Constitution, State and Core Executive

Abstract

The study of the core executive in Britain has been skewed by the focus of media, constitutional myth and behavioural studies. The media, through their concentration on personalities, have contributed to an excessive focus on the Prime Minister and increasing presidentialism. The constitution locates power in the upper echelons of the executive, and behaviourism, with its methodological individualism and belief in observation, has led to a focus on principal actors and the question, ‘Who gets what?’. This book has drawn upon realist epistemology. In other words, its concern is not with the observable behaviour of actors but with the underlying structures that create the institutional arena within which people act. For example, a behaviourist examining power and European Monetary Union would examine the preferences of the key actors such as the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. If the Chancellor favoured joining and the Prime Minister was opposed to membership and the final decision was to join, the behaviourist would see the Chancellor as winning and, therefore, having power. For the realist, however, these are second-order questions that derive from understanding why EMU is so important. Instead, the focus would be on how structures constrain and facilitate the decision-makers. The key question would be whether the decision to join was a result of the Chancellor’s power or of the structural pressures deriving from the City’s needs to have access to European financial markets. Therefore, while we have to examine behaviour, we also have to understand structure and context and how they constrain, facilitate and shape the decisions of policy-makers.