops on the street. A minority in the Senate blocked a tough new gun trafficking law, but these remain critical steps to empower law enforcement officers and Congress should pass them right away.’ (White House c. 201, 4)

Legislative scrutiny over the bureaucracy In the US, legislatures can also influence government departments through a range of measures such as directing them by statute to do or not do something, restricting budget resources, subjecting them to oversight hearings and exposing any failures or ethical issues within a government agency and creating and closing the agencies (Heymann 1988). For example:    

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was forbidden by statute to require automobile manufacturers to produce cars that would not run unless their seat belts were in use. The Federal Trade Commission was eventually forbidden to spend money on rulemaking on children’s television. The Internal Revenue Service was forbidden to spend money promulgating new rules denying tax benefits to segregated schools. Inspector generals were created and placed in a number of federal agencies to report directly to Congress.

Hidden legitimate formal power for late, eleventh-hour interregnum rulemaking by outgoing presidents during the transition Presidents increasingly using late rulemaking at the end of their term to achieve particular goals (Shafie 2013). This is an effective strategy for leaders to make progress in policy areas where legislative politics are deadlocked because, during the transition, government is not

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sitting and thus Congress does not need to be persuaded and thus presidents can act without worrying about the political consequences. They can achieve policy changes that are often not overturned by the next president, through regulation and deregulation and paying attention to detail such as how existing legislation is interpreted and implemented on the ground. It also leaves a policy legacy in the form of rules to achieve regulatory and deregulatory goals, often in specific policy areas. Whilst new presidents may enter office expecting to overturn their predecessors’ policies, new presidents can only afford to undertake a limited number of battles as it distracts from their own agenda. Therefore late rulemaking can outlast elections and policy and partisan debates because it is not easy for the rules to be reversed. It is costly to overturn previous rules and they may just be later reinstated. Many of the rules instigated by the Carter administration on auto, occupational and health safety, and withdrawn by the incoming Reagan Administration in 1981 were reinstated either in the original or an adapted form within a few years. Similarly, although the Bush-Cheney Administration was determined to reverse Clinton’s rules it opposed, it had little success in doing so with those that were already in effect as there is often a general deference to presidential actions by Congress and the courts. One example is Clinton’s rule limiting road building in national forests – the Bush Agriculture Department suspended it, but never succeeded in reversing it entirely because they were thwarted by conflicting court rulings. Regulations last longer – deregulation can be more easily reversed. Using late rulemaking is an increasingly cognisant presidential strategy in policy-making. Bill Clinton created more than 26,500 pages of new rules in the Federal Register in his last 90 days, many under White House direction, making the rulemaking cohesive and coordinated. In 2008, George W Bush was highly coordinated, having agency initiatives which were cleared by the OMB and reflected the president’s priorities. It included a large volume of economically significant rules. More recently, when Obama was not sure he would win re-election in 2012, he issued a series of unilateral policy initiatives known as the We Can’t Wait campaign, which included an executive order to prevent prescription drug shortages and appointing Richard Cordray to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the recess. Such actions bypassed Congress and were intended to have long lasting impacts on public policy. This can help presidents to achieve change blocked by Congress, advancing what might be popular safety, health and environmental objectives.

2c. Use internal sources of power such as central networks, units and expert knowledge High level leaders can use the networks, advice, staff, organisational units (e.g. policy unit, strategy unit, delivery unit) and expert information they have access to as a result of being at the centre of the most important networks. Political leaders have the potential to set the policy agenda through leadership of the government, control of the cabinet and cabinet committee system and influence over the Whitehall apparatus (Heffernan 2003, 357). UK Prime Minister Tony Blair met each cabinet minister at the beginning of the parliamentary session to plan the year’s departmental goals and tasks, thus influencing the organisational strategy. They can also create a power source by using a small inner circle of like-minded colleagues or other leader-controlled mechanisms to make decisions outside more traditional groups such as cabinet. The UK Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brought selected ministers together semi-informally to make

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government decisions (Bennister 2007). Similarly, Blair made cabinet meetings short and informal to avoid conflict and instead relied on ‘kitchen cabinet’ style decision making, through committees taskforces and networks, which Blair chaired, therefore giving him more power. Leaders also extend their authority by politicising appointments and expanding the political advisory infrastructure. Both Australian Prime Minister John Howard and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair took their close advisors into power/government with them. John Howard also influenced the appointment of the Cabinet Secretary and departmental secretaries, recruiting those who shared his philosophy and worldview, such as Michael L’Estrange who had worked for Howard in the lead-up to the 1996 campaign and was given responsibility for the new cabinet policy unit, which worked on creating longer-term political strategy (Tiernan 2006). There was also an increase in staffing numbers overall, which helped Howard have a much greater reach across government, as advisors can engage in negotiation and bargaining with other political practitioners on the leader’s behalf to achieve goals. Blair also increased his staff, and the running costs of Downing Street increased from £7.5 million in 1997 to £10.8 million in 2001, which combined with creation of cross-departmental units gave him ‘a set of key institutional resources’ and oversight (Heffernan 2003, 362). Leaders can also extend resource capacity by creating new organisational units. Under Howard, the cabinet policy unit worked across the whole of government and thus helped him to direct the government organisation and achieve strategic goals (Tiernan 2006; Bennister 2007; Heffernan 2003). Similarly, Blair created a strategy unit to create longer-term advice. Howard created a cabinet implementation unit and Blair a cabinet delivery unit to help get policies delivered. Blair also created a communications directorate and office of public sector reform which increased his power and control. Another way to increase authority is by using expert knowledge. This includes having a whole of government perspective, as well as information such as polling data, campaign expertise, evidence, policy advice and statistics. Being at the centre of the core gives prime ministers for example knowledge which they can use to exert strong influence over the government’s policy agenda (Heffernan 2003). Blair strengthened the ‘Whitehall centre’, including his own office, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, making it play a significant role in the formation of the government’s agenda, particularly in regard to forward planning, strategic thinking and approving department initiatives. This was enhanced by stronger links between the Downing Street policy directorate and the Cabinet Office, and deciding to manage European Union policy in the Cabinet Office, not simply in the Foreign Office. This also meant a lot more information went through the PMO.

Political leadership 3: be transformational Political leaders can also try to inspire people to follow and work with them to achieve the mission, as opposed to commanding them. They can use inspirational appeals using emotion and referencing values to influence behaviour to engage staff and volunteers in the overall purpose and mission. The language used by politicians can help to inspire staff and volunteers, appealing to the emotions, ideals and values of others. Presidents have used speeches to influence the federal bureaucracy to help achieve presidential policy goals, signalling broad concerns and specific preferences, which motivate government staff to implement policy (Eshbaugh-Soha 2008). An example is President Obama shedding tears when unveiling executive action, emotionally

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citing the mass shooting of children (see NBC News 2016). Ministers in the UK New Labour Government used transformational leadership to help reform education policy, with David Miliband himself using emotional educational leadership with symbolic potency but retaining the economic rationale of neo-liberal and managerial reform (Lambert 2007). Transformational leadership is needed at lower levels also: although politicians and political appointees influence the mission, if those at lower levels make the social contribution of the mission seem more attractive and engaging, it helps staff to see intrinsic value in their agency’s mission (Caillier 2016). Sean O’Keefe, who was Deputy Director of the OMB under President George W Bush and NASA administrator, emphasised the importance of motivating and inspiring people, a transformational approach. O’Keefe noted in an interview that ‘with people, the leadership challenge is to recruit, motivate, and inspire the highest productivity and ingenuity from the workforce talent’ to get people ‘to pull their oars in the same direction’ (quoted in Lambright 2015). Campaigns also seek to empower and thus inspire volunteers: US candidate Ted Cruz (2016) argued ‘[p]art of what makes a grass-roots campaign potent is empowering the activists’ as well as using ‘a message that inspires people … to work on the campaign.’

Political leadership 4: persuade Political leadership also involves getting others on board with you. Tactics include drawing on and extending external public support to persuade others internally, using political communication to build political influence, selling specific policies strategically and using exchange tactics, favours, rewards, and give and take relationships to build coalitions and support.

4a. Draw on external public support to persuade others internally Electoral success, external public popularity, and positively perceived leadership traits and behaviour help leaders to build political credit or capitol internally over the long-term, which they can use to influence others (Sykes 1993; Popper 2012; Heffernan 2003). UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher drew on public support as a power source, as public opinion data showed that from 1980 to January 1987 she consistently ranked above opposition leaders as a capable and strong leader, as well as good in a crisis and getting things done which helped her achieve substantial privatisation (Sykes 1993). Heffernan (2003, 350) argued that UK Prime Minister Tony Blair drew on ‘personal power resources’, including reputation amongst his peers such as ministers, skill and ability, association with actual or anticipated political success, public popularity and high standing in his party. Blair was visibly associated with Labour’s electoral success, being front and centre of the 1997 and 2001 campaigns, and maintained positive public opinion polls as well as having a broadly united party. The downside to political credit is that political leaders can lose it quickly even it was built over a long period, and thus if leaders go down in the polls then their internal support can slip away – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was removed by his peers after policy failures and once opinion polls also turned against him in government (Bennister and Heppell 2016, 138). As noted at the start of this chapter, the Chief of Staff to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison made an ominously profound comment about the power of a leader and how their authority comes from having effective political judgment and leadership skills that

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build up political capital, but such power ‘can dissipate very easily’ (Kunkel 2019) – as proved correct a few months after he was interviewed, when Morrison’s response to the 2019–2020 Australian bush fires came under substantial criticism.

4b. Use external political communication to build political influence Leaders can use political communication and media to build support for initiatives. The media is an additional power resource to a prime minister or president, helping them to influence the agenda, and remain centre stage. The White House Office of Communications was formed in 1969 to create more planned communications to influence the agenda, promote the presidential agenda as well as the president, build relationships with the media, and the Office of Public Liaison to build and maintain relationships with key external groups while in office and mobilise external supporters to help achieve policy goals (Eshbaugh-Soha 2011). UK Prime Minister Tony Blair used a communications structure and strategy that reinforced the centrality of the prime minister and his office and government communications connected government actions to Blair himself (Heffernan 2003); as did communication under Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Marland 2016). Presidents also use speeches to signal to politicians what their policy priorities are, targeting the agenda-setting and roll call (voting on Bill) stages in particular to shape legislation (Eshbaugh-Soha and Miles 2011, 317). Presidents also use value-led communication to the public to oppose Congress (Conley 2007). Presidents utilise external communication, framing disagreements and blaming their opponents in the legislature to build public support against policies they do not like. For example, Democrat President Bill Clinton overcame the formal constitutional authority of Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich to push the Republican majority’s agenda by criticising Gingrich in public and through the media and utilising rhetoric. Clinton and the House Democrats tried to galvanise traditional Democratic voters who would lose out from Gingrich’s proposed cuts to health and education spending in a temporary budget reconciliation Bill (HR 2491). The President utilised symbolism, using the same pen to sign a veto that Lyndon Johnson had used to sign the Bills that had created the Medicare and Medicaid programs. He also used rhetorical phrases such as ‘extreme cuts’. This positioned him as a defender of key American values and people, and framed the Republicans as uncompromising and to blame for the stalemate and government closedown. As President, Clinton attracted far more attention than the speaker, and his popularity increased, and the Republicans eventually compromised on the specifics of the budget to suit the president. In another case, George W Bush used blame framing to undermine congressional Democrats after they gained a majority in May 2001. The new majority leader, Tom Daschle, opposed legislative aspects of the President’s creation of the Department of Homeland Security following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the ground that giving the President broad powers to hire fire and run the new organisation went against standard labour protections in other agencies. Bush negatively branded the Democrats as putting special interests ahead of national security. This helped the Republicans to win two Senate seats and regain a majority and thus pass the Bill. President Obama framed his policies on reducing gun violence as a ‘common-sense’ approach and thus opponents as not, ‘although a minority of the Senate voted down common-sense legislation to reduce gun violence, President Obama is continuing to make progress’ (White House c. 2013, 1). Presidents can expand their effective power through the use of public communication, including rhetoric, negative branding, positioning and framing of themselves and the opposition in relation to key principles and values.

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Politicians can also use political impression management tools to build support in campaigns or a crisis, such as sound bites and metaphors which convey meaning in a short phrases, emotive political language to get attention in a highly competitive communication environment, metaphors and analogies to magnify or hide problems, frame them, and suggest solutions as well as changes to appearance which affect perceptions of leadership suitability (De Landtsheer, De Vries and Vertessen 2008). Strategic and planned communication can be used to generate and maintain a positive public image for a politician over the long term, although practice of this is however mixed: the UK Conservative Party press office claimed that reputation management was not carried out for individual politicians and that UK Prime Minister David Cameron had not engaged in systematic reputation management to shape his public persona (Schnee 2015).

4c. Sell specific policies strategically externally and internally A range of strategies can be used to sell specific policies externally. Leaders can present argument, reason and evidence as to why action is needed. For example, in 2014, President Obama issued Executive Order No. 13677 and outlined why climate change is needed: ‘The world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent the most dangerous consequences of climate change … The adverse impacts of climate change, including sealevel rise, increases in temperatures, more frequent extreme precipitation and heat events, more severe droughts, and increased wildfire activity, along with other impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, such as ocean acidification, threaten to roll back decades of progress in reducing poverty and improving economic growth in vulnerable countries, compromise the effectiveness and resilience of U.S. development assistance, degrade security, and risk intranational and international conflict over resources.’ (US Government 2014, Section 1, 58231) The White House (c. 2013) also used reason and argument in a progress report to make the argument about the need to take steps to reduce gun violence. For example, it explained why the Administration was calling on Congress to invest an additional $20 million to allow all states to participate in the National Violent Death Reporting System to ‘better understand how and when firearms are used in violent deaths’ so that ‘prevention researchers, practitioners, and policymakers will be able to gauge magnitude, trends, and characteristics of violent deaths at the national, state, and local levels to inform the development, implementation, and evaluation of violence prevention strategies, which will ultimately save lives’ (White House c. 2013, 8). Government managers need to work within the political context and reframe communication and language to suit the audience and political context (Heymann 1988). For example, President Reagan’s supporters described the MX missile as ‘a peacekeeper’ and part of an overall strategic defence initiative; a teenage thief is a juvenile to liberals but a mugger to conservatives; health insurance is seen as representing self-reliance, whereas welfare is dependency on the state. Another example is where health insurance for seniors was achieved in 1965 after universal health care had been defeated since 1912 (Heymann 1988). In the late 1960s, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare Wilbur Cohen proposed government health care – Medicare – specifically just for seniors, a growing segment of

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the population. Seniors were more likely to vote and thus the proposition gained support from 22% of the voting population who were over 65, as well as their children who would otherwise feel burdened to meet the costs of their parents’ medical assistance. Potential opposition was overcome by framing it as medical insurance for the aged and part of social security’s retirement benefits for those who had paid social security taxes all their lives, at the point at which citizens could no longer be self-reliant – thus fitting in with the values of the American ethic of self-reliance. Cohen and his team made the political benefits clear to powerful politicians, given seniors are politically active, and President Lyndon Johnson made it his first priority. Once in place, it has become seen as a right to be defended by seniors at election time, but beyond that to every worker paying social security taxes who has a stake in maintaining Medicare for their own old age. Similarly, strategic communication has been used to sell unpopular economic policy (Wenzelburger 2011). Analysis of ministers of finance in Sweden, Canada, Belgium and France from 1994 to 2000 identified a range of external strategies including planning, such as front-loading or enacting policy in a hidden way, see Table 5.4. In Canada, there was awareness of the broader context of the budgetary crisis, but to offset potential loss of votes the government enacted the harshest measures at the beginning of their term while discussing external factors such as economic growth, interest rates and distributed losses from the cuts equally across all ridings and regions. The adjustment programme was carefully communicated, with the finance minister participating in debates around in the country. Hearings were held with representatives from various pressure groups, lobbies and the trade unions to participate in a frank debate about the budgetary trade-offs the government faced, which helped to convince the public of the necessity of the proposed measures. It also helped to show that making these decisions was not easy. Communication messages were also tested in market research to identify the most effective approach. Speeches on fiscal policy (e.g. Paul Martin’s 1996 speech) used blaming arguments of the predecessor Mulroney Government for fairness across regions/individuals and generations, and helping to secure the Canadian welfare state:

TABLE 5.4 External strategies to manage unpopular policy reform

1. Front-load the timing of the fiscal adjustment – implement unpopular policy during the honeymoon period with the hope voters forget about it 2. Distribute the pain of the new policy equally 3. Hide the cost of the proposal such as through de-indexations instead of cutting the nominal amount of benefits 4. Engage in external blame avoidance through blaming the markets or external organisations such as the EU 5. Focus on the policy in midterm planning to safe guarding that the goals pf the new policy are being met 6. Describe the proposal as a national challenge 7. Frame the change within broader social policy, e.g. claiming that the fiscal adjustment reforms were needed to safeguard the welfare state 8. Constrain the proposal by saying it will only be a temporary measure or phasing it in over time, e.g. fiscal adjustment reforms can simply be until the budget was balanced or debt interest payments were lowered, and cuts can be brought in over several years instead of all at once 9. Connect the new policy to national identity such as to democracy as a whole of to address national deficits Source: adapted and generalised from Tables 3 and 4 in Wenzelburger (2011, 1173–4).

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‘Canadians feel our very way of life is at risk. They look at Medicare and feel it is threatened. They look at the pension system and wonder if it will be there for them in the years to come. They consider the economy and they worry that the gale force winds of competition and change will carry away their jobs. Canadians think about their children, our youth, and ask what kind of opportunities will be left for them. If there is one obligation before government today, it is to do its part to address these deep concerns. It is to do what we must so that confidence can overcome anxiety and hope can replace despair. In short, we must act now to help Canadians secure their future.’ (quoted by Wenzelburger 2011, 1177) The adjustment was therefore framed as vital for the future of Canada as a nation, with key policy areas such as health care mentioned because Canadian health care is seen as a national icon.

4d. Use rewards, exchange tactics, trade-offs and compromise to build internal coalitions and support Political leaders can use a range of tactics to build support. One is promising and giving rewards to those who adhere to the strategic vision and will help drive the strategic agenda. Rewards include good offices, committee appointments and ministerial positions for MPs, jobs to campaign workers and support for key policies – similar to tools to motivate people and ensure unity discussed in Chapter 4 on political HR. They also include support for navigating the legislative process. For example, majority party leaders use legislative scheduling as a reward for party loyalty in the US Congress (Hasecke and Mycoff 2007). Scheduling can be used as a reward because it increases the chances of legislative success and thus helps members of Congress get policy through, which they can then claim credit for and attract donations and votes. Scheduling involves decisions over thousands of Bills and can be used strategically with very little cost to the party leaders. In parliaments, parties engage in a range of reciprocal horse trading to get legislation through. It isn’t necessarily scientifically thought out or formalised as prime ministerial chiefs of staff explain, but it is fundamental to political management: ‘You obviously need to seek to persuade them and make a judgment where ultimately their support can be gained either through persuasion and some sort of ideally not significant departure from your existing policy framework. Sometimes there will be things that are particularly salient that they’ll want. You make a judgment from a whole range of reasons, including fiscal reasons, whether you’re prepared to make that sort of tradeoff. I am not sure there’s much science to it.’ (Kunkel 2019) ‘That sort of stuff is unspoken. Sometimes, you might regard yourself as having the wind on a certain issue. For example, Labour at right of the start of the governments term got through the “Fees-Free” tertiary policy. We could tell New Zealand First was not entirely happy about that. It was sort of an unspoken agreement at the time that at some point, we’d have to pay for that, that New Zealand First would want something that Labour was not be comfortable with. It was just something that was understood at the time, that if you get a win now, you got to be prepared to give something up later on, you expect to co-operate with something you wouldn’t normally want to promote. Often these things are not formalised, they are understood. They’ve got to balance out

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in the fullness of time and you’ve got to help the other side get over the line with something you might not be entirely comfortable with.’ (Munro 2019) Trading between politicians in difference parties is standard behaviour, as an opposition politician noted: ‘it might be that senator x wants us to get up and support some motion or other and approaches us and says “I want to make a point about some policy area with this motion in the senate and to that end I’d like your votes.” And we might say “ok, we will vote with you on that but we want your support on this that is coming up.” So that trading process is occurring all the time.’ (Dreyfus 2019) It needs good negotiation skills or help from key political actors, but as a ministerial advisor conceded ‘sometimes you are just winging it and it is good when you end up gaining more than you are losing. But you know, there are lots of smart people in Government, and so some tough negotiators’ (Baker-Jones 2019). Internal tactics such as coalition agreements, inner circles, public agreements and resignation threats can also be used to sell specific policies such as unpopular economic reforms (Wenzelburger 2011), see Table 5.5. For example, the Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Finance Minister Paul Martin held budget discussions and created proposals in secret so that ministers and deputies could only protest after the budget cuts were presented rather than before (Wenzelburger 2011). They also hid windfall profits from ministers in ‘contingency reserves’ within the budget, and thus at the end of the fiscal year ministries met their spending targets without using reserves, thereby reducing the deficit. Martin cut transfer payments by $6 billion by merging different transfer systems into the ‘Canada Health and Social Transfer’ in the 1995 budget without consulting the executives in the provinces, but mitigated this loss by meeting their long held demand to abolish national standards for social programmes apart from health care, which increased the freedom they had to choose how to spend the federal funding they TABLE 5.5 Internal strategies to manage unpopular policy reform

1. Make the new policy top priority through contracts with ministers, cabinet retreats, Cabinet as ‘emergency government’ and reaching coalition agreement about adjustment issues 2. Make sure the prime minister gives absolute support to the minister leading the reform 3. Allocate decisions on the new policy to an inner circle such as to the core cabinet or just the prime minister and finance minister 4. Include figures from coalition parties in government by making them a minister to get their support 5. Get all parties to make a public commitment to reform such as during the formation of a coalition agreement 6. Create a special strategy to help build consensus, such as using ‘objective’ expert committees to help coalition parties converge their positions 7. Place new policy into a whole omnibus package, so opponents only have the option to accept or refuse a complete consolidation package rather than hit at individual measures 8. Create ‘special situations’ such as threatening to resign if the consolidation programme is refused 9. Offer transfers or increases in authority to federal or state/municipal/provincial government such as through a new distribution formula of funding, authority or regulations towards federal states Source: adapted and generalised from Tables 3 and 4 in Wenzelburger (2011, 1173–4).

