Political and managerial succession and the performance of English local governments

Abstract

Abstract Political and managerial leadership change has been shown to have a relationship with the subsequent performance of public organisations. Research also suggests that prior performance is related to leadership change, with poor performance leading to changes at the top. However, hardly any work has brought these relationships together in an unbroken chain of events, in part because of the difficulties of obtaining suitable data. In this paper we estimate such a chain, using the opportunity created by a balanced and compact panel data set of 142 English local governments that includes political and managerial changes and a comprehensive set of performance measures. We develop a recursive set of equations to analyse the relationships between initial performance and leadership change and leadership change and subsequent performance. Our findings provide some evidence in accordance with a ‘virtuous cycle’ for the more broadly-based of the two performance measures we use: Low performance increases the likelihood of political change and raises the rate of managerial change, and the consequence of this increase in the rate of managerial turnover is performance improvement. Overall, this paper shows how panel data allow a set of interconnected question to be answered in a recursive set of equations. * Author order is alphabetical: all make an equal contribution to the paper. We thank the Economic and Social Research Council Public Services Programme for support (grant number RES-166-25-0026).

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