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did get. Spending cuts were masked by being brought in gradually over three years and mixed in cash transfers with a new equalisation formula and the transfer of tax points. This made it harder for the provinces to fight – they not only had no legitimate authority to oppose the cuts, they could not use soft powers to right dispersed cuts, and thus whilst they complained, in the end they accepted it. Compromise is also key to getting policies through Parliament, especially in coalition governments. The Labour chief of staff conceded that concessions were made with the Zero Carbon Bill in 2019 and employment relations legislation in 2020. This means: ‘You have a lot more watered-down policy going through cabinet and to the parliament for enactment. While I call it “watered down”, others say “well no, that’s what negotiation is all about. It’s about give and take and it’s about getting broad agreement.” … a lot of the policies that Labour went to the last election with and published in a manifesto are being enacted now in a much more diminished form. They can’t hold true to their positions as set out in the manifesto because they’ve had to give way to New Zealand First and the Greens in order to get it through the parliament.’ (Munro 2019) The Green Party, whose minister led the introduction of the Zero Carbon Bill, understood such compromise was needed. The ministerial advisor who worked on this conceded that, given the science, a more ambitious Bill was preferable, but not possible given the numbers in Parliament, ‘we were aiming to get the most ambitious Bill that we could, but really we were just fighting to get it through – and there were two times there that it was really touch and go – at now time was it a given that this Bill would get through, but we got through so that was success’ (Baker-Jones 2019). However, the framework was set up for extended action in future, ‘if the next government has an appetite to do so and successive governments wish to do so then there’s an opportunity; the mechanism is available for them to go much harder.’

4e. Build trusting and effective internal relationships Internal relationship building is also key to success in political management. The US Department of State Office of Civil Service Personal Management (2006, 35) advises leaders to ‘cultivate relationships with the staff of important/key people. Get to know staff aides and secretaries on a first-name basis … create a list of “go-to” people in your personal and professional network.’ Leaders can use favours, exchange tactics or trade-offs to build coalitions. The US Department of State Office of Civil Service Personal Management’s (2006, 35) Leadership Competency Framework discusses exchange type tactics such as ‘make a list of the resources you can offer to others; then, when someone asks you for help, you will know which resources you have available’, ‘develop effective give-and-take relationships with key individuals in the organization, both vertically and laterally’ and ‘make a conscious effort to create win-win results and to not just think of yourself and your possible gain when taking action.’ Co-operative relationships are important to how proposals are assessed (Heymann 1988, 155). This was confirmed by practitioners interviewed who spoke of the need to show respect and build effective relationships. Even in legislatures which can be seen as places for highly negative engagement, humour can be more effective, ‘there is always a level of tolerance that’s given to interjections and basically every standing order if there is a good humour attached to it … if someone makes an interjection, even if the speaker is telling people not to abuse rules and if it’s

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genuinely funny, they will be rarely be thrown out’ (Burke 2019). Moreover, just abusing opposition politicians will make it harder to get their support when needed in future: as one politician commented, ‘you better behave right at the start because you never know what will happen the year after or the year after or the year after that’ (Dreyfus 2019). Honesty is also important: ‘Keeping your word is important. It will be known instantly if you reneged on a deal that you had done – because the votes take place in public. And it will be obvious if a vote turns out differently than the Government or Labor thought because someone had not kept their word, because by and large you don’t bring things to a vote unless you are certain of the outcome.’ (Dreyfus 2019)

Political leadership 5: collaborate Political leaders can also work with others in decision making, adopting collegial, empowering leadership that involves others in discussion and decisions to create legitimacy, but avoid being too chaotic. For example, the New Zealand Green Party’s (n.d.) ‘Policy Development Process’ suggests a democratic style of leadership, as there are multiple stages in the process involving diverse groups, including issues raised by members at the a summer policy conferences, as well as caucus, issue groups and a policy committee. The management style presidents adopt influences how the leader engages the policy-making process in terms of who participates in the process, how information is processed, and how disagreements are resolved (Mitchell 2010). The Australian Liberals responded to critique that the 2016 campaign was too centralised, and for 2019 there was more collaboration between the different levels of the party, ‘the meetings of the state directors and three federal directors were very well done. There was an acceptance of the notion that there wasn’t a dictatorial top down from Hirst [the campaign manager] but there was a genuine attempt to run it in terms of the best results of the campaign rather than anything else’ (Greiner 2019). A collegial management style means involving others in generating policy preferences, pushing the group to assess a range of options, encouraging consensus building amongst the group (or advisors) and being willing to delegate authority to others with expertise. President Bill Clinton had a collegial style with low centralisation in his foreign policy-making processes (Mitchell 2010). He was open to information and sensitive to his environment, though in some ways he might be seen as too sensitive as he changed policy position in light of new information. He evaluated a range of options and tried to build a consensus but was forced by events and deadlines to make decisions. Policy development was delegated to his advisors, with him becoming more involved if the issue became salient, adopting a more formal management style when final choices had to be made. The ability of leaders to adopt democratic leadership styles can be constrained in politics and government when issues become top of the public agenda and/or they need to make a decision. Coalition government of course demands collaboration. With the Labour-led coalition government elected in 2017 in New Zealand, consultation: ‘tends to happen at the high level. This doesn’t tend to be something that happens at the caucus level. The PM’s office and the leaders’ offices from New Zealand First and the Greens tend to be the leads of these negotiations, and that is where the key decisions get

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made. A lot of them comes down to the Prime Minister and Minister Peters having to sit down and just forge an agreement on how a policy matter or a cabinet matter is going to be decided.’ (Munro 2019) Less contentious legislation also goes through parliaments with full collaboration from parties on opposite sides: ‘there will be bills where there is complete agreement between the opposition and the government. The parties of government, Labor and Liberals, will quite often reach agreement on what we say is non-contentious legislation, even if the Greens party or a cross-bench Senator or cross-bench member of the House is very upset about the legislation, we won’t be. So there is quite a degree of co-operation between the opposition and the government just in terms of managing both Houses.’ (Dreyfus 2019)

Political leadership 6: delegate Leaders can also give power to others, giving them the freedom to carry out a task where people are ‘able and willing’, meaning followers are competent and confident in their ability to do a task. The Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor leader talked of the need to delegate to staff: ‘Definitely the people management of your staff team is one of the crucial things. So we have a staff of around 30 and it’s a high pressure environment and most of them are quite high achieving people, so giving them what they need, making sure that they’ve got the delegation and the coordination that they need, not micromanaging them but giving them space.’ (Gartrell 2019) Presidents need to give cabinet secretaries more delegated control so they can appoint their own senior staff and build an effective departmental team (Laffin 1996). If the White House is seen to over-influence a department this undermines the secretary’s authority both internally and externally. To sell policies, or act as policy entrepreneurs, even those at the very top of the bureaucracy need presidential support. Secretaries need active support such as aligned agendas (without prescribed detail), expenditure of presidential political capital in congressional negotiations to support policy initiatives, and satisfactory resources for their departments. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key was perceived to delegate effectively. Wayne Mapp, a minister under Key observed he had ‘a different style than the traditional style of New Zealand political management. He delegates in the manner of a chief executive, and lets ministers get on with their jobs’ (Mapp 2014). Ministers were allowed discretion as to whether to even tell the prime minister about major developments in their portfolios. In his valedictory statement he noted that whilst Key set the vision and direction of the country but thanked him ‘for allowing us such a large degree of autonomy to develop the direction in our portfolios. The freedom you have given us is one of the secrets of your success as leader’ (Mapp 2011). Similarly, another minister Simon Power noted ‘the freedom he gave me to operate’ and ‘who gave me plenty of rope, some of which I have used … of the 462 papers I have taken to Cabinet as a Minister, on only one did he phone to say “I can’t support this one”.’ In contrast, it has been suggested that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd needed

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to delegate – former minister under him Nicola Roxon (2013) also talked of the importance of delegation: ‘Good leaders are good delegators. If they don’t delegate, they and their governments ultimately drown in less important matters … Governments need to allow ministers to act, give them real responsibility with consequences if they fail to deliver … .This respects the role of ministers, but at the same time demands ministers step up to the real work, instead of spending time on other distractions. This also frees up some precious prime ministerial time and it protects the PM too – the Government’s most visible and senior spokesperson is shielded from some inevitable failures and mistakes.’

Political leadership 7: adapt Another principle of management is that leaders should adapt their styles, approaches and tactics to suit the situation. Contingency theories of leadership argue that the effectiveness of leadership behaviour depended on the context of the situation at hand. Where the focus is on the task, and followers are unwilling or unable to take charge, managers should be authoritative, and define roles, give clear and specific directions when telling people what to do, and how and when to do tasks. More persuasive leadership suits when followers are motivated and confident, but lack skills – then the leader can be more directive and supportive to help followers buy into the leadership vision. When followers are able and competent, but do not want to lead, leaders can share decision making using a collaborative style. Party leaders and senior party staff often have to adapt to internal stakeholders: ‘When you’ve got shadow cabinet, you’ve got parliamentary leaders – the leader, the deputy leader, Senate leader, the Senate deputy leader and a few others. Every leader has a group of people around them and then their shadow cabinet and their caucus. So, there are a number of internal bodies that help the leader test ideas, selling things they want to do, and exert some authority … there is definite authority for the leader but also an accountability structure and mechanisms.’ (Gartrell 2019) Thus leaders have to work adaptively ‘by bringing people with you and trying to coalesce all the different agendas into something coherent’ (Erickson 2019). Delegation is suitable for when followers or subordinates are competent and confident in their ability to do a task and thus leaders are able to give them responsibility for decisions and implementation. For example, the Democratic National Committee in the US used to have more of a dictatorial style with volunteers, but then under Dean/Obama it used more of a delegating style. The Party decided that people were more suited to delegating than previously, but if they were not able to handle it, more control may need to be held back for staff at higher levels only. In the Australian parliamentary services, this has been shown to be risky: a secretary of parliamentary services noted how a crisis emerged when junior staff working in security leaked information to a senator, something which was technically within the rules because ‘senators can take information from wherever they because they desire because it aids them keeping the public service to account’ (Stefanic 2019). This created a case whereby ‘people who had substantively no power but use it – what little that they have,

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which is the ability to interact with parliamentarians on a daily basis, which they do whenever they pass a screening point or they walk past them in the corridor’ and it created an issue for the top levels, encouraging senior staff away from delegating. The Secretary noted when interviewed, ‘Some of our staff I know are frustrated at middle levels because they feel they don’t have as much delegated authority as they should have, but that is because they don’t have the full understanding of what can happen’ (Stefanic 2019). Political advisors also have adapt to the approach taken by leaders to maximise their strengths and minimise their weaknesses. The White House staff adapts to the elected president because each has different preferences for what detail they want to see, what type of things they want to see, and how much they will delegate to others to handle (Kessel 2001). Bill Clinton liked to get input from a wide range of people and engage in extensive deliberation, but then needed staff to help organise discussion into actual decisions. Staff have to adapt their routines and procedures to suit not just what the leader wants, but also to maximise their strengths and minimise their weaknesses. Similarly, the secretary of parliamentary services talked of the need to adapt to the style of politicians who get selected for leadership positions within Parliament: ‘I’ve worked under 13 presiding officers now and each brings with them their own level of interest in the organisation and how it works. So, you’ve got at one end the completely disinterested “you’re paid to do that-don’t bother me, if there’s something really wrong, just tell me” and the other, you’ve got the micro-management either because they’re predisposed to controlling or perhaps they’ve had an experience that has made them risk averse so they want to be across anything that could potentially be an issue for them. The level of power you’ve got stems from that and then that percolates down. What’s really challenging is when you’ve got a mix of both ends. I certainly have had that. You have got one presiding officer or speaker that is a micro manager and on the other one that has no interest. The problem I have got then is whilst the micro manager is interested in detail I have to keep an eye on the other person that they’re not thinking that I’m directing all my attention and energy and favouring them. I guess where possible there is this need for confidentiality I’m trying to provide the same information at the same time so there is no exception.’ (Stefanic 2019) Political managers also have to adapt to changing political fortunes. Politicians in parliamentary leadership positions have to adapt to changing events: opposition managers of business talk of leading the agenda where they are able as well as adapting parliamentary management to suit the media: ‘It’s always affected by what news the media is running during the course of the day. There will be some days where a story is not running at all and we decide that we are going to use Question Time to launch it. When we first launched the attacks on Angus Taylor over the grass-lands we just had the day where there had been nothing about it in the news that day and suddenly had to get every single question and by the end of day was under serious pressure. With that, we do things that are completely outside of the news cycle and push them in.

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There will be other days where there is an issue that I have planned to get to that day and then something happens in the news overnight and you just have to shift. An example of that would be that I was planning to have a day dealing with a whole lot of industrial relations issues and overnight, the IMF gave the financial write-down of the world’s economies with Australia’s write-down significantly higher than what was happening for other countries. So, we had to make the shift that day and do a very big emphasis on the economy.’ (Burke 2019) Similarly, President Reagan adapted his strategy to suit the political environment (Pfiffner 2013; Wildavsky 1987). He opted to favour limited domestic government over tax cuts, given the deficit and his party’s historical aversion to build up large deficits. Although he is remembered as a tax cutter, he signed off on large tax increases – the rationale for high rate of military spending was also created through a strategic defence initiative. While he is remembered as firm against terrorism, he withdrew Marines from Lebanon after a terrorist bombing, traded arms for hostages and worked to build a productive relationship with Gorbachev to end the Cold War tensions. Although he undertook a few significant and impactful initiatives to convey leadership, he left the detail to others and claimed not to know specifics in order to reduce the expectation that the president is responsible for anything that became unpopular. Thus while creating a very clear vision and strategy, he achieved policy success by being willing to adapt and compromise to suit political reality. The Green Party in New Zealand also compromised on the detail of their Zero Carbon Bill in order to ensure the legislation would withstand changes in power in future elections. If they led too much and insisted on legislation which did not have cross-party support, it could get thrown out by the next government completely ‘or even big chunks of it taken out. We have to remove the opportunity to do that, by not making it so contentious that any one bit of it would be changed’ (Baker-Jones 2019). They compromised on methane targets but set up mechanisms that could increase it in future: a non-parliamentary body called the Climate Change Commission was created which will review and recommend changes to the target, which is effectively a mechanism built into the Bill ‘so it could be made more ambitious.’

Summary and a theory of political leadership Political leadership is no way near as simple as using authority to tell others what to do, even for those at the very top of the system such as prime ministers and presidents. Effective political leadership involves developing and using effective competences, skills and traits, and then adapting a range of approaches including the use of obvious formal powers, but also lesser well-known sources of authority, transformational, collaborative and delegatory approaches, as well as persuasion in terms of communication, trading and relationship building. See Table 5.6 for an overall theory of political leadership. There is no single way to be an effective leader – rather, political practitioners need to have a range of tools at their disposal and adapt to suit the situation. In politics, political leadership more often involves being responsive and relational than directive and coercive, yet it still needs to facilitate those within organisations to work towards the overall strategy.

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TABLE 5.6 A theory of political leadership

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 1: DEVELOP SKILLS Develop effective leadership skills, competencies and personal characteristics 1a. Develop effective competences in personnel management 1b. Develop political skills and understanding of internal politics 1c. Engage in effective crisis management, including task competence, interpersonal skills and external political communication 1d. Draw on traits such as character, integrity, confidence, self-management, intuition and drive POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 2: BE AUTHORITATIVE Use own formal powers to exert influence 2a. Use authoritative or coercive approaches to direct behaviour 2b. Use formal authority and legitimate sources of power tactically 2c. Use internal sources of power such as central networks, units and expert knowledge POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 3: BE TRANSFORMATIONAL Inspire everyone to follow and work with you to achieve the mission Use inspirational appeals using emotion and referencing values to influence behaviour to engage staff and volunteers in the overall purpose and mission POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 4: PERSUADE Get others on board with you 4a. Draw on external public support to persuade others internally 4b. Use external political communication to build political influence 4c. Sell specific policies strategically externally and internally 4d. Use rewards, exchange tactics, trade-offs and compromise to build internal coalitions and support 4e. Build trusting and effective internal relationships POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 5: COLLABORATE Work with others in decision making Adopt collegial, empowering leadership that involves others in discussion and decisions to create legitimacy POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 6: DELEGATE Give power to others Give others the freedom to carry out a task where they are capable POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 7: ADAPT Adapt leadership depending on support Adapt leadership in response to willingness of others to follow the leader

References Primary sources Practitioner interviews Baker-Jones, M (2019) Former Ministerial Advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment in Auckland, NZ. 18 November. Burke, T (2019) Australian Labor and Party Manager of Opposition Business, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November.

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Dreyfus, M (2019) Australian Labor MP, and former Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House (2013–2019) and former Cabinet Minister, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 8 November. Erickson, P (2019) National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at Labor headquarters, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Gartrell, T (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Greiner, N (2019) Australian Liberal Party Federal President, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 29 October. Kunkel, J (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 1 November. Munro, M (2019) Former Chief of Staff to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 12 November. Stefanic, R (2019) Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at Parliament House Canberra, Australia. 25 October.

Government documents Canadian Government (2006) Key Leadership Competencies. Canada: Public Service Agency and the Public Service Commission, Government of Canada. Report retrieved from http://www.tbs-sct.gc. ca/tal/kcl/dwnld/klc-eng.pdf. New Zealand Green Party (n.d.) ‘Policy Development Process.’ Retrieved from https://home.greens. org.nz/policy-development-process. New Zealand State Services Commission (2009) Leadership Capability Profile. November. Wellington, New Zealand. Report retrieved from http://www.ssc.govt.nz/upload/downloadable_files/Leader ship-Capability-Profile-Nov09.pdf. White House (c. 2013) Progress Report on the President’s Executive Actions to Reduce Gun Violence. USA. Report retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/exec_actions_p rogress_report_final.pdf. US Department of State Office of Civil Service Personal Management (2006) Planning Individual Development Activities: Tools, Ideas and Suggestions. October. Washington, DC, USA. Report retrieved from https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/107870.pdf. US Government (2014) Executive Order No. 13677 Climate-Resilient International Development by President Obama. 23 September. Report retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2014-09-26/p df/2014-23228.pdf. US National Background Investigations Bureau (n.d.) Proficiency Levels for Leadership Competencies. USA. Report retrieved from https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/assessment-and-selection/comp etencies/proficiency-levels-for-leadership-competencies.pdf.

Politician comments Clark, H (2014) Quoted in ‘Helen Clark reflects on life as a leader.’ 12 April. Article retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/9935825/Helen-Clark-reflects-on-life-as-a-leader. Key, J (2012) Quoted in interview with Tracey Watkins, ‘Key’s own darkest hour after quake.’ 20 February. Article retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake/6445366/ Keys-own-darkest-hour-after-quake. Mapp, W (2011) ‘Valedictory Statement of Hon Dr Wayne Mapp.’ 8 October. Retrieved from https:// www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/valedictory-statement-hon-dr-wayne-mapp. Mapp, W (2014) ‘Not business as usual: Key’s leadership style & the bloggersphere.’ Retrieved from http://pundit.co.nz/content/not-business-as-usual-keys-leadership-style-the-bloggersphere.

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Obama, B (2014) ‘Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Immigration.’ 20 November. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/20/remarks-president-a ddress-nation-immigration. Obama, B (2015) Quoted in Bill Simmons, ‘President Obama and Bill Simmons: The GQ Interview.’ November. Retrieved from http://www.gq.com/story/president-obama-bill-simmons-inter view-gq-men-of-the-year. Power, S (2011) ‘Speech: Simon Power – Valedictory statement.’ 5 October.http://www.voxy.co.nz/p olitics/speech-simon-power-valedictory-statement/5/103401. Reagan, R (n.d.) Quote retrieved from http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-the-greatest-lea der-is-not-necessarily-the-one-who-does-the-greatest-things-he-is-the-ronald-reagan-37-49-70.jpg. Roxon, N (2013) ‘“Such a Bastard”: Nicola Roxon Condemns Rudd in Button Memorial Lecture.’ Australian Politics. Transcript of lecture retrieved from http://australianpolitics.com/2013/10/16/ roxon-john-button-memorial-lecture.html.

Practitioner comments Cruz, T (2016) ‘POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush interviews Ted Cruz.’ Podcast retrieved from http:// www.politico.com/story/2016/07/off-message-transcript-ted-cruz-225655#ixzz4JwKxmr5B. Gergen, D (2011) ‘Capella inspires Former presidential advisor David Gergen, 3 qualities of leadership.’ 27 May. Video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrJvmX6XC4. Plouffe, D (2010) ‘Keynote speech at the IMD Orchestrating Winning Performance program.’ Quoted in ‘Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe explains the details of a winning organizational culture in OWP keynote.’ 23 June. Article retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/imdbschool/posts/ obama-campaign-manager-david-plouffe-explains-the-details-of-a-winning-organizat/ 132118956813446/.

Secondary sources Academic literature Bennister, M (2007) ‘Tony Blair and John Howard: Comparative Predominance and ‘Institution Stretch’ in the UK and Australia.’ British Journal of Politics & International Relations 9(3): 327–345. Bennister, M and T Heppell (2016) ‘Comparing the Dynamics of Party Leadership Survival in Britain and Australia: Brown, Rudd and Gillard.’ Government and Opposition 51(1): 134–159. Benze, J G (1987) Presidential Power and Management Techniques. New York: Greenwood Press. Boin, A, P T’Hart, A McConnell and T Preston (2010) ‘Leadership Style, Crisis Response and Blame Management: The Case of Hurricane Katrina.’ Public Administration 88(3): 706–723. Caillier, J G (2016) ‘Do Transformational Leaders Affect Turnover Intentions and Extra-Role Behaviors through Mission Valence?’ American Review of Public Administration 46(2): 226–242. Cohen, J E (2015) ‘Presidential Leadership of Public Opinion: An Embedded Survey Experiment.’ Political Communication 32(3): 345–355. Conley, R S (2007) ‘Presidential Republics and Divided Government: Lawmaking and Executive Politics in the United States and France.’ Political Science Quarterly 122(2): 257–285. Crouch, J, M J Rozell and M A Sollenberger (2013) ‘The law: president Obama’s signing statements and the expansion of executive power.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 43(4): 883–899. De Landtsheer, C’l, P De Vries and D Vertessen (2008) ‘Political Impression Management: How Metaphors, Sound Bites, Appearance Effectiveness, and Personality Traits Can Win Elections.’ Journal of Political Marketing, 7(3–4), 217–238. Dinan, W, A Ford, A McConnell and R Pyper (2006) ‘Policy responses to crisis: the case of the UK firefighters’ dispute.’ Policy and Politics 34(2): 307–324.

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Eshbaugh-Soha, M (2008) ‘The Impact of Presidential Speeches on the Bureaucracy.’ Social Science Quarterly 89(1): 116–132. Eshbaugh-Soha, M and T Miles (2011) ‘Presidential Speeches and the Stages of the Legislative Process.’ Congress & The Presidency 38(3): 301–321. Eshbaugh-Soha, M (2011) ‘Presidential public relations.’ In J Strömbäck and S Kiousis, Political public relations: principles and applications. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 95–114. Fisher, L (2015) ‘Presidential Unilateral Actions: Constitutional and Political Checks.’ Congress & the Presidency 42(3): 293–316. Hasecke, E B and J D Mycoff (2007) ‘Party loyalty and legislative success: are loyal majority party members more successful in the U.S. House of Representatives?’ Political Research Quarterly 60(4): 607–617. Heffernan, R (2003) ‘Prime ministerial predominance? Core executive politics in the UK.’ British Journal of Politics & International Relations 5(3): 347–372. Herrnson, P S (2009) ‘The Roles of Party Organizations, Party-Connected Committees, and Party Allies in Elections.’ Journal of Politics 71(4): 1207–1224. Heymann, P B (1988) The Politics of Public Management. New Haven: Yale University Press. Howell, W G and D E Lewis (2002) ‘Agencies by Presidential Design.’ Journal of Politics 64(4): 1095–1114. Kagan, E (2001) ‘Presidential Administration.’ Harvard Law Review 114(8): 2245–2385. Kessel, J H (2001) ‘The Presidency and the Political Environment.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31(1): 25–43. King, A (1991) ‘The British prime ministership in the age of the career politician.’ West European Politics 14(2): 25–47. Krent, H J (2015) ‘Presidential Control of Adjudication within the Executive Branch.’ Case Western Reserve Law Review 65(4): 1083–1117. Laffin, M (1996) ‘The President and the Subcontractors: The Role of Top Level Policy Entrepreneurs in the Bush Administration.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 26(2): 550–566. Lambert, C (2007) ‘New Labour, New leaders? Gendering Transformational Leadership.’ British Journal of Sociology of Education 28(2): 149–163. Lambright, W H (2015) ‘Reflections on leadership: an interview with Sean O’Keefe.’ Public Administration Review 75(4): 619–624. Lynch, P and R Whitaker (2013) ‘Where There is Discord, Can They Bring Harmony? Managing Intra-party Dissent on European Integration in the Conservative Party.’ British Journal of Politics & International Relations 15(3): 317–339. Marland, A (2016) Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control. Vancouver: UBC Press. Mitchell, D (2010) ‘Does context matter? Advisory systems and the management of the foreign policy decision-making process.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 40(4): 631–659. Pfiffner, J P (2013) ‘The Paradox of President Reagan’s Leadership.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 43(1): 81–100. Popper, M (2012) ‘Conclusion.’ In M Popper, Fact and Fantasy about Leadership. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 114–132. Reagan, R (n.d.) Quote retrieved from http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-the-greatest-lea der-is-not-necessarily-the-one-who-does-the-greatest-things-he-is-the-ronald-reagan-37-49-70.jpg. Rottinghaus, B and A L Warber (2015) ‘Unilateral Orders as Constituency Outreach: Executive Orders, Proclamations, and the Public Presidency.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 45(2): 289–309. Rudalevige, A (2015) ‘Executive Branch Management and Presidential Unilateralism: Centralization and the Issuance of Executive Orders.’ Congress & The Presidency 42(3): 342–365. Schnee, C (2015) Political Reputation Management: The Strategy Myth. Abingdon: Routledge. Shafie, D M (2013) Eleventh Hour: The politics of policy initiatives in presidential transitions. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. Sykes, P (1993) ‘Party Constraints on Leaders in Pursuit of Change.’ Studies in American Political Development 7(1): 151–176.

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Taylor, A J (2008) ‘Strategic Intercameral Behavior and the Sequence of Congressional Lawmaking.’ American Politics Research 36(3): 451–474. Tiernan, A (2006) ‘Advising Howard: Interpreting Changes in Advisory and Support Structures for the Prime Minister of Australia.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 41(3): 309–324. Villalobos, J D, J S Vaughn and D B Cohen (2014) ‘Public Management in Political Institutions: Explaining Perceptions of White House Chief of Staff Influence.’ Public Administration 92(3): 744–760. Wenzelburger, G (2011) ‘Political Strategies and Fiscal Retrenchment: Evidence from Four Countries.’ West European Politics 34(6): 1151–1184. Wildavsky, A (1987) ‘President Reagan as Political Strategist.’ Society 24(4): 56–62.

Media NBC News (2016) ‘Tearful President Obama Unveils Executive Action on Guns.’ 5 January. NBC Nightly News. Video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx9xktzrRvs.

6 POLITICAL REVIEWING Reflection and renewal in government, parties and campaigns

Introduction to political reviewing in government, parties and campaigns Reviews happen all the time in politics – such as after a party or candidate loses an election, because of a scandal, crisis or failure of service, or to stimulate new developments where conditions have changed. However, political reviewing should be an ongoing reflective exercise where parties and governments – and the individuals within them – reflect on overall progress to identify any areas for improvement as well as to understand and maintain success. Political reviewing connects to political planning as it includes reviewing progress towards goals, and taking corrective action mid-process rather than waiting until the end or for something to go wrong, but also being or holding others accountable. It also includes creating a plan to improve organisational performance in light of specific reviews – including for example when a party has won an election – and supporting improvement and development in relation to post-review plans, otherwise all the resources devoted to reviewing come to nothing, wasting public and political resources. As the National Secretary for the Australian Labor Party said, ‘there is a tendency in politics for a challenge to come along, you break it up into a series of tasks, you execute those tasks and then you go to the pub and then you start again right and there is not a lot of – like as soon as you can you move through and put it behind you, just keep looking forward’ (Erickson 2019). While political reviewing is about reflection, it should ultimately stimulate change and action. Table 6.1 outlines the key areas of political reviewing.

TABLE 6.1 Key areas of political reviewing

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Review organisational progress Encourage individual self-reflection and adherence to norms Conduct or respond to accountability mechanisms Review a specific area Plan and implement post-review improvements

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Political reviewing 1: review organisational progress Political reviewing is about continually reflecting on organisational progress or achievement of goals and thus parties for example ‘do sometimes have to at an institutional level take a hard look at yourself but you shouldn’t think of it only in terms of this big event that only comes along at every couple of years and happens to you’ (Erickson 2019). Instead, organisations need to conduct regular review processes such as annual reports, and engage in ongoing reflection about progress against goals set in planning stage. Organisational data can be analysed against standards, criteria or measurements that relate to organisational goals, see Table 6.2 for what the data may include. Data can be used to stimulate new management approaches where performance is below the set goals or standards. Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe (2010) said ‘how do you evaluate your own performance? … Our decisions were based on the metrics we established. Everyone’s performance was based on these metrics.’ The White House Communications office monitored success through anecdotes, press clippings and polls to explore whether and how their messages/policies were being communicated (Kumar 2001, 634). Parties could embed reviewing by getting peers together, developing ‘a model where you have people who are working at similar functions or just are facing the same challenges across different parts of the organisation. They might be people working on digital in 8 different organisations or the people who have to manage the risk side of a fund raising operation in 8 different places’ who might be brought together for ‘shared learning and evaluation and reflection on a semi-regular basis’ (Erickson 2019). The UK Conservative Party used a membership survey to review their progress and identify areas where they might need to rethink their strategy. The survey suggested there was dissatisfaction with the amount of opportunities to participate in the politics of the Party and they should utilise values and single issues more as these are key motivators to joining a campaigning organisation. The review also identified a potential key target market:

TABLE 6.2 Data to utilise in measuring progress against strategic goals

Organisational data

Employee data

        

 Staff productivity – a performance measure of both efficiency and effectiveness  Absenteeism  Turnover – the voluntary or involuntary permanent withdrawal from an organisation  Organisational citizenship behaviour – discretionary behaviour that is not part of an employee’s formal job but helps an organisation perform well, such as helping work team members and volunteering for extra duties  Workplace misbehaviour  Work profile data, e.g. on age, ethnicity, gender  Campaign metrics – individual performance against established measures

PR briefings Membership figures Opinion polls, campaign metrics, voting enrolments Service users/client satisfaction HR applicant flow data Staff turnover, absenteeism, productivity Membership, MP and staff profiles Employee surveys on satisfaction Financial data, e.g. donations, increases in online fundraising from one election to the next  Employee surveys, e.g. on job satisfaction, perceptions of leadership, ethical values in the workforce  Data solicited purely for review purposes, such as focus groups, surveys and interviews with members, staff, key figures

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‘The over 50s are a group where people may have more available time, be more established in their careers or even contemplating early retirement so they should be a target audience for recruitment. The 30–50 age group contains plenty of supporters but these are arguably the people with most commitments so the concept of membership and involvement needs to be made as non-onerous as possible.’ (UK Conservative Party 2016, 8)

Political reviewing 2: encourage individual self-reflection and adherence to norms Political organisations also need to encourage individuals to engage in self-reflection and regulation in response to norms, conventions, external pressures and the potential for formal accountability, oversight and pressures from other sources and stakeholders such as external institutions and the media. There is a major gap in reflection and accountability for political advisors or staffers, however. On one hand, in the US there is both hierarchical accountability from many rules that exist within Congress and the prospect of external oversight from outside institutions (Romzek 2000). There is a degree of hierarchical accountability from the many institutional rules, directives, existing legislation, administrative and ethics committees which staff have to abide by. Political staff often check compliance with election laws, conflict of interest rules, financial disclosure rules, post-employment restrictions and employment laws so they will be able to comply with potential reviews of institutional performance from outside institutions. They also check in advance of proposed action with those working on ethics committees to be sure their plans will comply with regulations. However, staffers need to meet multiple standards from a diverse range of stakeholders, and sources of authority and direction for some aspects of the job are indirect. Members are the primary authority, but there are also other staff/colleagues, constituents, caucuses, institutional leadership and lobbyists. Within each political office, there tend to be flat hierarchies with only a few supervision lines such as junior staff (legislative analysts, legislative correspondents and receptionists), senior staff (administrative assistants, legislative directors, press secretaries) and overall managers (chief of staff). Elected members vary in how much autonomy their give their staff – some provide detailed directions, expect detailed reports and have clear hierarchies of authority, such as the chief of staff may review communication and the legislative director may review all policy. There are procedure manuals such as how to handle mail, how quickly to respond to inquiries, who can authorise communication or spending, and staff hours and travel, and measures to prevent mistakes. However, in other offices, staff are mostly left to judge for themselves the best way to anticipate and respond to the expectations of others, and members often do not give their staff enough direction – more often instead criticising their performance after the event. It is left to the individuals’ autonomy to use internalised norms or accepted practice to anticipate members’ needs without being directly told what to do or how to do it. Such norms are rarely articulated directly, yet staff are very aware they exist, so they end up considering their own internal norms of what is an acceptable standard. The lack of a clear job definition for political staffers – as discussed in Chapter 4 on political HR – leaves them with significant professional discretion as to how they work, but they have to build trust from their members over time in order to get more autonomy.

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There is also a lack of rules for political advisors in New Zealand – not only is there no dedicated code of conduct (whereas the UK does have one), but also in practice only about 30% said there were protocols in place regulating contact between ministerial advisers in their minister’s office and departmental officials, while over a third said their engagement with ministerial advisers was not subject to a protocol (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010). Additionally, very few ministers (only 5 out of 21 ministers they surveyed) have protocols governing relations between their ministerial advisers and departmental officials. It is left to the minister to set the working arrangements and expectations about how things will and will not proceed. This leaves a lot of ambiguity around expected conduct, which can cause problems in the relationship between ministers and their officials especially when things go wrong. Eichbaum and Shaw quote one official: ‘There’s a lack of accountability with ministerial advisers that makes it very difficult when things go badly. Who are you supposed to complain to? How do you know when they’re misrepresenting the minister’s views, and what’s to stop them doing that? Who are they accountable to? Most ministers certainly don’t have time to review their [advisers’] performance, and most ministers don’t have any management skills anyway. We have also had issues when staff inside the minister’s office don’t get on, and bicker constantly, withhold information from each other, and give the department different messages. Again, who is meant to be responsible for resolving that?’ (New Zealand civil servant, quoted in Eichbaum and Shaw 2010, 142) In Canada, a 2007 guide for ministers and secretaries of state rendered ministers and secretaries of state responsible for the conduct of their offices, and thus that of political staff. In practice, however, under the Government of Stephen Harper, ministers tried to apply the same rule to political staff that is accepted in the case of public servants, that if they did not know or were not personally involved, then they were not responsible (Aucoin 2010). This created an accountability vacuum for political staff working for ministers, because Parliament cannot discipline ministers for the actions of political staff. Additionally, ministers themselves are left to self-regulate and follow convention in their own behaviour. Social norms which set expectations as to what is acceptable are often more influential than formal codes of conduct or rules. Politicians also have to respond to informal requests to justify decisions and actions to other politicians and institutions in cabinet and parliament. Ministerial accountability is often seen as only requiring that ministers answer parliamentary questions without knowingly misleading, but ministers know that they will at least have to justify their decisions and actions to the prime minister, cabinet, their party and Parliament (Brenton 2014). Pressure to account for departmental actions can also come from the media and public, though ministers can blame the department even though it is their role to oversee the department and manage any errors. In Parliament, staff running the institution ‘are required to serve all the political interests’ of ‘elected representatives’ who ‘all represent a constituency’ and are ‘are microcosm of the community’ (Stefanic 2019). The Secretary for the Australian parliamentary services argued that staff need to be told to help uphold the perception of maintaining impartiality, ‘from my lens political management is understanding the politics that the individual represents, so when you are having that conversation you are not treading into territory where you could find yourself of concern with your own belief systems’ (Stefanic 2019). He also trains staff to

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communicate any issues early on, ‘to just own the issue so as long as we can say we learned from it and moved on, that’s the ideal thing. You are not going to be punished for it but we just need to know about it so we can work on it’ (Stefanic 2019).

Political reviewing 3: conduct or respond to formal accountability mechanisms There are also a range of formal accountability mechanisms, including legal accountability, external oversight, monitoring and audits, ethics, codes of conduct, judicial inquiries and parliamentary committees that political practitioners have to engage with. For example, various codes of conduct, guides, manuals, handbooks and legislation, have attempted to codify and clarify politico-bureaucratic relationships and ministerial responsibility (Brenton 2014). In Australia, Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard committed to Standards of Ministerial Ethics, later renamed as the Statement of Ministerial Standards by Tony Abbott in 2013. This specified that ministers must accept responsibility for the exercise of the powers and functions of their office, including the conduct, representations and decisions of those who act as their delegates or on their behalf and are answerable for the consequences of their decisions and actions. In Canada, the 2011 guide for ministers and ministers of state on accountable government issued under Prime Minister Stephen Harper sets out core principles for the roles and responsibilities of ministers, such as their accountability to the prime minister and to Parliament for all areas of responsibility. The New Zealand cabinet manual notes that ministers are responsible for determining and promoting policy, defending policy decisions, and answering to the House on both policy and operational matters, and also that ministers are responsible and accountable to the House for departmental actions and performance, even when the minister had no knowledge of, or involvement in, those actions. In the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair created a ministerial code in 1997 (updated by David Cameron in 2010), which holds ministers accountable to Parliament for the policies, decisions and actions of their departments and agencies, and whether their behaviour breaches those standards is also subject to the judgment of the prime minister. Additional accountability mechanisms come from external sources such as the Federal Elections Commission, Office of Compliance and the White House in the US (Romzek 2000).

Political reviewing 4: review a specific area The most commonly known form of political reviewing is a focused review, most often conducted after particular events, problems or issues that arise or to understand and improve an ongoing area of concern or focus. Reviews are conducted after an election loss or win, administrative errors by public servants, controversial decisions and leaks, scandals involving key advisors, or issues such as how to improve the working conditions for MPs, opportunities for party development, and parliamentary reviews of the political workplace after media reports of bullying and a scandal around a small number of MPs.

Party reviews post-election Political parties regularly conduct post-election reviews: they are ‘a very important thing to do’ (Gartrell 2019). They provide more objective analysis – as the Australian Labor secretary

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noted, reviews take ‘a disparate set of experiences and views about what happened and why it happened’ and create an ‘output that both puts a line under those events … and also gives a road map going forward’ (Erickson 2019). The New Zealand Labour Party held an election review after losing their third successive election in 2014 (New Zealand Labour Party 2015), which highlighted the lack of financial resources, a lack of campaign preparation, internal disunity, a lack of message discipline, and complex and confusing policies as being factors in Labour’s defeat, and recommended building a more effective database of online donors and creating more effective training for candidates, campaign managers and volunteers. The Australian Federal Labor Party also conducted a review after losing the 2013 election (Australian Labor Party 2014, 2). It discussed the impact of a sudden change in leadership from Julia Gillard to Kevin Rudd and how, in May 2013, the Labor Party held a two-day trial in campaign headquarters with the campaign team who were effective and committed, but a month later about half of that team was lost as a result of the leadership change and thus ‘the infrastructure of the campaign had to be rebuilt in a matter of weeks’ (Australian Labor Party 2014, 5). The review also considered campaign structure, localisation, processes for managing candidate issues, field, data and technology, the grassroots, research and messaging, advertising and communications, and campaign finance. It also noted positive successes such as increases in small donations collected online, with increases in activity between 2010 and 2013 election campaigns as follows: ‘Individual donors – 17 fold increase, Donors – 15 fold increase, Funds raised – 10 fold increase, Email addresses – 8 fold increase, Emails sent, volunteer signups – 12 fold increase, Twitter followers – 3 fold increase and Facebook likes – 12 fold increase’ (Australian Labor Party 2014, 5–6). It provided 30 recommendations, most of which focused on organisational aspects of the campaign, including (Australian Labor Party 2014, 23–5):     

Assign responsibility for final decision-making to the campaign director. Establish formal and regular structures for coordination between the central campaign director and state secretaries well before the campaign starts. Conduct regular training in the systems Campaign Central and NationBuilder and improve their management of data. Provide volunteers with clear information on policies linked to local examples and party values. Co-locate the campaign advertising agency and the online agency.

The US Republican Party (2013) Growth & Opportunity Project reviewed Republican performance after they lost the 2012 American federal election, and drew on multiple data sources:      

More than 2,600 people in and outside Washington were spoken to, including voters, technical experts, private sector officials, Party members, and elected office holders. In-depth focus groups with former Republican voters in Iowa and Ohio were convened. A poll among 2,000 Republican Hispanic voters was conducted. Political practitioners at the state and national levels were surveyed. GOP pollsters were surveyed. An online survey with more than 36,000 individuals was considered.

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Covering areas such as messaging, demographic partners, campaign mechanics, third party groups and fundraising, the review both critiqued performance in that area and made recommendations for improving future performance. For example, the report reflects on the party’s performance with youth, where Romney lost voters younger than 30 by 5 million votes and how ‘the Party is seen as old and detached from pop culture’, thus ‘the RNC must recognize that today’s young voters will be voters for the next 50-plus years’ and target such voters. It then made 14 specific recommendations, including (US Republican Party 2013, 21–2):     

Promote forward-looking, positive policy proposals that unite young voters, such as the Republican Party’s education policies. Empower an RNC youth liaison to work closely with the College Republicans, Young Republicans, and Teenage Republicans. Encourage young candidates to run for office by preparing them with training and support. Get republican leaders to participate in interviews with The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, MTV and magazines such as People, UsWeekly, etc, as well as radio stations that are popular with the youth demographic. Develop a youth advisory committee at the RNC to help de ne the rebranding efforts of the Party.

The Canadian NDP Party (2016) conducted a review of the 2015 Campaign, where they entered a campaign as the official opposition for the first time and led the polls for weeks before and during the campaign, but then lost to the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau. The review collected feedback through a consultation process focused on ‘what worked, what didn’t, and what we need to start doing as we continue to build and strengthen our movement’ (Canadian NDP Party 2016, 5). It found that the campaign was ‘out of sync with Canadians’ desire for a dramatic break from the Harper decade’ (Canadian NDP Party 2016, 6) and ‘weak internal communications hindered our ability to empower those on the ground to accurately share our vision for Canada’ (p. 6). Parties also conduct reviews after election victories. The President of the Australian Liberal Party said about conducting a post-election review even after winning the 2019 election that there is political value in reviewing elections to avoid perceptions of arrogance (Greiner 2019). The right people need to be assigned to conduct them: ‘My personal thing was to appoint people to run the review not too close including Mr Joyce from New Zealand, who went around Australia and talked to people, and then distilled what they thought were messages or future directions. I think the federal executive was probably capable of doing that on their own, and getting to very similar conclusions, but that is reviewing yourself so it looks a bit arrogant, and there is just no harm in having a reasonably independent set of eyes look at it.’ (Greiner 2019) For example, Victorian Labor conducted a review of the Party in 2016, after winning the 2014 state election to try to understand why they were successful, and how they could prepare for the 2018 election (Victorian Labor Party 2016). It conducted an internal audit into preparation for the next election, arguing that ‘all organisations have to be aware of risks and have strategies in place to manage those risks’ (Victorian Labor Party 2016, 3). The review

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identified a number of areas for improvement, such taking better measures to assure replacement staff exist for each position, correcting errors in policy before to their launch, and providing more effective staff training. For the first time, the UK Conservative Party (2016) conducted a review after winning the 2015 election, to avoid masking ‘those areas where the Party may be declining in strength or underperforming’ (p. 7). The review panel included representatives from all areas of the Party such as volunteers, councillors, MPs, MEPs and peers, and an online survey. Recommendations were made to offer more diversified membership, change the party structure, create a candidate outreach programme, and allow early parliamentary selections in opposition-held non-target seats where the local seat was able to produce a credible local candidate who could pass an approvals panel, starting in the current Parliament. In particular, the Conservative Party put forward a plan to increase party membership by improving offers made to its members: ‘There is clearly significant potential to increase our membership levels and it is clear that the value- added benefits that other successful membership organisations offer are something we should consider. The largest of these organisations, like the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), offer their members a wide range of benefits, services and offers. In order to facilitate the deeper involvement in politics that some Members want, the Panel believes that additional Silver and Gold levels of membership, each with additional benefits, should be created.’ (UK Conservative Party 2016, 15) Different levels of membership would offer varying access in terms of events, interaction, merchandise and also communication, see Table 6.3. However, the proposed levels need greater differentiation: there is no difference between the levels in some aspects.

TABLE 6.3 Suggested differential levels of membership post-2016 UK Conservative Party review

Core benefits for MEMBER

Additional benefits for SILVER Further benefits for GOLD

Communication

Influence

Events

Interaction

Commerce

Access to member-only content on website Newsletter Podcasts Daily briefings Daily news summary

Voting rights

Access to conference Conservative Central Head Quarters organised receptions

Mobile mini-polls Automatic membership of Conservative Policy Forum

Merchandise Third party offers Joining pack and free gift

–

Interactive policy questionnaires

–

–

–

Drinks reception at conference ‘Meet the Minister’ events Area at conference and priority seating for leader’s speech Bodleian archive tours Campaign calls with senior Party figures

Campaign polling and strategy presentations

–

Source: adapted from the UK Conservative Party (2016, 16).

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Additionally, reviews have been conducted on specific areas. For example, several Leaders of the UK House of Commons have chaired reviews of working practices in the UK Parliament which led to a series of reforms (Weinberg 2015). Reviews have considered working hours in terms of the timing of parliamentary debates and impact on MPs’ ability to spend time in their constituencies and at home. Despite the changes made, surveys of longitudinal cohorts drawn from a sample of 136 UK MPs on working hours’ reform suggested that the changes had a mixed influence on stress and ability to be with their family. The responses varied because of the differing distances between the capital and constituencies, and also because the changes did not resolve the inherent conflict between carrying out political duties and spending time with their family and/or friends at weekends. In 2003, the programme of reform was continued and the House of Commons trialled more reforms to the timing of debates, aiming to give MPs sufficient time for constituency duties during the traditional working week (Monday to Friday) thus permitting more family time. MPs were allowed to debate and vote on the permanence of the trialled changes, and adjustments were made as a result. Research suggests that working hours’ reform helped home life, but respondents also claimed that they had a moderate or pronounced negative effect on their work performance. Parliamentary committees also conduct reviews of ministers but there is big variance in their practice and effectiveness (Grube 2014). A 2012–2013 UK review of the failed tender process for the West Coast rail franchise, which was abandoned after major administrative mistakes costing taxpayers millions of pounds, identified there was a failure to take responsibility and it was unclear who was in charge. At the inquiry, the permanent secretary at the Department of Transport and the Director General appeared to answer for the alleged mistakes of the department, and ministerial responsibility or oversight of public servants was not discussed. The majority of the media focus was also placed on the alleged incompetence of civil service officials. In contrast, in Australia the 2010 Australian Senate Standing Committee review of the Federal Governments’ Home Insulation Program, where poor installation practices led to house fires and loss of lives, sought to identify dereliction of duty by ministers or the prime minister for political use against the government rather than administrative incompetence. When questioning public servants, the focus was on what ministers were told, and when and how they responded, to try to identify ministers who could be held politically responsible. Similarly, the media focused on political blame rather than administrative lessons. Grube suggests this is due to political contexts and traditions: the UK Public Accounts Council has a long tradition of non-partisan scrutiny of government departments, whereas it was election year in Australia when the review was held. However, overall the adversarial nature of committee hearings encourages ‘blame games’ that do little to guarantee better decision-making in the future. The setting for parliamentary committees is inherently adversarial: MPs act like interrogators of public servants to obtain potentially withheld information about mistakes by the government. Another area which has attracted repeated reviews is the role of political advisors, often stimulated by particular incidents which raise political and public concern about ethical behaviour. For example, after a scandal in Australia called ‘children overboard’ the Parliament of Australia’s Senate conducted a special inquiry into ministerial staff, which recommended a number of reforms to the management and accountability of ministerial advisers, including a code of conduct, training, an ethics adviser for staff, and that ministerial staff appear before parliamentary committees under certain circumstances (Maley 2010).

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Reviews into government communications in the UK stimulated an increase in partisan staff – the Government Information Service was reviewed by Sir Robin Mountfield in 1997 and led to institutional reforms in Number 10, including the creation of a new strategic communications unit headed by Alastair Campbell and staffed by six civil servants and partisan special advisers, as well as a new research and information office also staffed by both civil servants and partisan special advisers (Fawcett and Gay 2010). However, in later years the role of special advisers in the UK were subject to review by the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life in the wake of controversy, such as when a special adviser at the Department of Transport advised her department staff when 9/11 happened that it was a good day to release ‘anything we want to bury’ to the media, and the David Kelly affair where a scientists who advised the government committed suicide after media pressure. The Nolan committee suggested a new code of conduct in July 2001, and in 2003 the Phillis Review of Government Communications was held, after which the Director of Communications Alistair Campbell announced that he would resign. Campbell’s replacement had circumscribed powers: he was not given line management powers over civil servants, and overall responsibility for government media strategy and personnel was given to a non-partisan permanent secretary based in the cabinet office. Thus a review on communications leads to increased power by partisan staff, which then gives rise to ethical issues which leads to another review, which stimulates a reduction in power. This suggests a limitation with focused reviews that concentrate on just one area without considering more comprehensive implications. A scandal in Canada also prompted the Gomery Commission review of political staffers, specifically political staff getting jobs with lobby firms and the public service (Aucoin 2010). The new Harper Government elected in 2006 followed many recommendations from the commission, such as removing the worst aspect of the special access of political staff to the public service, categorising political staff as ‘public office holder’ and subjecting them to a new conflict of interest policy that restricted their post-employment lobbying. While it failed to adopt a code of conduct for political staff as recommended, it gave more explicit instruction in its guidance to ministers on aspects such as the status of political staff vis-à-vis public servants and how ministers were responsible for the conduct of their political staff.

Political reviewing 5: plan and implement post-review improvements Political reviewing needs to lead to action: post-election reviews can provide ‘an agenda for the three years in terms of what you can improve’ (Greiner 2019) and ‘what to avoid’ (Gartrell 2019). Reviewing should generate recommendations and suggestions for how the organisation can perform better in future or what to maintain. The next stage connects back to strategic planning and management: creating a plan to act on recommendations from reviewing and implementing them. After all, the big question particularly with regard to large-scale and public reviews is whether reviews lead to any action and changes in behaviour. For example, Australia’s Coalition Government (1996–2007) did not respond to recommendations made by the Parliament of Australia’s Senate’s special inquiry into ministerial staff following the ‘children overboard’ issue (Maley 2010). Similarly, both the Labour and Liberal Parties in Australia’s review of candidate selections after the 2010 federal election recommended a standardisation in preselection processes so that there would be a common set of practices across the states, but interviews with Party officials suggested a lack of support for

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this, with the view that state branches should be free to use preselection processes that reflect both their traditional and contemporary needs and context (Cross and Gauja 2014). Some of the tools suggested in business management literature to increase the potential success of changes include to operationalise and implement changes post-reviews through leadership support, clear goals, and supporting changes in staff and volunteer behaviour. Leaders such as political appointees and party leaders need to talk about and convey new priorities and goals in light of reviews, create goals and measurements for individual performance to encourage new behaviour in line with post-review changes and support staff to change to meet new standards and role descriptions following reviews, including offering new training to help them meet the new standards. Performance management of individuals can also be used to support staff to change to meet new standards implemented following reviews, identifying new training needed to help staff meet the new standards. It could also involve creating goals and measurements of individual performance to reflect post-review changes to encourage new behaviour to meet the new organisational plan. Kim (2009, 14) argues that political appointees need a performance management system, to help them with their ‘self-discovery, professional development, performance improvement.’ At the very least, political appointees need to meet to review goals/ priorities for the year ahead, especially given political priorities may change in response to formal reviews or political losses such as failure to get a policy through. This could ensure that the executive’s priorities for the year ahead are discussed, and made to align with the organisation’s priorities, and then ‘periodic reviews of the agreements and the appointees’ performance’ against agreed goals are held. Setting goals and performance indicators of meeting them would give political appointees a clearer sense of objectives and strategic priorities and thus create more satisfaction when they meet them. The US National Performance Review in 1993 recommended that the president develop performance agreements with the top 24 agency heads, but again this was not fully implemented. For reviews to matter, organisations need to create specific plans and strategies for change in light of them – which takes us back to political planning.

Summary and a theory of political reviewing Political reviewing is about making sure that an organisation is making progress towards its original goals, addressing any weaknesses, identifying strengths and improving behaviour. Without reviews, political organisations can stagnate, become insular and decline. Parties and governments devote a lot of resources to reviewing, whether it is ongoing reflection and self-monitoring, part of a system of accountability or in response to single incidents, issues, events or points in time such as election wins and losses. But for reviewing to make a difference, it needs to lead to action. Reviews should produce recommendations for future action that are then operationalised at all levels of the organisation, including individual employees, if they are to produce actual change and improvement in overall organisational performance. Table 6.4 presents a theory of political reviewing. Chapter 7 brings together all of the ideas from the core chapters and presents an overall model of political management alongside suggestions for future research and ethical issues.

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TABLE 6.4 A theory of political reviewing

POLITICAL REVIEWING 1: REVIEW ORGANISATIONAL PROGRESS Continually reflect on organisational progress or achievement of goals Conduct formal and regular reviews, e.g. government department annual reports and engage in ongoing reflection on overall organisational progress made towards achieving strategic goals POLITICAL REVIEWING 2: ENCOURAGE INDIVIDUAL SELF-REFLECTION AND ADHERENCE TO NORMS Individuals engage in self-reflection and regulation Encourage individuals to engage in self-reflection and regulation in response to norms, conventions, external pressures and the potential for formal accountability, oversight and pressures from stakeholders such as external institutions and the media POLITICAL REVIEWING 3: CONDUCT OR RESPOND TO FORMAL ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMS Comply with formal accountability measures Comply with formal accountability mechanisms including legal accountability, external oversight, monitoring and audits, ethics, codes of conduct, judicial inquiries and parliamentary committees POLITICAL REVIEWING 4: REVIEW A SPECIFIC AREA Undertake a focused review Conduct reviews after a key event (e.g. election loss/win), crisis (e.g. scandal) or into an area that comes high onto the agenda due to the media, or just to explore opportunities for development POLITICAL REVIEWING 5: PLAN AND IMPLEMENT POST-REVIEW IMPROVEMENTS Create and implement a plan to improve organisational performance in light of reviews Operationalise and implement changes to improve organisational performance post-review

References Primary sources Practitioner interviews Erickson, P (2019) National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at Labor headquarters, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Gartrell, T (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Greiner, N (2019) Australian Liberal Party Federal President, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 29 October. Stefanic, R (2019) Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at Parliament House Canberra, Australia. 25 October.

Party documents Australian Labor Party (2014) 2013 Election Campaign Review. Australia. Report retrieved from https:// d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/australianlaborparty/pages/2378/attachments/original/ 1403229510/2013_Campaign_Review_FINAL.pdf.

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Canadian NDP Party (2016) Campaign 2015 Review. Report retrieved from http://xfer.ndp.ca/2016/ -Debrief-Report/Campaign2015Review-Report-EN-Final.pdf. New Zealand Labour Party (2015) ‘NZLP Review 2014/5: Recommendations and actions.’ Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/doc/267495328/Labour-Review-2015. UK Conservative Party (2016) Conservative Party Review 2016. London, UK: Conservative Party. Report retrieved from http://www.conservativehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Conserva tive-Party-Review-Report-1.pdf. US Republican Party (2013) Growth & Opportunity Project. USA: Republican National Committee. Report retrieved from https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/RNCreport03182013.pdf. Victorian Labor Party (2016) 2014 Victorian State Election Review. VIC, Australia. Report retrieved from https://www.viclabor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Review.pdf.

Practitioner comments Plouffe, D (2010) ‘Keynote speech at the IMD Orchestrating Winning Performance program.’ Quoted in ‘Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe explains the details of a winning organizational culture in OWP keynote.’ 23 June. Article retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/imdbschool/posts/ obama-campaign-manager-david-plouffe-explains-the-details-of-a-winning-organizat/ 132118956813446/.

Secondary sources Academic literature Aucoin, P (2010) ‘Canada.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 64–93. Brenton, S (2014) ‘Ministerial accountability for departmental actions across Westminster parliamentary democracies.’ Australian Journal of Public Administration 73(4): 467–481. Cross, W and A Gauja (2014) ‘Designing candidate selection methods: Exploring diversity in Australian political parties.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 49(1): 22–39. Fawcett, P and G Oonagh (2010) ‘The United Kingdom.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 24–63. Grube, D (2014) ‘Administrative learning or political blaming? Public servants, parliamentary committees and the drama of public accountability.’ Australian Journal of Political Science 49(2): 221–236. Kim, P S (2009) ‘A case for performance management for political appointees.’ Public Personnel Management 38(4): 1–18. Kumar, M J (2001) ‘The Office of Communications.’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 31(4): 609–634. Maley, M (2010) ‘Australia.’ In C Eichbaum and R Shaw (eds) Partisan appointees and public servants: an international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 94–113. Moore, M H (1995) Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Romzek, B S (2000) ‘Accountability of Congressional Staff.’ Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 10(2): 413–446. Weinberg, A (2015) ‘A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of Changes in the Job and the Expenses Scandal on UK National Politicians’ Experiences of Work, Stress and the Home–Work Interface.’ Parliamentary Affairs 68(2): 248–271.

7 CONCLUSION A model of the four Ds of political management

The scope and importance of political management in government, parties and campaigns Political management is about how to cultivate and wield influence in a complex system of competing interests utilising leadership, organisational structures, strategic planning, political HR and reviewing. While it is all about how to get things done, it isn’t just about exercising formal authority because it involves both the unseen and the obvious. It is much more of a dance than a march, and reflecting and adapting, being artful and tactful when utilising complex and archaic rules, building positive norms and cultures and finding lesser known sources of power to influence others. It is about working with people and resources, but also rules, processes, institutional arrangements and policies, informally as well as formally. Whether the immediate goal is to recruit more members, get appointed, win selection as a candidate, win an election, get into government, run a department more effectively or, ultimately, change policy and thus the world, it is not enough to just have a good candidate, party, government or policy. It isn’t even enough to hold the key to the highest political office and have the most formal power. Just getting selected as a candidate, winning the primaries and a presidential election is not enough to get what you want to happen even if you run the White House, as Obama’s battles to get health care through the legislature, taken up by the states and then the people demonstrated. Each political entity competes with each other for influence, and the ability to get the right people on the team, persuade others, utilise long-established rules and adapt different leadership approaches to suit the circumstances has significant impact on the ability of political practitioners to control the outcome. No one person gets to control what happens in an organisation; instructing, delegating, encouraging, motivating, insisting, influencing, collaborating as well as commanding are all part of the 21st-century political management toolbox. This book synthesised literature from multiple subfields through a management lens and illustrations from practitioners and political documents to provide the first conceptual architecture for what political management involves. Political management offers practitioners in campaign teams, parties, government departments and political offices ideas, approaches, styles and tools to help them work with the resources they have available to them to achieve

208 Conclusion

their goals. It involves setting organisational missions and goals, creating well thought out plans, reflecting on progress, identifying the need for change, designing effective organisational structures, using effective HR to recruit the best staff and volunteers, as well as adaptive leadership approaches to get the best out of people to help achieve goals, see Table 7.1. Political planning is about creating or understanding the organisation’s mission statement – that is its overall purpose, including values and goals – and setting the short-term vision to fulfil it. It involves setting organisational goals that help direct efforts on key priorities to accomplish the vision, as well as strategies to achieve those goals at top levels and throughout the organisation, which then need implementing using specific actions, relationship building and effective communication to mobilise supportive power and resources. Political organising is about creating and utilising power, authority and control prudently, and organising and connecting people, their tasks and interactions into the most suitable linear or lateral organisational design. It also includes identifying the need for development and supporting effective internal communication as well as change. Political HR is about defining roles, recruiting volunteers, candidates, political staffers and ministers who can fulfil the competencies and political loyalties they require, orientating them into their new roles. It also includes training, developing and motivating them to perform at a high level

TABLE 7.1 The five areas of political management

Political planning

Political organising

Political HR

Political leadership

Political reviewing

                          

Understand the mission Set the vision Set organisational goals Create organisational strategy Develop strategic organisational plans Construct lower level plans Implement plans Create and utilise power Organise and connect people Identify need for improvement and development Enact and manage improvements Communicate internally Identify staffing needs Recruit appropriately Train and develop Learn how people work Motivate Encourage excellence Develop skills Be authoritative Be transformational Persuade Collaborate Delegate Adapt Review organisational progress Encourage individual self-reflection and adherence to norms  Conduct/respond to accountability mechanisms  Review a specific area  Plan/implement post-review improvements

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to help achieve organisational goals. Political leadership involves developing effective leadership skills and adopting a range of approaches, including being authoritative and using formal powers to exert influence, being transformational, persuasive, collaborative, delegatory or adaptive to get others on board with you. Lastly, political reviewing is about reflecting on the organisational progress, being self-reflective, accountable, undertaking focused reviews, but most of all taking action to improve organisational performance in light of reviews. Those theories provide insight into each functional area of political management. But what does political management look like for the practitioner having to work across all those areas? The rest of this chapter presents an overall model of the four Ds of political management: deliberating, designing, doing and dancing, illustrated by the perspectives from interviews with practitioners involved in managing politics. It then discusses a future research agenda for political management, presents potential methodology for researching political management, notes ethical questions to explore, before re-iterating why we need to research and teach political management.

What political management involves: the four Ds of political management There are four key aspects to political management: deliberating, designing, doing and dancing, as portrayed in Figure 7.1. Deliberating is about getting information and reflecting on it, Designing is about planning what to do, Doing is about implementing strategies and managing the people involved, and Dancing involves using tactical, artful and adaptive power sources and leadership approaches that are not always formal or official.

¥ Collecting data, learning, reflecting and reviewing

¥ Planning and strategizing

DELIBERATING

DESIGNING

DANCING

DOING

¥ Using tactics, being artful and adaptive

FIGURE 7.1

¥ Implementing plans and managing people

The four Ds of political management

Deliberating Deliberating, at heart, is about thinking – an underdone activity in the high speed game of politics and government, but no less essential, see Table 7.2.

210 Conclusion

TABLE 7.2 Deliberating in political management

Deliberating: collecting data, learning, reflecting, reviewing Understand the mission Set the vision Review and identify the need for development Encourage individual self-reflection and adherence to norms Conduct or respond to formal accountability mechanisms Identify staffing needs and roles Learn how people work

Create or understand the organisation’s mission statement, explaining its overall purpose, including values and goals Create or update a vision statement with specific short-term plans and actions to fulfil the mission Review organisational progress and identify the need for changes to the organisation and its culture Encourage individuals to engage in self-reflection/regulation in response to norms, conventions, external pressures and potential accountability mechanisms Conduct or respond to accountability mechanisms Research and analyse staffing needs and jobs to create accurate job descriptions and selection criteria Understand individual motivations and effective work teams and groups

Deliberating involves creating or understanding the organisation’s mission statement, and from this setting the vision for short-term plans and actions to fulfil the mission. It also includes environmental scanning and foresight to identify organisational circumstances, researching and analysing staffing needs and jobs to create accurate job descriptions and selection criteria, and identifying the need for improvement and development. Deliberating is also about learning how people work both individually and in groups and what motivates them. Reviewing and reflecting on past and current practice, a specific area or crisis issue, as well as being or holding others accountable is also important. Deliberating should be completed before designing, doing and dancing.

Understand the mission Political practitioners need to create or understand the organisational mission, an overall statement about long-term and broad-ranging purpose to help staff and volunteers connect to the organisation. Mission statements often discuss values such as equality, social justness and integrity, and also goals such as creating prosperity, raising living statements and protecting people. High level political practitioners such as presidents/prime ministers, party leaders, candidates, campaign managers and heads of government departments set the overall purpose. Permanent organisations such as political parties have more enduring, historical and sometimes constitutional mission statements which are rarely changed, but each new government, campaign or event should set a new mission statement, while new party leaders or presidents may state their own interpretation of their party’s mission.

Set the vision Top figures in the organisation should create or update vision statements that express what they want to achieve in the short-term to fulfil the mission, and how, and communicate this

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in speeches, documents, announcements and reports such as state of the nation speeches, speeches at the opening of Parliament, politicians’ speeches, party manifestos, candidate campaign announcements and government reports. Existing vision statements may be updated for shorter time periods or smaller components of the project, such as communicating a new party vision for an election campaign and in relation to election policy promises or for a new government department under a new presidential administration or appointee.

Review and identify the need for development Deliberating includes being proactive at recognising and identifying the need for improvement and development through environmental scanning, reviewing organisational progress and specific events or areas. Resources should be put into assessing the current state of the organisation and culture, including existing internal traditions, norms and behaviours, progress towards achieving the mission and vision, as well as identifying, anticipating and considering current and future behaviour in the organisation and its environment. Factors to consider include poor polling/public support, changes in voting behaviour and electoral losses, changes in electoral rules and electoral systems, declining membership or participation levels, donations, a change in government, campaign ideas from overseas, policy ideas, internal discontent and disunity and workplace stress, harassment and high staff turnover in political offices, economic conditions, foreign intelligence, competitors, collaborators (including with other parts of an organisation such as central party HR working with local/ state party organisations) and systems and rules such as a change in the election system. The most commonly known forms of political reviewing are after key events or a crisis. For example, parties conduct reviews after election losses or wins, in light of scandals or controversial decisions, or into an ongoing area of concern such as the working conditions for MPs and the role of political advisors. Focused reviews can also be conducted to explore opportunities for development such as in light of changing technology. Post-election reviews are ‘really important’ (Erickson 2019); the Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese noted that ‘everything in politics can be subjective’ so a review by ‘people who are no longer in the system but understand it … creates a communal understanding of what went wrong and how to avoid it next time. Otherwise, you’ve got a whole bunch of different, usually self-interested opinions’ (Gartrell 2019). Reviewing is also identifying what to do better, not just what went wrong. One key illustration of this is that parties conduct post-election reviews even after winning, not just when they lose. As the Australian Liberal Party Federal President commented, even though they won the 2019 election ‘we very much needed to do a review. In any circumstance, Australians hate hubris and arrogance on the part of their politicians … assuming that we were perfect and we didn’t need a review would not help. It sends an entirely wrong message to everybody from the Prime Minister to most humble voter or university students’ (Greiner 2019). Political managers also need to engage in ongoing reflection, including formal and regular reviews such as annual reports, but also considering how well the organisation is doing in terms of working towards achieving strategic goals in the future. The Australian Labor Party secretary argued ‘we should always be reviewing’ and going through a ‘cycle of reflection and evaluation and improvement and execution and then you start again’ that is about ‘embedding those cycles and those processes into the day to day work’ (Erickson 2019).

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Encourage individual self-reflection and adherence to norms Organisations should encourage individuals to engage in self-reflection on their progress in response to norms, conventions, external pressures and the potential for formal accountability, oversight and pressures from stakeholders such as external institutions and the media. Party staff should try to set the tone and expectations of behaviour between staff, ‘you have cultural rules as well. We had a planning day with a facilitator where we agreed on a bunch of cultural rules: confidentiality, dealing with conflict, supporting each other, all that sort of stuff’ (Gartrell 2019). Politicians and party leaders need to be able justify decisions and actions to other actors and institutions, including the prime minister, cabinet, their party and Parliament. There are often multiple processes that proposals go through: as the Australian Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff explained: ‘we obviously run a formal cabinet process, we have our formal expenditure review process which lead into budgetary settings and we might have more hands-on process with cabinet committees looking in-depth at issues not necessarily from a decisionmaking point of view but just to examine them … ultimately moving to some sort of formal process and budgeting.’ (Kunkel 2019) Additionally, in the organisations that run parliaments, staff have to be aware of actions may be perceived due to the need to uphold impartiality in relation to the politicians elected from different parties. The Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services commented how they have to be thinking how something looks to lots of different people, ‘I would picture it looking at a globe. You are holding it up and peering around it because there will be all sorts of different takes on an issue’ and thus ‘being cautious and reflective are key’ (Stefanic 2019). The Secretary therefore tries to encourage individual staff to reflect as well, ‘I say that to people – whether you are a gardener or a policy advisor – everything you do is monitored and you are representative of parliamentary democracy in this country, everybody is connected to the institution.’

Conduct or respond to formal accountability mechanisms Political practitioners need to comply with formal accountability mechanisms, including legal accountability, external oversight, monitoring and audits, ethics, codes of conduct, judicial inquiries and parliamentary committees. Reviews can lead to changes such as in the codes of conduct or job descriptions of political staffers. Ministers and civil servants are called to answer to hearings or committees in parliament. Parliamentary services is also scrutinised, ‘whatever we do has that critical visibility’ and there are also ‘conventional accountability mechanisms, estimates committees, Department of Finance, reporting to the auditor general, internal and external audits, so we’ve got literally thousands of sets of eyes on everything we do in terms of accountability’ (Stefanic 2019). Thus: ‘review and reflection is critical. You have to be able to get on the front foot, if you stuffed up and simply acknowledge there was a human error, or you know we need to review our procedures or policies, and this is what we doing to avoid it next time. Usually that provides understanding that you are acting in good faith in terms of what is one of the chief values for the Commonwealth but also providing that public value.’ (Stefanic 2019)

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Identify staffing needs and roles Future staffing requirements should be systematically researched, understood, and predicted, collecting and curating data such as the organisation’s HR inventory on employees’ capabilities and training, and external and internal sources for staffing. A job analysis should also be conducted to create and update job descriptions with accurate selection criteria outlining the basic qualifications and competencies necessary for the position. Common skills in politics include internal and external communication skills, information sharing, gate keeping, advising, coordination, intellectual skills, relating to people/relationship building, people management, representing and advocating, leading and motivating, strategic thinking, policy expertise, policy management, decision making, adaptability and resilience. In politics, the requirements of jobs also include partisanship, political conviction and political loyalty both for selection of candidates by a party and staff working for an elected politician or leader. The roles of MPs, ministers and chiefs of staff often lack descriptions and definition, but they are still needed – not just for recruitment, but also to ensure there is role clarity for when people take up the jobs. The Chief of Staff who set up the office for Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese argues for making roles clear in writing: ‘I’m a great believer that in strategy, planning and organizational stuff you have to actually write stuff down and it has to exist in documents, and then everyone’s signed up to it. So, the leader agrees with it, and then as chief staff you can consult a bit on the shape of thing, and then that’s what’s agreed. So, someone who’s worked in the media unit can’t just wander over and say “I’m going to work in the policy unit today.” They’ve got a role to do; they have got a job to do.’ (Gartrell 2019) It means resources are used more effectively, it helps to align the work staff do with overall organisational mission and vision; as a party secretary noted, ‘having position descriptions for staff that mean you are aligning what you say are your stated objectives for the office with the way you have organised your human resources in the office’ (Erickson 2019). In practice, ‘that doesn’t happen everywhere … having seen what party offices have looked like where this hasn’t been in place, I think it is really important.’ However, planning staffing needs and role design is not always possible in politics – Chief of Staff to Scott Morrison who became Party Leader and thus Australian Prime Minister unexpectedly noted how ‘in our case, obviously we went within a matter of 3 days from being the treasury’s office to being the prime minister’s office without much forethought and planning’ (Kunkel 2019). Moreover, there can be variance in office design and expectations of advisors, as these practitioner comments suggest:  

‘There is no necessarily defined processes about how an effective executive office can operate. Each MP has their own way of managing their office, some really well, some not so well’ (Stefanic 2019). ‘Different ministers have different demands and perceptions of what advisors should be doing. It’s really hard to come up with a uniform description of what an advisor would do in any one office’ (Munro 2019).

Nevertheless, engaging in some forethought as to what you want staff to do will help get the right people on board and improve their effectiveness once there.

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Learn how people work Political managers need to understand what motivates politicians, staff, volunteers and donors, including values, aspirations, incentives, working conditions, the nature of individual roles (resources, demands) and salaries/financial benefits. Political practitioners and volunteers often value working towards the common good, helping others, discussing and improving policy, being involved. Politicians respond to incentives such as committee allocations, office space, potential appointment as a minister, belonging to a team, as well as policy motivations. Political managers also need to understand how people work together effectively as this influences organisational effectiveness, including informal and formal group formation, culture, norms, resources and how groups develop over time. It is important when running a campaign to foster an effective culture: ‘You want to get the culture right for a campaign. By that I mean respect, don’t chat up your fellow staff members even when you’ve had a few drinks, the extent to which drinking is allowed, encouraged, discouraged. You really want to get to that place where people aren’t unduly competitive or petty or all those negative character traits that you want to avoid.’ (Nash 2019) In government, one key aspect of this is the relationship between non-political and political practitioners, i.e. civil servants, political staff and ministers. There can be tension between them, but informal relationships between political staff working for different ministers significantly aids horizontal communication, and with political and civil servants bridges the gap between policy making and political realities. Political staffers need to forge positive relationships with the civil service as this will help the politicians they work for and the civil servants: ‘when I had a really great relationship with the bureaucracy that helped my minister but also helped the public service in terms of providing context. They knew what they was serving up was actually going to be appreciated and considered and read’ (Campbell 2019). Relationships also matter in more central supporting organisational units: an Assistant Secretary in the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) explained that ‘if the PM says “I want a brief by lunchtime on this” and that’s not something we know much about, we need to know who to go to and have a good enough relationship so that they will give us that information in time for question time or whatever it is’ (Lloyd 2019). Similarly, relationships within parliamentary services are ‘extremely’ important – ‘it makes a massive difference, essentially from where I see it’ with the current secretary of parliamentary services noting he worked to establish more positive relationships with politicians and the Speaker/President, ‘connecting with as many senators as I could at a personal level’ to be able to address any concerns more quickly before it gets to an external audit (Stefanic 2019). A former political staffer in the Australian PMO who became Assistant Secretary in the PM&C argued that understanding is also important, ‘one of the things I really really encourage is for APS staff, to whether it is an advisor role whether it’s in departmental liaison role is to actually spend some time on the hill because they get a bit of an understanding of kind of how the hill works.’ This is ‘because that’s where decisions are made’ and ‘an understanding of how the processes work up there both in theory and in practice – in fact probably more importantly in practice – is so important’ (Campbell 2019).

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It is also important to foster unity within political organisations: the Australian Liberal Party President argued that ‘political management as you’ve broadly defined it is really a platform, it’s “sine qua non” – necessary or indispensable – in our system … .unity as it’s facing the public is in our system a precondition for success’ (Greiner 2019). Processes, rules, key decision makers and also culture can have more impact on group effectiveness and cohesiveness than disciplinary methods. Norms in the UK House of Lords help maintain party unity and cohesiveness, key decision makers such as a chief of staff need to be in place early in new governments to help with office structures and appointments of other staff, and outside tsars may be brought into governments to help stimulate action in cross-departmental policy areas.

Designing Designing is about planning what to do, using information and understanding from deliberating to create strategic goals and plans, see Table 7.3. Designing includes setting action-oriented and achievable organisational goals that help direct efforts on key priorities to accomplish the vision, creating a strategy to meet those goals at top level and throughout the organisation through organisational wide and lower levels plans. They need to recruit and select staff and volunteers who meet the competencies and political loyalties the jobs require, organise them, their tasks and interactions into the most suitable linear or lateral organisational design. They also need to plan changes in response to reviews.

Set organisational goals The first step in designing is to set overall organisational goals that will focus direction on key priorities and help accomplish the vision. In campaigns, the overall goal is normally clear – to win, ‘During a campaign, it’s clear where a destination is. You want to win. Whether you want to win a local seat, or a national election, it’s clear where the destination is. The TABLE 7.3 Designing in political management

Designing: planning and strategizing Set organisational goals Create organisational strategy Develop strategic organisational plans Construct lower level plans Recruit appropriately Organise and connect people Plan post-review improvements

Set action-oriented and achievable organisational goals that help direct efforts on key priorities to accomplish the vision Create an overall organisational strategy to achieve those goals, determined by current and prospective circumstances Develop overall strategic organisational plans to achieve the strategy Design lower-level and individual strategic plans to match overall plans Recruit and select staff and volunteers who meet the competencies and political loyalties the jobs require Organise people, their tasks and interactions into the most suitable linear or lateral organisational design Create a plan to improve organisational performance

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destination is set from the very beginning. And everyone clusters around making sure that happens. And I think that’s a big difference’ (Campbell 2019). Clear goals help to motivate everyone involved in the organisation. In parties, goal setting can simply be about setting the agenda for the work to be done – ‘the key decision that determines what priorities you identify and genuinely tackle, as opposed to just pay lip service to, is the agenda setting piece. Someone sets the agenda that then determines what you end up working on’ (Erickson 2019). They may also focus on targets for campaign donations, seek to maintain public support, improve awareness of an issue such as climate change or security threats, or get legislation through Parliament to ensure policy promises are delivered. The advisor who worked for New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw on the Zero Carbon Bill explained how their goal was to get legislation through quickly, but in a form that would last through any future changes of government: ‘We wanted to get the Bill through within the short time frame available to us which meant moving it thorough select committee as quickly as possible, but not too quickly given it was a piece of legislation about which a lot of people wanted to have their say. There was a little bit of leeway there around timing, but generally we had to do it in quite a short period of time to get it through before the end of this year [2019]. So, the key piece of work for me was working out the timing of all the steps we needed to take in order to achieve the deadline. Success for us was really just coming out with a bill that would stand as a sound framework for future policy. We really saw this as opening a door, creating awareness and creating something that’s enduring.’ (Baker-Jones 2019) Public or internal speeches by candidates or campaign manager speeches often set goals, as well as formal directives through government memos and reports, but the process may also be collaborative. As the Australian Labor Party secretary reflected: ‘In my experience the agenda in the Labor Party is constantly being mediated through a mix of leadership and very complex stakeholder politics. On the organisational side, we have 8 different state branches which have all the organisational authority and responsibility for things like membership and affiliation, and who have the vast bulk of the party’s assets and revenue. We have got the trade union movement, which has a formal affiliation relationship and then there are big institutions like the ACTU and the national unions which are big players and they have big voice. And you’ve got this little office here with a dozen people that just reports to a couple of standing committees of the National Executive. And then you have the Parliamentary Leader, who is responsible for setting their own agenda and mediating all the politics and all the different views that abound about the topics on that agenda. This is the key thing that you need to understand in order to do the job. We have a pretty clear delineation of responsibilities. On organisational matters, it is the NEC that sets the agenda. The Secretary and the President are very influential and do most of the work, but we are not the only source of authority – it’s ultimately the Committee that makes the call. Then on anything public facing, the Leader sets the agenda.’ (Erickson 2019)

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Ideally, goals should be challenging yet achievable, measurable and results-oriented, with completion dates such as securing a certain number of campaign donations. They should be set at and across different organisational levels and for different time periods, projects and events, including campaigns and government departments, temporary groups such as working parties and presidential transitions, events such as campaign convention, and non-units such as policies and programmes, for individuals, and also across different units. However, apart from the case of campaigns to win elections, goals are often not made that clear in politics. Moreover, multiple goals may conflict with each other – such as getting a policy through Parliament while maintaining public support and coalition unity – and thus need prioritising. To be more directive, political managers should use specific, prioritised goals. Politicians need to ensure civil servants understand what direction they want to go in. A Chief of Staff to the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern argued that ministers sometimes have to tell civil servants if a cabinet paper is ‘not reflecting accurately or faithfully exactly what a policy was designed to do … there is push-back when a paper doesn’t quite capture what the government is going to do. It might not be nuanced enough in terms of reflecting policy’ (Munro 2019). After the 2019 Australian election ‘processes’ and ‘mechanisms’ were used to debate government priorities, with the Cabinet Secretary working to link civil servants in the PM&C with the PMO to help ‘make sure the right things are on the agenda’ and within the PM&C there are ‘various units … their job is to essentially track those priorities, and again they are conveyed either from the Prime Minister’s office or the Cabinet secretary’s office’ (Lloyd 2019). To allow more flexibility, goals need to be ambiguous so there is freedom in how to interpret and implement them, while still aligning goals across all organisational levels, such as from a presidential transition campaign through to all federal agencies, which can aid implementation. When working in government communications, planning needs to be more flexible, but setting overarching overall goals can still be effective: as one staffer recalls, ‘I found – and it took me a while to get to this place – but particularly I found this when I was working at the Treasurer’s office – was it wasn’t so much the planning about what you’re doing each month, it was the planning of the destination, the question “what are we trying to do here?” And that was really useful’ (Campbell 2019). Political managers then need to build motivation and gather resources to support achievement of goals.

Create organisational strategy Political managers need to set aside the time and resources to create an overall organisational strategy to achieve the set goals. The boldness of the strategy will depend on current and prospective circumstances informed by insights gathered during the deliberating stage – whether to achieve small to high levels of change, including maintaining the status quo if it remains effective, or setting bold new directions where needed. For example, UK Labour Party leader Tony Blair set a new transformative direction for his Party to become ‘New’ Labour after it lost four successive elections. The strategy needs to create more benefits than it costs, both politically (e.g. impact on public support, internal legislature support, party membership, party unity) as well as financially. Strategies are often built collaboratively. The Australian Labor leader’s Chief of Staff argued that strategic thinking and planning in parties and campaigns are ‘absolutely’ really important but come from group discussion, ‘the best strategy comes from a good bunch of people with

218 Conclusion

different skills, different roles, different perspectives, working collaboratively on strategy’ (Gartrell 2019). Strategies for party offices also need to involve staff because that then means: ‘we know what we are expected to do, we get a shared understanding of what we think the organization’s challenges are, whether it is getting ourselves onto a more sustainable footing in terms of finance and whether it is dealing with sort of those governance challenges or whether its thinking about the politics of the next 18 months, internally and externally.’ (Erickson 2019) Political managers need to build in flexibility to allow the organisation to take advantage of opportunities, including operating tactically in terms of getting the best timing on policy and other issues and taking action to avoid a crisis. Creating a strategic plan to get key policies through parliament is also crucial: advisors working on the Zero Carbon Bill in New Zealand ‘started to anticipate hurdles or issues and ‘began quite extensive planning’ which included ‘sitting in a room with a whiteboard and working through various strategies, and trying to develop the plan to meet those strategies’ as well as using a ‘brainstorming exercise’ (BakerJones 2019). Conflicting goals and strategies from different parts of the organisation may need resolving such as presidential goals versus those of departmental agencies. Opposition parties need different strategies to get the most out of the tools available to them in Parliament. The Australia Labor Party Manager of Opposition Business noted that: ‘There is always a three-way intention with question time: what works best in the house itself, what works best on the evening news, and what’s the best in terms of long-term investment. They are not only different but often completely conflicting. The long-term strategy will mean you make an investment in some issues that will not run on the evening news at all, but you will always be glad that you’ve done it. An example of a day like that was there was a day about five or six weeks ago where every question we asked was about the government having made statements that were not true. You make an investment in a long-term argument that you can’t trust what this government says. So, we had quote after quote … It was never going to be a particularly big issue in the news at night, but it’s a long-term investment in how you describe the government.’ (Burke 2019)

Develop strategic organisational plans Political managers need to develop organisational plans to implement the overall strategy. This is ‘really important because otherwise you just get swept along’ (Gartrell 2019). This is important for governments but not always done well if parties find themselves in power unexpectedly or having to work in coalition with other parties. The Labour-led Government in New Zealand elected in 2017 under Jacinda Ardern created cobbled together and late plans. A 100-day plan ‘where the government came up a whole list of things that it wanted to do by the end of January the next year and then achieve that’ was ‘cobbled together’ from documents prepared in coalition talks between Labour and New Zealand First, and Labour and the Green Party (Munro 2019). A longer plan for the full three years ‘to make sure we [we]re all heading with our priorities during the three-year term’ was not produced until September 2018, a year after the election because of the way the Government was formed – ‘in a perfect world, that

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plan would been prepared immediately in these first few months. When the three parties that came together to form the government. But it took a look a lot longer, and a lot more negotiation, and unfortunately, it wasn’t until September the next year that we finally rolled it out’ (Munro 2019). Creating strategic plans is also important for parties in opposition because they can be tempted to fall into just being reactive, ‘there are generally a broad series of planning documents that we work to but because we’re in the opposition, we try and be proactive but we are responding a lot’ so without plans ‘you just drift along. That’s very dangerous for an opposition … Governments have generally has got four or five times the resources you’ve got and they are also “The Government;” they can make announcements, and you can just end up with them dictating the agenda completely’ (Gartrell 2019). Strategic planning includes plans at different levels of the organisation:  



Broader overall strategic plans such as for a political office: ‘having nice strategic plans on a page is worth doing and we have certainly done a degree of formal and informal planning in terms of the PM’s office’ (Kunkel 2019). More detailed and tactical middle level plans such as the tactical allocation of resources within different states as part of a presidential campaign electoral college strategy or how to manage the select committee process involved in getting a Bill through Parliament: ‘it was understanding how best to use those processes. We were congratulated by the select committee on how well we had prepared them and the advance work that we did, so they hit the ground running’ (Baker-Jones 2019). Lower or ground level operational plans such as how and where to allocate resources including volunteers, money, advertisements in campaigns and plans for party offices: ‘setting clear objectives and being clear about what you are going to do, organising the office and being really clear through unit planning, unit budgets’ (Erickson 2019).

There are different types of plans. Standing plans cover repeated activities or situations, including: (a) policies which set out expected behaviours such as codes of conduct for ministers, political advisors and party members and rely on self-regulation and personal responsibility; (b) rules which specify required action, covering parliamentary debates, the election of party leaders, boards and candidates, campaign finance rules, recruitment and termination of employees, receiving gifts, party membership, committee structure, party convention/conference debating and speaking rules; and (c) procedures that outline how to respond to problems such as disputes or a crisis such as breach of rules or an ethical issue. Rules are particularly important when managing Parliament, because as the Secretary for the Australian Parliamentary Services explained: ‘if you didn’t have those rules in place … chaos could very quickly reign, partly because we are talking about major parties, each is trying to best each other. They will use whatever tactics available to achieve a particular purpose … There are standing orders that exist for the life of a parliament which all parliamentarians vote on and agree to so it’s a codified procedural behaviour in addition to the precedent that’s been recorded which provide guidance. They provide the backbone to debate and a structure to how legislative programmes are managed.’ (Stefanic 2019)

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Additionally, action and operating plans define strategies and goals for the short term or one legislative/government term, including coalition formation and management, a communications plan for a department or the White House/PMO, including rollout and weekly calendars for press releases, speeches, events, travel and interviews and party training programs. The Australian PMO under Malcolm Turnbull adopted a model from the UK for their communication: ‘we took the model of what David Cameron used, which is what Gordon Brown used, which is what Tony Blair used, which was off the grid. We found that was really useful – that you have the overarching message, then you have what was happening in the government and MP – land then you have what could kind of derail it – economic reports and opinion polls etc. We found that was quite useful.’ (Campbell 2019) Single use plans are for a one-off project or event such as a candidate’s campaign, a presidential transition, including a staffing plan, a working party, a campaign launch or convention, guides for voters for a specific election in a particular city and mega events such as the Olympic Games. In management terms, campaigns need a plan for who will clear and coordinate communication. The Chief of Staff for the Federal Australian Labor 2019 campaign headquarters reflected on their plan: ‘We had something which was called the Rolling Forward programming which basically is a coordination mechanism. So people from various teams come together and we run through the 3 days ahead to make sure everyone knows what is being announced, who is announcing it, what materials are required, identifying what shadows are out and about, identifying potential cross-message cutting or other risks, identifying problems that may be arising for whatever reason. But as much to make sure that if the leaders’ programme changes at last minute, everyone is aware of how that changes all the different parts of the organization.’ (Nash 2019) Single plans are also needed to get key policies through: the advisor who worked on the Zero Carbon Bill in New Zealand recalled how they completed ‘fairly extensive planning in preparation’ for the select committee phase, including ‘scheduling, mapping out processes, and meeting key people’ (Baker-Jones 2019)

Construct lower level plans Political managers need to involve individuals across the organisation in creating their own plans that align with the overall plans using tools such as priority setting, expectations setting, steering, coordination, targets and incentives. Effective internal communication, social events and retreats can be used to create a supportive and integrated culture and social norms that support connecting activity throughout different units to the overall strategy.

Recruit appropriately Political recruitment involves attracting prospective candidates, staffers, members and volunteers and selecting them appropriately to ensure they have the required competencies but also political loyalties to help maintain control and achieve organisational goals. Often, in practice

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though, parties rely on their political networks to recruit staff for campaigns, parties and political offices. Parties try to ‘get the right talent in at the centre’ (Greiner 2019) for their campaign organisation, picking ‘the people who you want to play leadership roles who are key, and then those leaders then pick people, often just the people they knew’ (Nash 2019). When recruiting political staff, they are sometimes appointed temporarily from outside organisations for a campaign, or positions are advertised for a political office, but generally existing connections are used: 





‘There’s a cadre of people who have had experience within senior roles and the bureaucracy, maybe not senior, but sort of mid-level roles in bureaucracy who are broadly sympathetic to one side of politics or the other whether it’s centre-left or centreright and hopefully you can entice a number of people who have got keen policy interest as well as a political commitment to be part of your team’ (Kunkel 2019). ‘You use your networks, look for people who are in the system and may have worked for an MP … we – myself and the two deputy chiefs of staff – really worked hard on working through our networks trying to find the good people with the right temperament’ (Gartrell 2019). ‘You do rely a lot on referrals … Ministers would often come to me and say, “You might want to think about so-and-so, they might make a good adviser”’ (Munro 2019).

Political skills can be made part of the expected competencies: parties can professionalise candidate selection in parties using processes that test for the skills actually needed to be an MP, and include ideological commitment is part of those skills. Chiefs of Staff to the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers note: 



‘You are looking for people who have got politics in their blood obviously, and who are aligned with your particular party and particular government. You want people who have got some policy background. You want people who have got some communication skills’ (Munro 2019). ‘You obviously need a balance of skills. In terms of the structuring of our office we obviously have a media team, a political strategy team, a programme team, a policy team; I mean they are the main ones. And there’s an operations – a broadly “making trains run on time” – team’ (Kunkel 2019). Governments in particular look for people who have worked in government before: ‘when we were thinking that we might win there were conversations about who you might bring back to be chief of staff in a political office because you knew you wanted experienced people who were willing to come back. So it’s not just people who had done the job in opposition, but you want people who could come into government who had experience being a federal minister’s chief of staff.’ (Nash 2019)

Professional selection can also be applied to volunteers for parties and campaigns or government volunteer programs such as for the US Federal Emergency Management Agency. Organisations also need to create cultures and practices that encourage diverse recruitment and thus organisational effectiveness – the Australian Labor 2019 campaign ran an expressions

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of interest process which identified a small number of different people and improved overall diversity (Nash 2019). Parties and non-profits can create initiatives programmes to support more women becoming political candidates through mentoring, strategic advice and fundraising tools.

Organise and connect people Political managers need to organise individuals within a party, campaign team or government into units, groups or departments in a way that will help an organisation implement its plan, building on the understanding about how people work together effectively developed in the deliberation stage. As one campaign manager said of appointing people to lead teams within the campaign, ‘you need to choose your leaders carefully. I think you need to think about how those leaders interact with each other. So you want the leadership group to be on the whole capable of working together’ (Nash 2019). Political managers can adopt more formal, rigid and differentiated organisation for specific areas such as skills, services, policies, issues, processes, tasks or a section of society to provide clarity and control such as dedicated political staff working on a presidential campaign separate from those working on governing. Or they can use informal integrative, boundaryless and temporary organisation to encourage more collaboration and improve coordination, such as where different party organisations may share information with each other without formal arrangements. There are pros and cons of both formal, hierarchical, differentiated structures and more informal organisational forms, and in part it depends on what best suits the political leader. For example, informal, flat structures in political offices mean that, as one staffer who worked in an Australian Prime Minister’s office recalled, ‘the principle gets the information they need as fast as possible and with a leader like Turnbull that was really useful’ but the problem is there is a lack of filters, checks and balances on the information that does to the leader, and the high speed can encourage a more reactive instead of strategic culture (Campbell 2019). Yet more hierarchical structures preference seniority of the grade of a person to what their actual skills and knowledge are: thus practitioners say ‘I wanted the person who actually knew their stuff in the room and I didn’t care about their rank. I did get grads into the room with Malcolm [Turnbull] to actually brief him on the important aspects of policy because they were the ones that knew it’ (Campbell 2019). Similarly, in parliamentary services the traditionally more hierarchical structure can lead to silos and ineffective internal communication, ‘if you were on a particular level you only spoke to people on that level, the problem is the communication is not happening here, it’s not going to happen over there either’ (Stefanic 2019). Thus some practitioners argue ‘you can’t have a situation where a person in one unit can’t talk to person in another – that’s ridiculous – there are just times where something happens and people work across the units. So that’s what we call it loosely networked’ (Gartrell 2019). Political parties in particular have to balance the need for clearly branded campaigns designed by the centre and the desire to avoid over-centralisation, with the Australian Liberals finding that in the 2016 campaigns ‘there was a lack of management of local-federal collaboration’ and thus a: ‘perception was it had been a heavily top-down centralized campaign, and it had been with too much of “my way or the highway,” too much saying “We cannot put out a pamphlet saying: you know, we are building a bunch of submarines in Adelaide and

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that’s going to create a lot of jobs in a country like Australia.” That that message in Bundaberg in Queensland, or Bunbury in Western Australia is not a very compelling message.’ (Greiner 2019) Organisations can create boundary-spanning units to overcome the downsides of hierarchy, such as where governments have created cross-departmental social exclusion units and drug czars help to promote boundary spanning work. The PM&C aims to cut across silos: as one Assistant Secretary explained: ‘We break down those silos – that is really our value add. I mean why are we here? To bring that whole of government perspective, particularly around the Prime Minister’s or the Government’s priorities. Certainly, there’s examples, where Treasury says “we cannot do X because of this” whereas Foreign Affairs says “Well this is a strategic priority for these reasons” so we need to bring these two things together and work a way through.’ (Lloyd 2019) They also use task forces to work on priority issues which involve staff from different departments. Similarly, parties need to find ways to enable people within different levels of the organisation to interact, especially in countries with federal systems and separate state organisations. On the other hand, differentiation can also be valuable, both in government where different staff with distinct skill sets are needed to work on preparing for re-election campaigns and ongoing governing, and in parties where administration of the organisation needs to be maintained while other staff work on forthcoming campaigns. As the Labor secretary explained: ‘They are very different challenges. Putting together and leading a campaign requires a set of skills around campaign strategy and execution as well as a bit of performative leadership in order to bring together the campaign and execute it. Whereas administration is frankly much drier. It’s about managing budgets and these days meeting contemporary standards and expectations around governance. So they require very different skills … The key challenges that I have to think about are making sure that we have the right team here in the office and the people are very clear about what priorities and expectations are during those two different time periods.’ (Erickson 2019)

Plan post-review improvements To ensure that reviews do not just create ideas and no action, political managers should create a plan for how the organisation can perform better in future to ensure action is taken in light of reviews, such as a government plan to foster innovation, or a plan to improve a party’s electability. Thus as party presidents/secretaries noted, a post-election review ‘creates a platform for going forward and gives you a bit of an agenda and a bit of debate for good future direction’ (Greiner 2019) and ‘the best reviews are the ones that have the final recommendation to report back to some sort of governing body on implementation of findings … so people don’t go “Oh, that was nice, yes, that told us a lot” and then don’t do anything about it’ (Gartrell 2019).

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TABLE 7.4 Doing in political management

Doing: implementing plans, managing people Implement plans

Enact and manage improvements, including post-review Train and develop

Facilitate effective internal communication Be authoritative Be transformational Delegate

Implement strategic management plans using specific actions, relationship building and effective communication to mobilise supportive power and resources Operationalise, promote and support organisational development and innovation, including post-review changes to improve performance Orientate, train and develop politicians, staff and volunteers, and develop leadership skills, competencies and personal characteristics Facilitate effective internal communication throughout the organisation Use own formal powers to exert influence Inspire everyone to follow and work with you to achieve the mission Give power to others

Doing Doing is the most standard part of political management and is about implementation and managing the people involved, see Table 7.4. Doing includes implementing strategic management plans using specific actions, relationship building and effective communication to mobilise supportive power and resources. Organisational development and innovation also needs promotion and careful management, including supporting individual performance in relation to post-review plans. Politicians, staff and volunteers need orientating into their roles, training and development, and leaders need to build effective leadership skills, competencies and personal characteristics. This aspect also involves facilitating effective internal communication throughout the organisation, and choosing how to use leadership powers – whether that be authoritative and using formal powers to exert influence, transformational and inspiring others to follow and work with you, or delegating powers to others.

Implement plans Strategic management plans for campaigns, parties, policy and legislation need to be implemented, using specific actions, relationship building and effective communication to mobilise supportive power and resources. Political managers need to create an implementation plan with specific actions and keep to the key strategy when managing campaigns, parties, policy and legislation. Party staff therefore explain that: ‘you have to have an accountability mechanism which is like a monthly meeting where you actually go to the plans you’ve set down and you check against them how you are travelling and everyone who’s got projects and element under that, needs to report back and give you their progress. Then with the external relationship like with the party headquarters and the state branches, we are all going to set up forums for the others to regularly work on strategy and planning as the campaign starts to come together.’ (Gartrell 2019)

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Implementation also involves working across different organisational units. PMOs work to keep ministerial offices aligned with the plan: ‘The Prime Minister’s office does have to exercise close oversight and keep a close eye on Minsters’ offices. Because some are highly organised and good at keeping their Ministers focused on priorities; keeping them focused on the cabinet papers, the weekly drills and whatever. Others are not so good at it. Others get a bit side tracked by peripheral matters and side tracked by reactive stuff that comes along. So, it is a bit of a mission for the Prime Minister’s office.’ (Munro 2019) Ministerial advisors also need to play a role in keeping ministers on the plan. Day-to-day crises happen often and have to be dealt with, but then advisors need to get their ministers ‘back on track. They need to make sure the Minister is focused unerringly on priorities, making sure they are sticking to the coalition agreements or confidence-and-supply agreements, sticking to the manifesto commitments. Just keeping the Minister on course’ (Munro 2019). Similarly, civil servants in the PM&C also contribute to helping advisors with strategy adherence: as an assistant secretary explained, ‘we can see what is happening in other departments to an extent. We hear from them what’s happening and then advisers see it in another level and they can bring it all together’ (Lloyd 2019). They thus help foresee problems in advance: ‘If you know that a department’s working something up and it’s due to come to Cabinet on a certain day but you hear on the grapevine that it is taking a long time to go through the Minister’s office. That is the sort of thing where the Prime Ministers’ office can go and knock on their door and go come on you need to get this out the door. Or, if they’re preparing a submission is in a very different direction to what is expected. It is their minister’s submission and sometimes they choose to do their own thing but the PMO, if possible, could do an early intervention, rather than have a blowup in the room, or something like that. In terms of implementation, probably even more so, being very clear about where things are at. I know that at senior levels the deputy secretaries are meeting regularly with the Prime Minister and talk weekly with the PMO. And part of that is to focus on the priorities of the PM and where they are up to in terms of implementation.’ (Lloyd 2019) Senior political managers also need to mobilise support through relationship building and communication with key players, using figureheads and accessing internal and external sources of power. Implementation plans may also need to be adapted to the political context and unexpected events such as economic recessions, political scandals, changing political leadership, campaign crises and natural disasters. In government communication, practitioners note that specific plans have to be adapted to current events and thus, while having strategic plans ‘is useful because you can always go – OK I’m not going to be distracted by the opinion poll that after day or the report that’s out today, we’re doing what’s in the grid’, the problem with sticking to pre-laid plans is ‘you might not get a run in the media cycle because you’re not talking about issue of the day’ (Campbell 2019). Practitioners have to try to link ‘the high frequency stuff that’s happening with the actual strategic plan that you’ve got.’

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Enact and manage improvements, including post-review Leaders need to support and embody desired changes and post-review responses through formal statements and role modelling to ensure it is taken seriously. Politicians and political staff need to work with non-partisan staff. For example, the president and White House staff need to communicate to their appointees the importance of working with career staff to utilise their skills who may also understand that change was necessary. Political managers should seek to build the motivation to change and innovate using external drivers, including making presidential/prime ministerial priorities clear, gaining public support or a democratic mandate secured via election, election results, polling, changes in electoral systems and declining levels of traditional members. Political leaders need to be willing to expend political capital and provide a clear vision both of the reform and improve government after the changes were made. Election results and membership figures are a common driver in party development – parties have created new forms of participation focused on single issues for party supporters, not just for members.

Train and develop Organisations should ensure there are appropriate orientation, training and development for individuals to perform effectively as this impacts on overall organisational progress towards set goals. All political and government organisations need effective orientation programmes to help staff, volunteers and politicians to understand the organisation, its goals, their role and performance expectations. However, training and development is often lacking for politicians and political staff, limited to mandatory requirements from Parliament or a focus on rules and procedures rather than skills or political tools. As one Chief of Staff noted, ‘you try as much as possible to have some sort of an induction. There’s obviously the health and safety inductions that a parliament requires which are done. If there’s time you try to give people a little bit of an induction’ (Gartrell 2019). Parliamentary services provide politicians with training on rules and procedures: ‘we conduct inductions whenever new parliamentarians come on board and the first objective of that is to enable them to efficiently start their work but also to outline the various rules, obligations and powers that they have as parliamentarians. Highlighting to them also things like entitlements, outlining where there are legal and regulatory constraints around what they can do, around administrative rules that we expect everyone to comply with.’ (Stefanic 2019) But this does not cover political skills and tools. The gap is particularly stark in government, which is a very different organisation to campaigning: ‘A campaign is very different from governing. Very very different from governing … I had trouble adjusting. I was an opposition staffer for three and a half years before becoming as a ministerial advisor in September 2013. Concepts of dealing with bureaucracy was completely foreign. I didn’t know the difference about how to work best with the bureaucracy because I had never worked with the bureaucracy. So, it’s actually really really hard to adapt.’ (Campbell 2019)

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In practice, therefore, staff learn on the job:    

‘A lot of it is on the job training … you learn a lot as you go on about the dynamics of the place and how things happen’ (Munro 2019). ‘I set up processes to help me work effectively and to overcome my political inexperience’ (Baker-Jones 2019). ‘there’s a lot of “learn on the job” … you learn by doing’ (Nash 2019). ‘a lot of it is watching and learning’ (Burke 2019).

Political managers need to offer training, professional development and mentoring to improve and extend their skills, targeting resources at activities aligned with the organisational strategic plan or recommendations from reviews. This includes training volunteers so that they can help parties and candidates to campaign more effectively. Additionally, those at leadership level need to develop effective competences in personnel management, political skills, crisis management and traits such as character, integrity, confidence and self-management. More informal but still valuable networks, seminars and mentoring also offer support and informal sharing of ideas, such as overseas campaign tactics. For example, in parties ‘if you’ve got a good culture and people look after each other. People ask questions and try to find out where things are and all the rest’ (Gartrell 2019) and in government ‘the advisors do get together on a regular basis, there is a weekly meeting of the whole core of advisers. And, they swap stories, and the Chief of Staff will give them a bit of a gee up’ (Munro 2019).

Facilitate effective internal communication Effective internal communication is important to inform, connect and support staff and volunteers and help individuals within the organisation follow strategic plans. For example, campaigns need processes to manage documents which need to go out and thus internal communication is needed for this, ‘all the material which is produced needs to be cleared. There is a small group of people who read everything that goes out externally during the campaign period to make sure that it is not wrong but also consistent with messaging and style guides’ (Nash 2019). Horizontal communication between units and individuals within and across the organisation is also important, such as staff networks, memos, briefings, reports, committee hearings, party and government intranets, and letters between politicians, to ensure effective coordination. Parties need to facilitate communication between the different parts of the organisation as well as the immediate team: as Australian Labor staff noted, ‘you have to have coordination across the units. There is a schedule of executive meetings, staff meetings … we obviously use communication channels … [and] there is a strong interaction with obviously the rest of the movement: the Labour party and the trade union movement’ (Gartrell 2019). In government, White House communications directors need to coordinate different offices when organising presidential policy speeches and scheduling. Political managers can also use technology and organisational units to connect and support communication and communications staff, such as intranets and internal databases that distribute information to local party organisations during campaigns to help them stay on message, while adding in localised information. In political offices, ‘some of the communications platforms whether it’s WhatsApp or Slack or Microsoft Teams, that sort of software is very

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useful – people can put updates in very quickly and share information very quickly. You can use a bunch of those platforms to make sure people are just sharing information and working in groups’ (Gartrell 2019). Organisations also need to foster effective communication between practitioners in different roles. As one advisor argued, ‘Communication is everything. As a political adviser, you are constantly meeting people and talking with people at all levels of government, and you get to know very quickly who does and can do things; you know where they are going so you can work with them’ (Baker-Jones 2019). Presidents need to share information with bureaucrats to ensure they can deliver their policies. Informal opportunities for ministers to interact with their own and other ministers’ communications’ staff such as walking through connected offices also helps. Coalition governments need to work hard to ensure there is effective communication between different parties, ‘a big part of it is the consultation with the other parties. A lot of work has to go into keeping the three parties on an even course, because things can go off-track very easily … there is constant contact going on between the three parties’ (Munro 2019). Communication on policies has to be effectively managed to balance ensuring politicians are informed in advance – ‘to avoid surprises’ – but not overwhelmed by paperwork and thus ‘help ministers in processing the information so that they felt comfortable when making their decisions’ (Baker-Jones 2019). Civil servants also play a role in fostering internal communication: an assistant secretary noted they ‘also work hard at different levels, having both transactional relationships but going beyond to develop relationships’ (Lloyd 2019). Politicians also need to be cautious of external communication about civil servants, because campaign bashing of government staff reduces morale, relationships between politicians and staff, and ultimately policy implementation. Relationships between non-political and political staff are crucial to effective management, ‘the important thing is to actually have the structures of the bureaucracy working hand in hand with political offices’ (Campbell 2019) and civil servants can be proactive at fostering communication, ‘having that relationship, talking to them fairly regularly, being there to answer the phone when they need it, little things like that … sometimes we need to think about ways to engage them’ (Lloyd 2019). Proactive relationship building also helps parties to work in Parliament. A former Deputy Manager of Opposition Business noted how they spent significant time ‘building good relations with the cross-bench in both the House and the Senate … because people with whom you’ve got reasonable relations are prepared to work with you, vote with you and debate with you’ (Dreyfus 2019).

Be authoritative Political leaders and managers can use formal positional power, authority, rules and coercive approaches to exert more influence on colleagues, staff and followers. In the Australian Labor Party, for example, ‘there is authority and the structures … a long history of caucus rules, the way the party operates in terms of a leader, the leader’s role with the national executive authority, there is authority embedded in a lot of the practice around the place. Some of it is rules-based authority, based on the caucus rules, and the party’s rules’ (Gartrell 2019). Authoritative power should be used tactically, such as using parliamentary rules to influence the focus of debate, the public reputation of your own and opposition parties and also whether policy gets through – it can limit problematic policy, ‘and facilitate good policy’,

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and even using rarely used procedures – such as insisting Bills get debated clause by clause, which necessitates the proposing minister having intimate knowledge of a Bill – can delay action (Burke 2019). Formal authority and legitimate sources of power include legitimating tactics and sources of power, such as presidential authority, congressional hearings and budget restrictions, the ability to appoint ministers, set the agenda at, and chair, cabinet meetings, use rules and regulations to affect policy implementation, make political appointments and veto. Prime ministers may intervene into ministers’ work and their departments and exert control through communication approval processes. They can also draw on internal sources of power such as central networks, units and expert knowledge such as polling to get people to behave in a certain way. Authoritative power, despite seeming to be the most obvious resource for leaders, has to be used carefully. For example, as a manager of opposition businesses explained, opposition parties can: ‘force the government to vote on are motions to suspend standing orders to bring on a particular issue. You’ve got to be careful not to be overuse the number of times you suspend standing orders. But whenever you do it, there has to be a vote. This creates one of the opportunities where you call on a vote on whatever issue and because the government rarely lets you make a speech, in the text of the motion you step out most of your arguments. Because there is a vote, you get a level of people paying attention.’ (Burke 2019) However, if it is used every day, while it helps to make the government look inept because Parliament is in disorder, it then loses its impact as people get used to it.

Be transformational Political managers can also try to inspire everyone to follow and work with them to achieve the mission voluntarily, instead of under pressure, through a transformational leadership approach that engages staff and volunteers in the overall purpose and mission. Inspirational appeals – using emotion and referencing values – help to build this kind of support, such as when presidents signalled their preferences in speeches on civil rights policy, which drew attention and influenced behaviour. Personal appeals to allies or potential collaborators across government units and countries – as in a crisis such as the volcanic eruption with interrupted global travel – also help to get people willingly on board. Parties try to use this approach to engage their volunteers in campaigns: as Australian Labor National Secretary noted ‘we really quite explicitly and deliberately try to invite our members and supporters to be a part of the campaign and take some stake in what we are trying to do and take some ownership and go forth and propagate and go out and recruit like-minded people to be part of the campaign’ (Erickson 2019).

Delegate Political managers can also give power to others, delegating authority and leadership powers to give others the freedom to carry out a task, such as chiefs of staff ‘trusting the [staff] to do their jobs without necessarily seeking to use a lot of formal hierarchical authority either internally within the office or externally’ (Kunkel 2019) and prime ministers who give ministers the freedom to do their job without interfering, apart from in rare cases.

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TABLE 7.5 Dancing in political management

Dancing: using tactics, being article and adaptive Motivate Encourage excellence Persuade Collaborate Create and utilise power Adapt

Motivate and retain an effective workforce Develop an effective work environment that nurtures highly committed, engaged and satisfied staff Get others on board with you Work with others in decision making Choose, use, grow and give power, authority and control prudently Adapt leadership in response to willingness of others to follow the leader

Dancing Dancing is the more nebulous yet tremendously powerful aspect of political management which involves using tactical, artful and adaptive power sources and leadership approaches that are not always clearly defined or official, see Table 7.5. Dancing involves motivating and encouraging excellence amongst staff, volunteers and colleagues to help boost their productivity. Political managers can involve others in making decisions which boosts their commitment to implanting plans. More tactically, they can use persuasion to get others on board with them, or grow and extend power in unusual ways to increase authority and control. Moreover, leadership can be most effective when it adapts to the willingness of others to follow the leader, thus dancing around the people, resources and circumstances involved in managing government and politics.

Motivate Political managers need to offer incentives to volunteers, staff and colleagues to engage in behaviour which supports the organisation’s strategic plan. As the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff explained, ‘it is a mission for the PM’s office, just to keep an eye on the overall operation and make sure that Ministers’ advisers are doing the nuts and bolts of their job well’ (Munro 2019). On the one hand, there is a basic management side to this – party organisations create ‘personal development plans … [and] work through with people well what are your key challenges for the next 6 or 12 months’ (Erickson 2019). On the other hand, it is also about understanding of individual motivations in political organisations, such as that value led motives are more important than financial rewards. Thus at ‘a weekly meeting of the whole core of advisers [where] … the Chief of Staff will give them a bit of a gee up and try to keep their nose pointed in the right direction’ (Munro 2019). One way is to offer the opportunity to make a difference and recognise the contribution people make. For party members and volunteers, motivational factors include the change to express their own values, acquire new skills that may help their career, feel positive, needed and gain social approval, whereas government staff are often motivated by the chance to play a role in important work. Another is to make sure that staff take their leave, otherwise morale and productivity declines: ‘One of the problems in political offices is you can get a hero mentality when people think it’s cool not to take leave and work really long hours and in those offices you have

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a massive burn out right … Ultimately, it’s quite an issue about productivity – it’s a moral thing to do in terms of duty of care, but also you get more out of people, and also they make less mistakes. Because in politics, fatigue is very dangerous. Because people make mistakes, and mistakes can cost dearly.’ (Gartrell 2019) Feeling part of a group is also important. When crisis hit staff in an election campaign in 2016 this helped to bring people together, ‘One of our staff had his house raided by the Australian federal police … a decision taken by Bill and the ALP secretary at the time was to stand by [them], no one was going to resign, to support people, no one was losing their jobs, no one was being hung out to dry. That solidified that sense of being a team’ (Nash 2019). Organisations should also adapt the motivational dance style to suit the partner where possible, responding to individual’s different people needs. For example, party managers can offer different ways for volunteers to get involved to suit individuals’ different interests and lifestyles. For example, the US Democrats under first the chairmanship of Howard Dean and then when Barack Obama became the nominated presidential candidate created more volunteer-centred structures, utilising online methods to enable volunteers to help the party in the way that suited them. The more negative side of this is when managers need to ask someone to leave the dance. Discipline and dismissal can be used for poorly performing staff, and at higher levels, leaders may also be encouraged to leave if they perform badly in opinion polls and elections, but they are complex tools to use in politics and government.

Encourage excellence To encourage high levels of performance, political managers need to facilitate organisational commitment, job involvement and satisfaction by supporting staff to find meaning in their work, such as encouraging commitment to the organisation or passion for a candidate’s campaign. One of the challenges is that working conditions in politics are often poor, for MPs, political staffers and campaign workers. Campaigns are very intense and take place in a high pressurised time period. Fostering positive morale is important and parties thus ‘often get politicians in to boost morale and convey messages about this is where we are at, and briefings about how we will move in this direction – shaping mechanisms for mood because it is really catching’ (Nash 2019). Empowering people within organisations can also help them to perform more effectively. In politics, parties can design pro-activist internal cultures to mobilise members that involve them in creating party policy, messages, organisational structures that make it easy for them to get involved, and create opportunities for non-member volunteers to participate in key activities such as policy forums and primaries for candidate selection. Organisations can also shape and reinforce positive behaviour through social learning and existing cultures to foster desired behaviour, such as the emphasis traditionally placed on party unity within German and UK legislatures.

Persuade There are a range of tools that political leaders can use to persuade others to come on board with them. None of them have guaranteed impact, but all have the potential to exert influence. Within parties, ‘there’s a lot more persuasion as time has gone by, as opposed to edicts. Because ultimately the leader has to answer to the caucus, half of who elected the leader, the

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party runs the caucus, so you can’t be too dictatorial … a lot of effort goes into checking lines of communication, openly hearing caucuses concerns’ (Gartrell 2019). Political managers can also promise and give rewards, including good offices, committee appointments and ministerial positions for MPs and jobs to campaign workers to those who adhere to the strategic vision and will help drive the strategic agenda. Practitioners also noted the importance of respectful behaviour internally: as the Australian Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff said ‘first of all, it is treating people with a degree of personal respect, never underestimate that’ (Kunkel 2019). Persuasion is also used in Parliament – politicians from all sides engage in trades with each other to get legislation through, especially when the governing party does not have a strong majority or is in coalition, in which case ‘a lot of compromising goes on’ (Munro 2019) and ‘a lot of it depends very much on ministers being prepared to spend significant amounts of time with people in other political parties’ (Kunkel 2019). Whilst this sounds manipulative, it actually requires trust and courtesy:  

‘Some people might think that deals are reached in Government through dodgy arrangements, and perhaps some are, but in my experience, agreement was largely reached through honest, and transparent, trusting and informed discussions’ (Baker-Jones 2019). ‘You don’t burn people – I mean, you might need them next week! There is a degree of courtesy required. I like this. I like negotiating with people and I like being courteous … it actually makes negotiations a great deal more difficult if you are going to be abusive to your political opponent’ (Dreyfus 2019).

Leaders can draw on external public support to persuade others internally. Electoral success, external public popularity and positively perceived leadership traits and behaviour help leaders to build political credit – for example, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher drew on her reputation as a capable and strong leader to achieve substantial privatisation. They can also use the media and external political communication to build political influence, such as presidents using pressure tactics to call out Congress blocking their proposals, framing opposers negatively in relation to core values. They can also sell specific policies strategically, both externally and internally, presenting argument, reason and evidence as to why action is needed, and reframing communication and language to suit the audience and political context, such as arguing that Medicare for seniors was appropriate for people who had already worked and paid into the system.

Collaborate Political managers can also choose to dance co-operatively, and work with others in decision making. Collegial and empowering leadership involves others in discussion and decisions and creates legitimacy, such as the democratic leadership styles and decision-making structures in Green parties. Other parties also emphasise the need for collaboration with different parts of the organisation. The President of the Australian Liberal Party noted that ‘having state presidents who are innately collaborative rather than innately whatever the opposite is, is important’ and as federal president ‘you need to be setting, achieving, and maintaining a collaborative tone’ (Greiner 2019). Looking forward, Australian Labor are engaging in discussion in order to prepare for the next election and thus the federal secretary said they need to be ‘making sure that we are bringing along and are responsive to and are really engaged

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with our party committees’ and ‘the stake holders that you naturally have to deal with on those different committees’ – the party has ‘to start working with them on developing a shared agenda’ (Erickson 2019). Collaboration is also required by coalition governments but takes a lot of time. The New Zealand Labour-led Coalition Government elected in 2017: ‘took an awful lot of consultation … at the Ministerial level, Minsters talk to their counterparts all the time, Chief of Staff level, advisor level. The Prime Minister and Minister Peters have to get together on a regular basis and just iron out late niggles and complications of issues. Sometimes you might have Ministers in the room, the relevant Ministers for those conversations. There is a lot of horse trading and a lot of talking behind the scenes to make headway.’ (Munro 2019) Furthermore, extensive consultation and collaboration also create too much chaos, such as the early years of President Bill Clinton’s administration, if not structured in some way. The potential for collaboration can also vary depending on the issue and country, ‘climate change in New Zealand or the UK has ceased to be a matter of political contention. But regrettably in Australian politics, for the last dozen years or so, it has been the killing grounds of Australian politics, so we fight constantly about climate change issues’ (Dreyfus 2019).

Create and utilise power A fundamental aspect of dancing in political management is firstly to understand that power is dispersed, diverse, constrained and contested in political organisations, and then take action to create and utilise alternatives sources of influence. There are many potential formal constraints on power, including duties, line management and reporting hierarchies, candidate and leadership selection, numbers in Parliament, coalitions, committee structure, decision-making processes, delegation, prescribed responsibilities, audits, accountability measures and resource allocation. Thus power is more dispersed and fluid, as practitioners note: 







‘There’s a lot of people who have theories about where power resides but inevitably it tends to be pretty dispersed. Whatever formal authority including from the prime minister’s office is clearly constrained. Probably the first constraint is both in legal frameworks and in the political frameworks you work in as well’ (Kunkel 2019). ‘Labour just doesn’t have the authority to [just tell people what to do]. They had to get a majority of 61 votes in the parliament any time something had to be passed, and you pulled together that majority by sitting down and negotiating, compromising and horse trading’ (Munro 2019). ‘I described it at one time as like fishing with a cobweb. You just have no hooks with some of the issues. And there is no reason why the other party or the person across the table from you has any compulsion or interest or reason for supporting your policy’ (Baker-Jones 2019). ‘[Power is] constantly mediated and never codified into one particular format or understanding because it’s always changing and different people are coming in and out’ (Erickson 2019).

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‘The power lies with the leader – the parliamentary leader – and his office, and to an extent, the Cabinet. They have the capacity to have the most power. However, if they perform poorly, or they are perceived as performing poorly, that obviously dissipates their power’ (Greiner 2019).

Despite this, in practice political managers can increase their power in a range of ways. They can centralise decision making such as by leaders moving control of policy to their offices and staff instead of delegating to cabinet secretaries or ministers of individual departments, seeking to influence the selection and behaviour of non-political civil servants. In parties, the increased use of political market research and communication has led to a general centralisation in information, decision making and control, as it has by PMOs in government. They can also extend informal indirect power through increasing political staff numbers, creating new central government units (e.g. policy unit, strategy unit, delivery unit), recruiting new members who will support your party strategy, and through communication systems. Presidents have developed new administrative agencies through executive action – executive orders, department orders and reorganisation plans – to increase their influence over the whole of government without having to go through Congress. Political managers can also distribute power and control vertically down or horizontally across the organisation, but have to do so carefully given the variable impacts. More diversified power and decision making gives coalition partners room to differentiate, provides local party organisations with valuable autonomy, and allows more views to be considered. But it can also cause disunity, chaos, inefficiency and uncertainty, which prevent candidates, parties and governments from appearing able to govern and thus affect electoral success. On the other hand, while centralising control adds clarity, it can erode buy-in from lower levels. If everything is decided at central party headquarters this reduces the potential attractiveness of becoming a party member and prevents appropriate local adaptation in campaigns, both of which prevent effective implementation of strategy plans and achievement of organisational goals. Less tangibly, engaging in effective communication helps, ‘the power comes through the partnerships and your relationships … also the way you deal with people like stakeholders and with the bureaucracy’ (Campbell 2019).

Adapt The ultimate dance in political management is to choose strategies and tactics in response to the situation, including the ability and willingness of others to follow the leader. In political parties, party leaders and senior staff are ‘not like the CEO of an organisation, able to make decisions and see them implemented’ and thus ‘adaptability is the key thing, and you just can’t expect to exercise power in a kind of command and control sense because you don’t ever in my job pull the lever and see things happen. You’ve got to persuade the 8 people who are controlling their lever and you want them to pull at the same time’ (Erickson 2019). Equally, in government communication: ‘things change at a moment’s notice. You don’t know that Trump is going to tweet something, or that a tsunami’s going to happen or a cyclones going to happen or a coalfired power station is going to breakdown. You really just don’t know so you actually have to be the “definition of adaptable”. This means still having a sense of the overall vision or destination but adapting to ‘environmental considerations.’ (Campbell 2019)

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When the political context does not support a new policy proposal, leaders may have to pull back on using their authority to push it through. Thus with the Zero Carbon Bill which passed in New Zealand in 2019, ‘there was the ideal piece of legislation that James Shaw had lived and breathed in his mind for years and years prior to becoming the Minister for Climate Change. But we knew we were never going to get that ideal because we didn’t have a single party majority government. It wasn’t just a Green government’ (Baker-Jones 2019). Moreover, they wanted to be open to all partners to make the dance last longer and ensure cross-party support so that the legislation would last: ‘We always knew that there were going to be limitations and we developed the policy in a way that would allow it to be improved. But the main message we were getting, and that all the parties were getting was that – especially from the business sector – people didn’t want a change of government to result in a change in the bill. So in order to ensure that it would be enduring, that there would have to be consensus, we had to take a middle path otherwise we just wouldn’t have a Bill or it would be amended or repealed with a change in Government.’ (Baker-Jones 2019) All in all, although political management includes using formal power, it is more complex and variable and thus requires awareness and careful judgment in practice. From planning to execution, judgment is crucial. As the Australian Prime Minister’s Chief of staff argued, ‘we have certainly done a degree of formal and informal planning in terms of the PM’s office. But you are very alert to the fact that naturally politics means that a lot of those best laid plans can get unravelled pretty quickly if you are lousy at political judgement’ (Kunkel 2019).

A future research agenda for political management This book is the first to visualise and explain what political management is. It also, inevitably, has all the limitations that you would expect to find with the first book to lay out the conceptual foundations for a new field. Despite combing through databases and plodding through over 1,000 pieces of literature and 200 documents, and interviewing high profile practitioners, there are necessarily gaps given the dearth of existing literature. Given it is the first model of political management, the four Ds of political management will also be critiqued, adjusted and adapted over time. More focused research will build on the initial broad foundation provided in this book, which spans the whole discipline of management, rather than just one specific field within it. The book shows what political management is, what it involves, and what the key issues are. But it also opens the door to future research to explore more detailed questions, especially empirical research into what approaches, angles, paths and directions need to be taken in order to produce the most effective political management in practice. Different methodologies, including testing theories, conducting case studies on specific parties, campaigns and governments, and across different countries, will broaden our understanding of effectiveness, as well as the complexity. There are numerous questions for future research that can be identified. For example, in political planning, how can we encourage foresight and strategic planning in government especially for newly elected politicians and governments? When strategic plans are created, are they of any value, do people within organisation pay attention, do ‘nice-looking’ strategic plans end up being followed through? In political organising, does the

236 Conclusion

need for coherent external communication to win elections make tighter mechanistic control within government and political parties, with all its implications, essential in the 21st century? And how can effective internal communication be facilitated within political organisations? Political HR is the area most in need of extensive research, such as to improve job analysis, job definitions, recruitment, selection, orientation, training and retention for political staffers and minister, and identifying how to develop an effective work environment that nurtures highly committed and engaged staff in political offices, parties and campaigns. The limits on formal power but potential for more persuasive sources of control in political leadership raise the question as to whether politicians are aware of the potential to use unusual forms of influence in the governmental sphere or whether they only learn over time, which increases the incumbency effect and makes it harder for new politicians to influence policy. To what extent is leadership a dance that needs changing to suit the music, or can those who adopt more fixed styles and authoritative forms of leading still succeed? And how can those at lower levels, or without positional power, pursue leadership by using different aspects of political management? And, in political reviewing, given the resources spent conducting reviews, to what extent are they actually followed through and what factors increase the chances of them being actioned? And how can organisations ensure that political/government practitioners create time to reflect on their progress in achieving organisational goals? When asked what area they thought was the most important, practitioners interviewed for this book almost unanimously talked about the political HR side – specifically addressing the lack of training and management of party staff, political advisors and politicians they work for, particularly in government, and also how to manage offices: 







‘We have Royal commissions, we have inquiries and independent reviews into how you structure to bureaucracy with best effect. There’s virtually no work done on how you actually structure a political office for best effect … There is just no understanding, there is no literature’ (Campbell 2019). ‘I think in one of your project areas towards the end it’s about areas of fruitful research and I think one of the challenges across democratic systems is around HR, both in terms of how you run good process and also how you deal with difficult issues … The politician clearly is in a position of power and authority. You have a big, high pressure, intense working environment and people are there for a whole range of motivations and reasons … And part of the management of that large staff-related set of issues in democratic political and parliamentary systems is quite complex. I’m not sure who has the best practice in this regard, but I do think it’s an area that could deal with some research and analysis’ (Kunkel 2019). ‘I have done different roles, as well as campaign Chief of Staff I was also Chief of Staff in the leaders’ office for a few years and I was also Chief of Staff in government, and [technically] completely unqualified for doing all of those jobs. I’m not saying I’m bad at it or they wouldn’t keep giving me new jobs to do … But are there things that we could be taught that we could adapt to political management that are tools?’ (Nash 2019). ‘There isn’t any professional college or anything like that, that in other professions would at least been putting on some training or organising some professional gatherings. And there is not ever going to be some meeting at the Royal Society where myself and my counterparts from all the other parties come together and talk about like what we are all dealing with. We are naturally very secretive, and we don’t really want to be

Conclusion 237





tipping off our opponents to what we are seeking or planning or even just thinking about doing’ (Erickson 2019). ‘I think it’s still something we should be turning our minds to, to come up with some kind of job description, or manual if you like, for how advisors should work … people who leave jobs in the beehive, should write an exit summary or an exit interview would be a good idea and way of learning about that, just so we can sort out what the core responsibilities are’ (Munro 2019). ‘Political management training for advisors and new politicians could be really useful. It would have to be concise and comprehensive and come in early. You will have challenges because some may not think they need help. So I don’t know how do you manage that. And who are you targeting to do this. There will be some who will recognise the challenges and recognise they need help, but not all’ (BakerJones 2019).

Ethical questions/areas to explore Political management also raises ethical issues as there are many different approaches that can be used when managing campaigns, parties and government, and this also needs further research. For example, political management argues that leaders need to have very clear plans and implement them thoroughly. Yet a judge noted of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s handling of an expense scandal that ‘the precision and planning of the exercise would make any military commander proud. However, in the context of a democratic society, the plotting as revealed in the emails can only be described as unacceptable’ (MacCharles 2016). There is also the potential that effective communication planning increases the control of the top political leader. Schnee’s (2015) work on reputation management in the UK government suggested that while communications theory may suggest the more coordinated communication is better, there are democratic concerns with centralised communications. On the other hand, it could be argued that governments need to focus on achieving the policies they were elected to deliver and use political management in any way that helps them do that. The tactical use of a diverse range of rules in unusual ways raises democratic issues. Shafie (2013) commented that the strategic use by outgoing presidents of late rule-making during the transition raises questions of accountability as the outgoing or losing president can implement policies which do not reflect the preferences of the winner and thus renders policymaking less responsive to the will of the people at that time. It also means policy is made without congressional oversight or scrutiny because it occurs at the end of the legislative session as well as the president’s term. Scholars also note that what seems good from a managerial perspective may not work so well in politics from a democratic perspective. Silvester and Dykes (2007, 11) worked on, and researched, applying standard HR selection techniques to the selection of political candidates using an assessment centre for a main UK political party. They noted that there were challenges with applying management to politics because ‘in the words of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people. As such the notion that politicians can somehow be “selected” rather than “elected” appears to run contrary to the idea of democracy itself.’

238 Conclusion

The importance of researching and teaching political management This book was started four years ago at the start of 2016. By the end of the year, Donald Trump became President of the US and the UK voted narrowly to exit the EU in the Brexit referendum. The need for research and teaching in political management, which utilises understanding from both politics and management, has only become more apparent since then. US President Donald Trump has struggled to implement his agenda in power. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau became embattled with disunity and problematic internal communication in his party. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was thrown out of office by mis-managed internal factions in the Liberal Party. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who won such an unexpected victory after the 2017 election and has won international accolades for her kindness approach has had to abandon key commitments, such as introducing a capital gains tax due to differentiated views in her Coalition Government. After replacing embattled UK Prime Minister Theresa May, the newly elected Boris Johnson promised the public he would leave the EU with or without a deal, and tried to control Parliament to prevent it stopping this by ending the parliamentary session through prorogation, only to be met with rebellions and chaos, albeit enjoying a strong electoral victory thereafter. In 2019, the Speaker of the House in the New Zealand Parliament launched an external review into bullying and harassment of political staff because of problematic practices reported by the media. And these are just the problems we hear about as they happen at the top level of politics – the places where you would expect the leaders to be able to draw on formal authority and legitimate power to run their organisations effectively and achieve their goals. Clearly, the political management dance has to be attended carefully and any power derived from it used wisely and prudently. In politics, power is widely dispersed, and the ability to manage it is always subject to challenge and change, as noted by practitioners when interviewed: 





‘The whole concept called political management is an interesting one in that as I said it can often turn on very individual factors and things like a leader’s instincts as well as their ideology and their particular skill – whether it is charisma – all these things sort of get rolled up into a single individual in a way when it comes to political management. I think the main thing is not to think about it as too bloodless a concept, but it’s a very human process’ (Kunkel 2019). ‘This is a mistake we made: we assumed that our coalition partners would just be on board with everything. It’s like your partner – you work all the long hours and you think you partner is going to be happy with it but you’ve got to maintain that relationship and it’s the same with your coalition partner as well. We realized later on that we actually had to be doing a lot of work with them as well to keep them on board. And that is how it should work. Policy should be interrogated and not just passed because of a political relationship’ (Baker-Jones 2019). ‘It’s not quite an either/or, black or white. “where the power lies.” Maybe the better question is “how is the power managed?” which is what you’re writing about … The power isn’t located anywhere, the power exists and you take it or you use it and you need to manage it’ (Greiner 2019).

Conclusion 239

Moreover, politicians, political appointments and ministers start their job at short notice, and the vast majority have little understanding of how best to practice political management in campaigns, party organisations and government. Over time, they learn on the job, but until then, our chosen candidates, party leadership teams and elected politicians have massively reduced campaigning, policy making, change-making and delivering ability compared to others. Without awareness of political management, their ability to win elections, design and implement policy in government is significantly and profoundly limited. Unless they understand the importance of vision and planning, implementing those plans, recruiting the most appropriate staff, working well with employees and colleagues, organising effective teams, utilising existing rules, and the pros and cons of different leadership approaches, their chances of achieving their goals – and delivering for the public – are profoundly limited. The lack of appropriate political management research and associated training takes its toll on our political and governmental organisations. This book synthesises previously disconnected literature from multiple subfields through the lens of basic management concepts in order to provide the first conceptual architecture for the emerging field of political management, providing a clear sense of what political management involves, theoretical frameworks and an overall model to be used in future research. While it aims to make a very important contribution to political management in its own right, its biggest value will doubtless lie in stimulating future research and teaching. The sooner we can move onto conducting effective training for our political practitioners running campaigns, parties and government, the better.

References Primary sources Practitioner interviews Baker-Jones, M (2019) Former Ministerial Advisor to New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment in Auckland, NZ. 18 November. Burke, T (2019) Australian Labor and Party Manager of Opposition Business, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Campbell, A (2019) Former political staffer in the Australian Prime Minister’s Office under Malcolm Turnbull, currently Assistant Secretary, Priorities and Delivery Unit, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Dreyfus, M (2019) Australian Labor MP, and former Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House (2013–2019) and former Cabinet Minister, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 8 November. Erickson, P (2019) National Secretary for the Federal Australian Labor Party, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment at Labor headquarters, Canberra, Australia. 24 October. Gartrell, T (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Greiner, N (2019) Australian Liberal Party Federal President, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 29 October. Kunkel, J (2019) Chief of Staff to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 1 November.

240 Conclusion

Lloyd, R (2019) Assistant Secretary, Taxation, Financial Sector and Employment Branch Economic Division, Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at PM&C, Canberra, Australia. 28 October. Munro, M (2019) Former Chief of Staff to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 12 November. Nash, Y (2019) Chief of Staff for the Federal Australian Labor 2019 Campaign headquarters and Chief of Staff for opposition leader Bill Shorten, interviewed by Jennifer Lees-Marshment over the phone. 5 November. Stefanic, R (2019) Secretary of the Australian Parliamentary Services, interviewed by Jennifer LeesMarshment at Parliament House Canberra, Australia. 25 October.

Secondary sources Academic literature Bourgault, J (2011) ‘Minority government and senior government officials: the case of the Canadian federal government.’ Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 49(4): 510–527. Conley, R S (2007) ‘Presidential Republics and Divided Government: Lawmaking and Executive Politics in the United States and France.’ Political Science Quarterly 122(2): 257–285. Schnee, C (2015) Political Reputation Management: The Strategy Myth. Abingdon: Routledge. Shafie, D M (2013) Eleventh Hour: The politics of policy initiatives in presidential transitions. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. Silvester, J and C Dykes (2007) ‘Selecting political candidates: A longitudinal study of assessment centre performance and political success in the 2005 UK General Election.’ Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology 80(1): 11–25.

Media MacCharles, T (2016) ‘Mike Duffy cleared on all charges of defrauding the Senate.’ Toronto Star. Article retrieved from http://m.thestar.com/#/article/news/canada/2016/04/21/mike-duffy-trial-verdict.html.

INDEX

4 Ds of political management 209–235: Deliberating 210–15; Designing 215–23; Doing 224–29; Dancing 230–35 accountability 9, 45, 74–5, 87, 94, 147, 186, 196–8, 202, 205, 212, 224, 233, 237 accountability mechanisms 198, 205, 210, 212 action plans 47, 49 adapt: adaptiveness of political staff 120–21, 123; adaptive leadership 161, 186, 209, 230 ambiguity, ambiguous: staff role ambiguity 197; goal ambiguity 36, 217; power ambiguity 70 annual reports 195, 205, 211 authority: authoritative leadership 166–7, 186, 189, 228–9; authorising organisations or authority’s 73, 74, 127, 182; dispersed authority 3, 9, 70–72, 74, 81, 97, 216, 233, 235; exerting authority 75, 80, 89, 105, 160, 167–175, 177, 186, 196, 230, 236; horizontal authority 83; lines of authority 76, 81, 82–3, 97, 133, 138, 163, 175–6, 178, 182–3, 196; vertical authority 84 boundaryless 86–7, 222 bureaucrat(s): see non-partisan staff careerist, career staff: see non-partisan staff campaign manager(s) 22, 30, 34, 36, 43, 54, 61, 82, 87, 92, 93, 115, 122–3, 184, 222 candidate selection 44, 72, 82, 83, 87, 89, 97, 98, 167, 203, 221, 231 centralisation, centralising 75, 79–80, 81, 85, 96–7, 102, 104, 140, 163, 184, 222, 234, 237 challenges 7, 28–9, 51, 52, 60, 74, 75, 77, 78, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 102, 113, 117, 119, 122, 135,

136, 139, 149, 167, 171, 177, 180, 194, 195, 218, 223, 230, 231, 236, 237; leadership challenges 71–2, 147–8 character 131, 142, 148, 165–6, 189, 214, 224, 227 chief(s) of staff 5, 9, 51, 75, 76, 84, 85, 92, 94, 114, 115, 117–19, 126, 128, 129, 140–41, 143, 149, 161, 181, 185, 196, 213, 215, 221, 226–7, 229, 230, 232, 236 civil servant(s): see non-partisan staff coalition(s), coalition management, internal coalitions 10, 42, 48, 52, 59, 83, 100, 120, 160, 181–4, 218, 220, 225, 228, 233, 234, 238 code(s) of conduct 44–5, 166, 197, 198, 202, 203, 212, 219 coercion, coercive 166–7, 188, 228 collaboration, collaborating, collaborative, collaboratively 18, 35, 39, 55, 56, 82, 86–7, 103, 139, 144, 161, 184–5, 186, 216, 217–18, 222, 229, 230, 232–3 Communication, communicating 29, 32, 44, 59, 80, 82, 87, 92, 139, 195, 232; communications control 77, 80, 81, 95, 166–7, 176, 229, 237; crisis communication(s) 162–4; communicating the vision 33; communications staff (or advisors) 19, 21, 22, 80, 82, 85, 89, 116, 117, 121–2, 138, 143, 203; communication technology 41, 102–3, 126; communications planning 43, 47, 48–9, 220, 225; communications systems 78–9, 196, 203, 234; filter communication 40; internal communication 56–7, 58, 84, 85, 88, 99–104, 137–8, 142, 200, 201, 214, 222, 224, 226, 227–8, 232; leader and political communication 171–4, 177–181, 210–11

242 Index

competencies 114–16, 117–123, 127, 128, 131, 161–5, 183, 188, 213, 215, 220–21, 224, 227 coordinate, coordination, coordinating 44, 48, 49, 53–6, 62, 78, 80, 86–8, 91, 93, 97, 102, 103, 119, 120, 129, 137–42, 163–4, 168, 175, 185, 199, 220, 227, 237; coordinator 20, 21 crisis (or crises, recession, scandal, natural disaster) 10, 15, 19, 22, 41, 86–7, 90–91, 94, 150, 162–5, 211, 231 culture, cultures, organisational culture 6, 18, 81–3, 89, 90, 92–5, 131, 142, 149–52, 214, 220–22, 227, 231 dance, dancing 207, 209, 230–35 delegate, delegating 72, 75, 81, 163, 184–7, 229 deliberating 75, 99, 153, 187, 209–10 designing, design, organisational design 81–5, 215–6; lateral organisational design 86, 208, 215; linear organisational design 38, 84, 208, 215 discipline: discipline or dismissal 145, 147–8, 152–3, 197, 231; academic discipline 8, 235 drive, driven (ie. leadership drive, to drive implementation) 30, 60, 117, 165–6, 232; external drivers 96–7, 226 election reviews 198–9, 200, 203, 211, 223 employees 18, 37, 57, 113, 114, 124, 127–8, 132, 149, 172, 195, 213 empower, empowering 57, 131, 150–52, 177, 184, 200, 231 engagement (of staff, volunteers, engagement roles) 21–22, 150–51, 197 environmental scanning 39, 90, 210–11 ethics, ethical 6, 20, 45, 47, 147, 165, 174, 196, 198, 202–3, 212, 219; ethical questions for political management 237 exchange tactics 181–3 foresight 39–40, 118, 120, 168, 210, 235 goals 10, 15, 16–17, 34–7, 42, 55, 77, 86, 128, 130, 132, 135, 145, 195, 204, 208, 210, 215–18 government staff (or staffers): see partisan staff group(s) 16, 20, 52, 56, 81, 131–2, 136–145, 150, 153, 184, 214, 215, 222, 231; group think 91 horizontal, horizontally 71, 77, 80, 81–2, 83, 87, 99–100, 104, 120, 137–8, 214, 227 implement, implementation, implementing 24, 36, 43, 50, 54–8, 64, 88, 94, 99, 101, 203–4, 224, 226 incentive(s) 54, 115, 146, 152 inspirational, inspiring, inspiration 176, 229

integrative, integration 56, 86–9, 91, 103, 222 integrity 45, 47, 134, 165–6 job analysis 114, 116, 153, 236 job description(s) 113, 114–15, 124, 154, 210, 212–13, 237 ministerial advisor(s): see partisan staff mission, mission statement 28, 29–21, 63, 95, 124, 176–7, 210, 213, 229 morale 103, 118, 142, 144, 149–50, 228, 231 motivate, motivations, motivating, motivated 37, 96, 116, 117, 135–7, 145–8, 154, 166, 176–7, 181, 195, 210, 214, 230–31 networks 150, 175, 176, 227, 229; staff networks 4, 99, 101, 126, 140, 221, 227; supporters’ networks 151 non-partisan staff (also bureaucrat, careerist, civil servant, public servant) 15, 17, 36, 38, 46, 56, 57, 59, 76–80, 92–3, 95, 101, 103–4, 128–30, 138, 140–42, 197, 202–3, 214, 217, 225, 228 norms 5, 54, 71, 92–4, 135, 137, 139, 142–3, 145, 153, 196–8, 210, 212, 215 operating plans 47, 220 organisational: organisational change 94–98; organisational commitment 149–50, 231; organisational development 90–91, 94, 224; organisational effectiveness 17, 131, 140, 145, 153, 205, 214, 221; organisational goals of political management 16–17; organisations involved in political management 15–6; organisational plan(s) 43–53; organisational progress 195, 205, 210–11, 226; organisational psychology or organisational behaviour concepts 6, 8; organisational strategy(ies) 37–43 organisational unit(s) 35, 56 orientation, orientation programmes 132–3, 226, 236 oversight 74, 196, 198, 202, 212, 225, 237 parliamentary committees 46, 99, 127, 198, 202 party members: see volunteers performance management 8, 146, 204 personality 7, 119, 148 personnel management 55, 57, 60, 118, 119, 130, 136, 161 persuade, persuasion, persuasive 96, 100–101, 117, 122–3, 161, 177–184, 189, 231–2 policy management 59, 95, 115, 123, 126, 213 political advisor(s): see partisan staff political loyalties, political loyalty 4, 116, 124, 128, 213, 215, 220 political management definition 7, 14–5 political managers definition 17, 19–22

Index 243

post-election review 198, 200, 203, 211, 223 post-review improvements 203, 223 power 6, 7, 81, 82–3, 97, 133, 138, 163, 166–7, 175–6, 178, 182–3, 186, 189, 196, 228–9; dispersed power 3, 4, 9, 70–72, 74, 81, 97, 216, 233, 235; exerting power 75, 80, 89, 105, 160, 167–175, 177, 186, 196, 230, 236; power sources 170, 209, 230, 233, 236 priorities 15, 19, 32, 33, 34, 36–8, 40–41, 49, 51–2, 54–5, 57–8, 78, 95–6, 119–20, 121, 123, 128, 130, 175, 178, 204, 215–18, 223, 225–6 professional development 6, 134–5, 204, 227 public support 34, 41, 59, 62, 90, 96, 160, 173, 177–8, 211, 217, 232 public servant: see non-partisan staff purpose: see mission recruitment 4, 51, 52, 55, 76, 83, 103, 113, 124–6, 131–2, 152, 213, 220–22 reflection, reflecting, reflective 56, 90, 104, 195–8, 210–12 relationship building 58–60, 88–9, 100, 115, 119–123, 183–4, 225, 228 research agenda for political management 235–7 rewards 4, 87, 95, 135, 136, 152, 168, 181, 230, 232 role modelling 94–5, 226 roles 114–124, 213–14

selection criteria 113, 114–124, 128, 210, 213 shaping 152–3, 231 staffing needs 113–124, 210, 213 stakeholders 9, 23, 42, 75, 118–19, 123, 128, 130, 186, 196, 212, 234 steering 54, 141 strategic management plans, strategic plans 54–62, 224 targets 34, 35, 36, 39, 41, 47, 54, 59, 188, 195–6, 220, 237 trade-offs 181–3, 232 training 3–6, 8, 113, 117, 128, 131–5, 150–51, 199–200, 204, 226–7, 236–7 transformational leadership 176–7, 224, 229 unity 48, 77, 83, 90, 135, 152–3, 166, 168, 215, 217, 231; group unity 142–4 values 16, 29–31, 135–6, 146, 148, 176–7, 178, 180, 195, 210, 212, 214, 229, 230, 232 vertical, vertically 79, 81–5, 87, 99, 102, 104, 183, 234, 210–11, 213, 215, 234 vision 31–4, 52, 56, 96 volunteers 87, 98–9, 124–6, 133–7, 145–8, 150–52, 196, 199, 229–31 whip(s) 21, 147, 167 working conditions 6, 115, 135, 149, 198, 211, 214, 231